Don’t tell me what your characters are doing – show me! I want to see and feel them. Make their world real!
It’s the modern creative writer’s first commandment: “Show, don’t tell!” It’s so famous, it has its own Wikipedia page. What does it mean? How do you “show” and avoid “telling”? And why does the lady running the Writing Huddle suffer traumatic flashbacks whenever someone says those three magic words?
It’s a simple enough concept. Anton Chekhov (of Chekhov’s gun fame) is often misquoted as saying: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” In other words, you should describe your fictional world through sensory description and action. That’s showing. Telling, well, telling is bad. Telling leans on infodumps and adjectives. Showing is for amateurs.
You don’t want to write like an amateur, do you? Of course you don’t! So come along to the Writing Huddle, where we will unpack the sense and nonsense of “Show, don’t tell”. Let’s really get into it, and maybe also we’ll discover why getting feedback on your writing can feel like your soul is getting stepped on.
