We are so thrilled to have Susan Dennard on the blog today. Not only is Susan a fabulous author, but she’s also an amazing person with unmatched generosity. Recently, she judged our Pitch+250 Contest and went above and beyond in her finalist critique. She’s also mentoring our July 1st Five Pages Workshop, where again, she is going above and beyond in her notes for the writers’ workshop participants. She’s written a wonderful craft of writing post on Showing vs. Telling and included a helpful writing exercise.

“Show, don’t tell.” I know everyone has heard that phrase a thousand times. At least a thousand times, right? And yet, though we all know we should show our story instead of tell it, ye olde maxim is WAY easier said than done.

Trust me: I still make this mistake, and I know I’m not the only author who finds myself falling into the Telling Trap. I seem to be especially guilty when I’m trying to provide backstory—and I’m even more guilty when I’m writing a first draft.

But that’s the beauty of revisions, no? We can rip out all our telling and weave it back into the story as beautiful, seamless showing.

In this post, I want to show you how to spot telling in your WIP—and then I want to show you how to work the information back in as showing. I’m going to use a writing example, but bear with me. I tend on the side of verbosity.

So let’s say we have a story, and in it our MC is named Emily. In this scene I’m going to use for our example, Emily is in a car at nighttime. She’s with her ex-best friend, Carrie, who has somehow—despite the bad blood between them—convinced Emily to abandon the end of her school’s play rehearsal. Carrie needs to take Emily somewhere to show her something super important…

Carrie’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel—she tended to do that whenever she was nervous. “You should call your sister, Em.” She threw me a meaningful glance. “The last thing I need is another one of her freak-outs ‘cos you’re late home from rehearsal.”

“Right.” I wriggled my phone from my pocket. My older sister, Kelly, had a tendency to Go Super Crazy whenever I was late—be it late from school, late to school, late from rehearsal, late to wake up. You name it. But I couldn’t really blame Kelly—not since she’d played mom to me for as long as I could remember.

But my fingers paused on the call button. What could I say? Kelly would NOT approve of me being with Carrie.

I had known Carrie since I was six years old (she was six and a half at that time—and she never let me forget it). She had moved into the house across the street, and though I had decided I liked her hair right away (those red ringlets continued to amaze me), it was our shared adoration for all things My Little Pony that had pretty much solidified our Best Friends Forever status.

But forever ain’t forever when your BFF makes new friends—and those friends claim to be witches and have a ton of piercings. Starting three months ago, Carrie started ditching me to be in that weird “coven.”

Who can spot all the telling? There was a LOT of it, and I urge you to try to find it. The more practice you have, the easier it gets.

Now keep in mind that though nothing was mechanically bad about that passage, you might have noticed there was 1) info-dumping (which is boring), and 2) no emotional charge to the scene.

That’s one of the “side-effects” of telling: a lack of emotional resonance. When you TELL the reader something, you ultimately fail to SHOW the reader why that information matters. And how do you that SHOW something matters? By SHOWING the characters’ emotional reactions to information.

Now I’m going to paste this same passage and highlight each of the spots that are telling…

Carrie’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel—she tended to do that whenever she was nervous. “You should call your sister, Em.” She threw me a meaningful glance. “The last thing I need is another one of her freak-outs ‘cos you’re late home from rehearsal.”

“Right.” I wriggled my phone from my pocket. My older sister, Kelly, had a tendency to Go Super Crazy whenever I was late—be that late from school, late to school, late from rehearsal, late to wake up. You name it. But I couldn’t really blame Kelly—not since she’d played mom to me for as long as I could remember.

But my fingers paused on the call button. What could I say? Kelly would NOT approve of me being with Carrie.

I had known Carrie since I was six years old (she was six and a half—and she never lets me forget it). She had moved into the house across the street, and though I decided I liked her hair right away (those red ringlets continue to amaze me), it was our shared adoration for all things My Little Pony that had pretty much solidified our Best Friends Forever status.

But forever ain’t forever when your BFF makes new friends—and those friends claim to be witches and have a ton of piercings. Starting three months, Carrie started ditching me to be in that weird “coven.”

Did you spot all that on your own? I bet you did. 😉 Kudos.

Now we want to rework this passage. Specifically, we want to weave in the highlighted parts as SHOWING. But to do that effectively, we need to break down the critical information from the highlighted sections.

Think about it this way, because I probably don’t need to show everything I told above, I should figure out what I DO need to show—then I can more easily weave those bits of info into the narrative.

So here’s what I’ve decided I want to give the reader:

• Carrie squeezes the steering wheel when she’s nervous
• Carrie is red-headed
• Carrie and Em became best friends at age 6. They liked My Little Ponies
• Carrie used to be Em’s best friend, but then she joined a witch coven and totally changed
• Em’s sister, Kelly, raised Em and now doesn’t like Carrie

After a bit of wand-waving (read: lots of thinking and reworking and trial-and-error), I managed to rewrite the scene to incorporate the critical information in a showing fashion. Here’s what I came up with:

Carrie leaned forward, a red ringlet zinging free from her severely—almost painfully—tight bun. “You should call your sister, Em.” She threw me a meaningful glance. “The last thing I need is another one of her freak-outs ‘cos you’re late from rehearsal.”

For half a second, I just gaped at her. But then anger roared to life. “You know what, Carrie? Eff you.” I scowled as I wriggled my phone from my pocket. “You know damned well why Kelly’s so high-strung—and hell, you’d freak out too if you had to raise your brothers all by your lonesome.”

Carrie didn’t answer. She just squeezed tighter at the steering wheel. Its vinyl was almost worn down to the plastic now—she must have done a lot of nervous wringing since the last time I was in her car three months ago.

The car was a lot messier since then too—trash was everywhere. Plus, the seats had that old man stench of stale cigarettes. Yet for some reason, the My Little Pony charm I’d given Carrie when we first declared our Best Friends Forever Status at age six, was still dangling around the crooked rearview mirror.

And that just made me angrier. “You know what else, Carrie?” I bared my teeth at her, knowing they gleamed in the glow from my iPhone’s screen. “Kelly also wouldn’t freak out so much if you hadn’t joined a flippin’ witch coven and gotten all those disgusting piercings. I mean, Jesus, Can you really blame my sister if she doesn’t want me to turn into you?” I gave a strangled growl and shoved my phone right back into my pockets. I’d call Kelly later, when I wasn’t so pissed off and I could conjure a decent lie for my tardiness.

Phew. I think I managed to incorporate all the important information there. More importantly, though, I hope I managed to show how Emily feels about each piece of important information—how bitter she is about Carrie leaving her for a witch coven, how defensive she feels about her sister, and how she still knows Carrie even if they’ve been apart for three months.

But what do you think? Is that second version better or do you actually prefer the first? OR, feel free to try to tweak the first version on your own! I would love to see what you all come up with! Remember, there’s no single, perfect way to fix telling!

Also, keep in mind that backstory, info-dumping, and emotional “flatness” are totally normal for first drafts—at least for mine! I think a huge part of drafting is simply figuring out who our characters are, and that requires us to pour out their histories onto the page. As we uncover the meat of our characters, we start to realize how they feel and why. Thus, when we revise, we can layer in all the needed showing and emotions.

So while I wholeheartedly approve of telling in your first drafts, I definitely don’t approve of it when you’re handing it off to your critique partner/agent/editor. 😉

Now, you guys tell me: Do you ever catch yourself telling too much? How do you SHOW instead of TELL backstory? Or do you have any questions about what I’ve shared here?

About the Author

Susan Dennard is a writer turned marine biologist turned writer again. A Darkness Strange and Lovely (7/23/13, HarperTeen) is the sequel to her Gothic debut, Something Strange and Deadly. Among the traits she shares with her heroine Eleanor are a weakness for Shakespeare quotes, a healthy appetite for baked goods, and an insatiable curiosity. Sadly, Susan does not get to wear a corset or wave a parasol on a daily basis.

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About the Book

With her brother dead and her mother insane, Eleanor Fitt is alone. Even the Spirit-Hunters—Joseph, Jie, and the handsome Daniel—have fled to Paris. So when Eleanor hears the vicious barking of hounds and see haunting yellow eyes, she fears that the Dead, and the necromancer Marcus, are after her.

To escape, Eleanor boards a steamer bound for France. There she meets Oliver, a young man who claims to have known her brother. But Oliver harbors a dangerous secret involving necromancy and black magic that entices Eleanor beyond words. If she can resist him, she’ll be fine. But when she arrives in Paris, she finds that the Dead have taken over, and there’s a whole new evil lurking. And she is forced to make a deadly decision that will go against everything the Spirit-Hunters stand for.

In Paris, there’s a price for this darkness strange and lovely,
and it may have Eleanor paying with her life.

Perfect for readers Libba Bray’s The Diviners and Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Angel series, this spellbinding sequel to Something Strange and Deadly delivers a mix of intrigue, supernatural forces, intense romance, and revenge, all set against the enchanting backdrop of nineteenth-century Paris.

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