*I was recently asked by a student to provide an example of ‘show don’t tell’ in writing, I prepared a quick response for them:
My understanding of showing rather than telling is for a creative writer to make a greater attempt of expression within writing by combining action, tone, sense, and thought in opaque fashion rather than having them separated. Differs slightly depending on format (novel, play, opinion piece, etc.), but the essential idea is to reduce unimaginative narration or text.
Useful in fiction to establish tone without sacrificing the reader’s immersion with excessive exposition. If you separated a story’s actions from what is thought and felt you’d end up with a quite dry, matter-of-fact style that won’t lend itself to the reader’s affection.
I’ve always understood show don’t tell not to mean do away with telling altogether – imagine if you were to write a story in which every last detail, fact, and past event is embellished with dramatic writing, it would be longer than an Ayn Rand novel and cumbersome to read.
So, for example, rather than a writer describing a scene as such: “It was getting dark. Jenny was scared as she walked home from work. She heard a loud noise behind her and started to run.” We can expand upon this, adding some flair to captivate and convey a greater sense of the situation and feeling to the reader with something like:
A cacophony of unseen crickets sung out from the periphery as lurid shadows crept in-between amber streetlight [-It was dark out, eerie]. Jenny’s hands had been mottled with papercuts from working the photocopier all day [-she had a long day at work, sore] and the bitter air stung as it whipped about her in a fury [-the weather was bad]. She could usually walk her way home blindfolded, but tonight was different. The familiar roads seemed distorted, as if the Earth had shifted while she was away [-reinforcing eerie atmosphere]. She found herself second-guessing every turn, twitching at every brambled movement in the treeline [-scared] when a savage howl boomed out from the thicket. Lost and in a panic dreadful, she picked a direction and ran…
~ Giuseppe Gillespie, Thicket
With narration like this we can direct the reader through a scene, saying more than meets the eye and suggesting certain tones in a subtle manner, generally making something more interesting to read without explicitness.
~ G. Gillespie Sept 2024
Giuseppe Gillespie Writing 
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