Creative Writing Rule #3: Show, don’t tell. (This one is a GENERAL rule–the kind that can be broken.)

Look at the picture below to see an example of the telling/showing spectrum in writing.

As you can see, showing is more work. That’s one reason why even the best of us sometimes don’t show action when we should. We are lazy. We are tired. We like to cut corners. We want to get the work done so we can play. We are human.

But the extra work needed to recreate an experience for a reader is what leads to an audience dying to see what happens next instead of one dying for you to go away and shut up. Try to remember that no one (except your mother and a handful of other deeply attached types) cares what you FEEL. What readers want when they read your work is a new experience, something that takes them into another world or body, something that shows them what they’ve never seen, makes them feel what they’ve never felt, helps them understand what has never been clear before.

If the difference between showing and telling in writing is still foggy for you, look at this example from the writer, Nicholson Baker. At a moment in his novel, The Fermata, when a less skilled writer might have said, “I loved lying in the sun after a shower,” Baker wrote, “[I am] seldom more pleased with life than when I can go directly from the tiley shower out to a clean warm sunlit beach towel on the lawn. I took off my watch and my glasses and set them on the edge of the towel, next to the Fieldcrest label; I took off my T-shirt and laid it gently over the portable phone, lying nestled in the grass, to keep it from overheating. I extended myself stomach-down on the towel (a blue-and-white-striped towel; the blue stripes were detectably warmer than the white ones) and let the weight on my ribcage produce a moan of utter contentment.”

If you are still unsure of the difference between showing and telling, here is a short list of distinguishing characteristics for both types of writing:

Signs of Telling

• Descriptions of feelings and personality traits
• Abstract adjectives (beautiful, ugly, good, bad, nice, happy, etc.)
• “To be” verbs (is, was, were, are, etc.)
• Complex action covered in a half page

Signs of Showing

• Dialogue
• Sensory details (smells, textures, sounds, sights)
• The recreation of a full experience

Now it’s your turn to try. Rewrite the sentences below so that they are less telly and more showy. If you are sitting in my class room right now, tweet your creations to me. We’ll look at them using our Twitter class list. Rewrite all of them if you can, but recreate at least three. You have eight minutes.

1. The room was hot and stuffy.

2. John said mean things to me. (For this one, you have to use dialogue. No profanity, please.)

3. Clem felt ill.

4. Dana was hungry.

5. Grandma hated me.