47. When You Can Tell in Your Writing (Show, don't Tell Part 3)

In part three of three, Suzy reverses course and shares the times where TELLING is preferred to SHOWING. Take note on when it is appropriate to gloss over details, skip time, and give a little more information in a direct way so that your readers stay informed and engaged in your story. 

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Transcript

0:49

Welcome to Show. Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We're gonna explore writing techniques. I'm gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers' careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And I'm also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show's gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do. I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, and you're gonna also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Welcome to part three in my Deep Dive series of Show Don't Tell. In part one, we talked about why show tell is important. It's not just tired writing advice, how it actually works in the human brain. And why you need to care about it. We also reviewed some of the most typical advice that you get and how to level it up, because here's the thing is show don't tell is writing advice and a technique that you're gonna be working on for your entire writing career. And I hope you're as excited about that as I am, because I promise you, if you start to really get it and understand it, you're gonna have a lot of fun with it In episode two. We'll link to all of these in the show notes. In episode two, we went through some next level techniques and some things that you've probably never heard before. Some places where you can introduce, showing into your writing and really make a huge difference for your reader, drawing them in and making them experience firsthand what it's like to be a character in your story. So this is episode three, and we're out of showing techniques that I used to teach. But here's the thing. I'm gonna show you how to tell. Because there comes a point in every writer's career when I've been working with them and they keep getting this information like, show don't tell. Show don't tell. And they think, oh, okay. And then there comes a point in time where I'm like, Hey, maybe don't show here. This is a place where you could be telling. And they say, but Susie, like good telling me that they need to show more and all of a sudden, right. It is a balance. It is absolutely a balance. And it is okay to tell sometimes. And it's in fact preferable to tell sometimes. So we've talked a little bit about in the prior episodes, about the fact that you're the God of your own story. You're the director of this movie that is going to play in reader's minds. And so you've got your video camera and you can zoom in if you're gonna show, and you can listen and you can hear what they're saying. And you can be in their bodies and you can do all of those things or can zoom out and show us the bondages of their life going by where we've got a little bit of music, we've got a little bit of feeling. We're not really zooming in and we're not seeing all of the details. Okay. There are moments when you want to do that. We're gonna go through some of the places where it's perfectly acceptable to actually tell in your writing. So if you have, and you're the God of that video camera, and you can decide, then I guess the question is, what do you want your readers to know and what do you think is really cool about your story and what's important? That's totally up to you. This one is particularly important if you're writing memoir. It's a really good example, and this same thing applies to fiction, but in memoir, we have all these events that happened in your life. Memoir is basically telling your own biography in the narrative format. It ends up reading more like a novel, but they're real events that happen in your life. So how do you decide which ones get a scene or a chapter and which ones you skip? Remember, writing a memoir is not an all access pass into everything that happened in your entire life. People do not get to see it all, nor should they, 'cause they'll be born to tears. We don't want a cradle to grave. I was born on this day and I took my first steps on this day. No, we're showing a particular journey that you went through. That's why people can write more than one memoir because you've been changed which journey you're showing, and I'm sure that you've gone through different growth journeys in your entire life. Right. So if you're looking at a memoir, then you take your video camera and you can decide which pieces are important to show that character change that I went through, or that change that I went through from the beginning to the end. What are the moments I need to zoom in on and what are the note moments that I can pull back and summarize? Okay. The same thing happens in a novel. If you're wondering. When to use that zoom lens and go right in and show us all of the dialogue or when to summarize. We talked about X, Y, and Z. When are you gonna do that? I. That is totally up to you. And in fact, I get this a lot, especially when we're working on showing is writers will send me a chapter and they've zoomed in on a conversation that is completely inconsequential, and you'll hear things like, oh, I like your shoes. Yeah, I like your shoes too. And, oh, what did you do yesterday? I did this yesterday and I hope that you're bored to me because it's a very boring scene and it has nothing to do with. It has nothing to do with anything. So I would cut that and I wouldn't show that. I might, if it's important. And the first thing that you need to answer, it's the same thing when you're looking at an info dump and fixing an info dump, which we talked about in episode one of this series. The first thing that you need to ask yourself is, does the reader actually need this information at this particular moment in your book? And if the answer is no, then cut it right. If the answer is yes, but you've zoomed in in such excruciating detail, you've got a five page dialogue scene where really all we learned was that the dog was named Rex. Then maybe you can summarize it with a sentence or two and pass that. We talked for over an hour and I learned that his dog was named Rex, right? So you have a choice. You can either use quotations and dialogue and zoom right in and show me all of the moments that happen, or I can zoom out and summarize. This is a great example. If nothing else in that conversation is relevant and the reader doesn't need it, let it and tell us. A quick litmus test. If it's important to the story and the reader needs it, zoom in, let us experience it. If it's not important, zoom out and skip it. Okay, now I tease this next one a little bit in episode two, which is that if you're recapping something that the reader already knows, you can skip it or summarize it and tell it. So the example that I used was, if you have already shown us this amazing epic battle where your characters best friend dies in their arms on the battlefield, right? And we've been there and your reader's gone through this emotional arc and has exhausted themselves emotionally. And then your character goes the next day to the his best friend's, widow's home, and recaps all of the battle and the glory. Your reader's already been through that arc. Number one, we know all of the information, but number two, we don't wanna go through the emotional heartbreak of it again. And writers will tell me, but the widow needs to know what happened. Yes, that's true, but we don't need to go through that excruciating, zoomed in shown detail again. What you can do in that case is if you're recapping something that happens offscreen or something that we've already witnessed, that the reader already has that information, that's a great place to use your telling techniques, right? So rather than showing us in three pages and re blow by below what happened in the bloody battle and how that character died, you could do it in a couple of sentences, right? Harry died in my arms and he was well, and then have the widow sobbing. I like the game, just kinda like cut to the chase, especially if it just happened. This is actually one of the biggest ways to find word count in your book, is to look at these recapping scenes. They happen in many, many, many books. I've seen them over and over and over again. Your writing will always be stronger if you take them out, even if you've spent all this beautiful showing technique. You've made a detailed and heart wrenching, and the widow's reaction is so amazing, your reader's gonna be like tired because they've already gone through that emotional arc once. They don't wanna see it again. These are hard scenes for you to cut. They're like killing your darlings, right? These are hard scenes to cut, but I would highly, highly recommend skipping ahead, telling us that your character recapped it, recapped the battle to the widow, and then moving on and giving us new information. The widow's reaction might be new information, right? So we can still go there. We can still have that conversation, or you could even say it off screen the next day. I went and told his widow what happened. That could be it. And then move on to the next. If nothing consequential happens in that scene again, you've got your zoom lens. You get to decide whether you're gonna zoom in or zoom out. And I would argue that watching the widow react to it is not that interesting because we've already reacted to it ourselves, and hopefully we're appalled by what happened. This is the most common way that this shows up where we're recapping something that the reader already knows and we're doing it to tell another character. But it does definitely show up in other ways. It shows up when you're writing book two or book three, and you wanna tell us something that happened before, or tell us something in their backstory that we have already read. If we have read those books. So a way that you can do it. Sometimes we need that information. Again, ask yourself, does the reader need this information? Is it even important? If it isn't, skip it entirely. If it is important, I would highly recommend telling us or summarizing it rather than dropping into it and showing it again. Number three, if you absolutely must include information that the reader already has from a previous book or from a previous chapter, and there's no way around it, make sure that you're giving us something new, please. So that if you know for your readers that are paying attention, you're rewarding them for paying attention. You're not boring them by telling them the same thing over again. You're giving them new information. So, for example, if you were to say, if you were in that bloody battle scene, and then you go and tell the widow, maybe we create some new information where the widow says, you know, I'm pregnant and we were gonna have a child, and we, he just found out right before the battle. That's new information that makes it way more interesting. So rather than just recapping, number one, do you need it? Number two, can you summarize it in a faster way rather than zooming in and making us experience the same thing over again? And number three, if you have to do it. How are you gonna make it interesting? What are you gonna add to it? What perspective can you give us? What new information can you give us to reward those readers that are paying attention so that it doesn't feel redundant and it doesn't feel like we're just watching the same thing again? Another place that summary or telling can be really, really useful is in managing the passage of time in your book or in your story. This is one of the hardest things for writers to learn, and when you first start writing, many, many writers do this. They'll drain the well dry and tell us everything that happens, right? They're gonna tell us your character woke up and then they went to breakfast, and then they did this, and then they did that, and then they did this, and then they did that, right? It's very natural. One of the first things that a lot of coaches teach or editors teach writing instructors is to create a timeline to make sure that it all makes sense and hangs together. And then we go along and we write on this timeline and we fill in all the blanks. But the thing is, is that it could be really boring, and again, we're giving equal weight. Everything that happens, and that's not your job when you're outlining. You might need to know all of that for yourself so that you don't screw up and have them have breakfast after they've had supper. Right? We don't want that. But at the same time, we also, this is your prerogative as the director or the god of your story. To figure out which pieces we actually get to see and to manage passing that time. So there are a lot of things that happen during character's day that we're going to assume. So it's considered amateur writing to include because it's the easiest way to open a scene. That's why is to have a reader or to have a, have a character wake up at the beginning of the scene is the first thing that writers do because it feels natural and it feels easy, but it's so overdone and it's so cliche that you could just start the scene after they woke up, and we will assume that they woke up today. We'll also assume that they go to sleep at the end of the day, right? So you can skip those boring things, but you could also pass time or pass several days by recapping or telling. And so we don't want every single event in this character's life to have equal weight. So when you're taking your zoom lens, you may need to use telling to have that time pass quickly. Now you can do some cool things with it. I like to say to pass the time, if there's some kind of device that you can use or something like a thread in your book that you can show that time has passed, you might do it. Some of the simple ones, and they might be a little cliche, is they're heck growing longer or their fingernails were heck longer or however long it's been. Those are some obvious ones, but it might also be, I had a. A writer who used this, she'd been given three jars of food, of an ethnic type of food from her dad, the character's dad, and those kind of dwindled along the way, and showed the passage of time as, as those jars were no longer full, and then she was on the last jar. You can use an object to pass that time. You could also use a growing relationship. You could use somebody starting to date in the beginning of it, but then they've been out a bunch of times and they're celebrating their 20th anniversary together. Obviously, time has passed, right? You can find ways to pass the time I. They don't have to always be zooming in on every single moment. In fact, that makes it feel very boring. It's not gonna light up your reader's brains. They don't need to be in every moment of the day. It is especially true if you are trying to show a period of time that is boring. So literally you are showing us, or your idea in the scene is to show that your character is bored. Sometimes I see these scenes people are saying mundane things and nothing's happening, and the clock is ticking, and all these wonderful things are happening, and the writer says to me, yes, I'm showing that they're bored. I said, well, that's great, except here's the problem with that is you've actually done a terrific job. Such a good job of showing me that your character is bored, that I'm also bored when I'm reading it because I am your character. And so that is a, it's a bit of a trap, so if you're trying to show that somebody is bored, please don't let us sit in that for five or six pages. You may be doing a great job of making us bored, but you're making us bored. And honestly, I'm gonna skim ahead if I don't put the book down entirely. So instead of doing that, that's a great place to tell us, right? To pass that time to tell us that something was so bored that I watched the paint peel off the walls, right? So find a way to do it and it could be a telling way, and that is totally perfectly fine. Okay, now this next one, I'm gonna break one of my own rules that I shared with you in episode one. We talked in episode one about the really typical show tell advice, which is, please don't name it motions. But here's the thing, if my body is shaking. It might be anger, it might be sadness, it might be overwhelm. It could be a lot of different things. So sometimes when we're naming emotions, you can use a show and a tell. It's not always, it's not always wrong to leave the tell in there. So I was shaking with anger. I was shaking with emotion, I was shaking with sadness, I was shaking with overwhelm, right? You can name emotions in that state if you need to, if it's obvious. What's happening? You can leave the tell out if it isn't obvious, or the reader could possibly be confused or misinterpret it. Sometimes actions could mean more than one thing. And when I'm shaking with anger and when I'm shaking with sadness, when I'm shaking with overwhelm, those are very different. So you're going to have moments where you can actually name an emotion. So hopefully you've listened to this series all the way through and you can go back to your notes and be like, except in the case of, but do make sure that you're showing us as well. So give us a visceral reaction. That the character is going through that sort of demonstrates that. But if it is too vague, you can also name that emotion to give us a hint as to what's going on. That same advice can bring true to anything that needs clarification. So again, I. I don't want you to gimme an info dump on how the machine works. That's five pages long, but you could give me a sentence or two, and that might be a perfectly appropriate place to use your telling techniques to tell us something that we need some information a bit or a snippet. That we need. So don't be afraid of telling. It is a balance and you get to decide, at the end of the day, you get to decide, and I get asked this question a lot, which is, but Susie, like, how do I know? Well, you know, so take a look at your scenes and be like, alright, is this important? Is this pivotal? Is this a milestone or should I be summarizing it? Don't waste your time with all your beautiful showing techniques, describing things that really don't matter. Please don't let me sit in their boredom. Please don't describe all of the things to another character. All of these things are places where you wanna jump into Summary. And use your telling techniques too. So as you get more comfortable and now that you understand all of these different places, you can make that decision, whether you're telling or whether you're showing. Showing is almost always going to be longer. So watch your word count. It doesn't have to be though, because showing can also mean that you're getting really specific. And sometimes using a list of two to three details can really get you into showing. Without putting all those purple prose or flowery prose into your book and slowing it right down. Okay, so showing doesn't always have to be longer, but it often is. Telling is almost always shorter if you can. If something is feeling too long, something is slow, you have a pacing issue, then be strategic about it. But find places where you might be able to summarize or tell if you can't cut it completely. Okay, so if you need a little bit of practice adding back telling and it just feels wrong, believe me, it can be done. There are some places in your manuscript or in your book where you can add this without being overwhelming to the reader. So here's a few cheats for you. The first place that you should be adding a little bit of extra information, not necessarily telling. It might be showing or slow it down a little bit is if something's really important, slow it down. You can give us a little bit more information on that. Don't be afraid to do it. The biggest mistake that I see is especially if you've got like magic or politics or something that's really important to your book and you skip over it and you don't because you're worried about the pacing and everything else and it's been beaten into you. Slow it down. If it's important, it's okay. Add an extra sentence or two. Make it a whole paragraph. Potentially be careful and be really sparing in where you do this. Okay. Second place that you can add a lot of information. It depends on your genre, but for instance, different genre norms or different types of books. The readers have different levels of tolerance for more information, or sometimes even for tele, for example, I. If you are writing hard science fiction, if you are writing fantasy, if you're writing science fiction, those readers actually are okay with a little bit of telling. It doesn't mean you can do four pages of world building, but you could do a paragraph and you can sometimes slow it down and actually explain the science, right? I'd still try to break it up if it's a lot of information altogether. Use your techniques that you learned in the earlier episodes for info dumping and how to solve info dumping. You can actually include a little bit more information in fantasy. There's a little bit more leeway in world building and your magic. In historical fiction, there's a little bit more leeway in terms of what's interesting historically. Again, we don't want three pages on all the weapons that were used in the middle Ages, but maybe in quick detail or two, use your specificity where you can, A quick detail or two is always a good thing, especially given the genre. If it's something that people are interested in, find a way to slip it in there. When you are grounding a scene, so again, when you walk into a new scene or chapter, we wanna ground our readers with four things, right? We're gonna tell us whose head are we in, or what point of view are you telling the story from? Who is in the scene? Where are we like the setting, and where are we in time and space relative to the scene that we just left? And so those four things that in the first two paragraphs of the scene are a great place to add an extra detail or two that you can't figure out where else to add it without it slowing the pace. That is a great place 'cause your reader's brain is already resetting and trying to get that information, so they're looking for it. You can slow down for a beat there and give us a little bit of extra information. An extra sentence or two there if you need to, is usually okay with your reader. It won't slow the pace. The last place that I highly recommend putting something that you can't find another spot for is when we're first meeting a character. Okay? When we first meet a character, it's the same thing as grounding, where we need to visualize them. That's when we're gonna formulate an opinion. We're gonna have a little bit of detail around that character. So if there's a. Detail that you are trying to find a place to stick it and it feels like it doesn't belong anywhere else. That might be a good place to put it in context of how it relates to the character that we're meeting. I hope you've had an absolute blast. Listening to all these techniques of show don't tell and that your next revision or that you're chopping at the bit to go and find these in all of the places. If you found something in your manuscript that was super helpful, please drop it in the comments. Let us know. We love, love, love to hear from you. And if you wanna brainstorm one page of your writing with me that you know has a lot of telling in it and you wanna learn how to show. I'd be more than happy to brainstorm it with you on the podcast. Just click the link to apply to. There'll be a link in the show notes. Click the link to apply to get a free, totally free complimentary show. Don't tell session with me on your page and we'll have a lot of fun doing it. So I hope you do apply. Thanks for tuning in to show. No, tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori. Help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leading a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you're writing that isn't quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best you're feeling called to write that book. Keep going and I'm gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.