Writing Tutorial: Show Don't Tell.

What in the world does this often-given advice to writers actually mean, anyway? Tune in where I explain this important skill that took me far too long to learn on my own.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

Show vs. Tell

I’ll start this tutorial by giving you an example. See the photo above?

Telling about it would look like this:

The place we saw was beautiful.

But Showing would look more like this:

Two mountains rose from the earth toward the sky, one a lush, impossible green, the other the blue of hydrangeas. Below them stretched a lake so calm it it reflected the landscape like a mirror, and clear enough that I could count the rocks underneath the surface of the water.

Are you getting the idea?

Maybe some of you reading this have known the difference between showing and telling since you first picked up a pen to write. But I certainly didn’t. And in fact, I didn’t know the difference—not really—for many years and several books. It wasn’t until I flat out asked one of my editors what in the world she really meant when she kept commenting this in the margins of the manuscript I’d turned into her. I was a bit embarrassed to not really understand—but luckily she was happy to explain—and I finally, finally understood show and tell. I’m glad I asked her too, because this is one of the most fundamental skills a writer needs in her toolbox.

And I’ll be honest—I still have a hard time with showing not telling, because it’s simply a lot of work to show as opposed to tell.

Let me clarify even further about the difference between these—in case their are still questions.