 Short Stories: February 18, 2015 Issue [#6839] |
  Short Stories
This week: Are you showing or telling? Edited by: 🦄🏳️🌈Sapph  
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The purpose of this newsletter is to share my personal thoughts and ideas of what can make (or break) a short story. In doing so, I hope to inspire new, creative stories and to help short story writers improve their craft.
Today's Topic
Are you showing or telling? |
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Recently with reading stories, I was confronted with something that is a continual plague in short stories. I'm talking about a writer telling the reader what is happening instead of showing it. This is always an issue, even for the most seasoned writer and can cause quite a few headaches when editing if you switch between the two on a regular basis.
In a story, showing generally involves adding more detail, being wordy with your descriptions and drawing the reader in through thorough explanations of the scenery and characters. This level of detail can't always be achieved in short stories, especially if you're working within a word count, but that doesn't mean you have to resort to just telling a story instead of inviting your readers inside of one. The essence of showing in a story is to draw the reader in, make them experience what is happening and feel like they are right there with your characters. You can't achieve this level of depth with just telling your reader what is going on.
An example of telling would be "She was angry." This doesn't give us any detail about this character, we can't picture what she's doing and just get the surface level of her emotion. If you change a few words you can make it showing: "Her face was red and steam billowed from her ears." This is much easier to picture and seems to give a bit more depth of your character because you can see just how angry she is, how that kind of emotion affects her.
If you really want to connect with your readers, you want to give them that kind of detail where possible and make them feel for your characters. Allow them to see what you see when you're writing and draw them in.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to make sure you're on the right track and a few tips to get there:
 Is this the type of story that needs to be shown instead of told?
 Can you clearly picture what the character is doing?
 If you can picture it, have you described it in your writing exactly how you see it so the reader can see it too?
 Can anything be rephrased to make what is happening more apparent?
 If word counts are an issue, have you cut unnecessary words that will still keep the same level of detail?
 Have you connected with the reader in a way that they'll understand the story to its fullest potential?
I've focused on showing here because that is the type of writing I prefer to read but telling can have advantages as well. If you need an overview and want to give that without too much detail on a specific character, you can go that way with a story. In general, figure out which is best for the story you're writing, follow it through, and get feedback on the story to see if the method you chose works best for the content.
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My question for you this time: How do you decide what your story should be? And how do make sure that you're showing a story to your reader and not just telling?
Question from before in ("Short Stories Newsletter (October 29, 2014)" ): Have you ever written a story without these? How did you fix it?
ANN Counselor, Lesbian & Happy replied: Excellent.........you've reminded all of us as writers just what elements are essential for short stories; sometimes contests' limit number of words lead us to short-change the continuing element. We need reminders like you've given here.
billikus replied: Great newsletter, and you asked a very good question. Where's the story? I started watching the first season of the Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was a master of the short story. In his work there always seemed to be some type of social comment thrown in but emphasized through his weird vision. My point is that yeah sure it can be weird, but say something with it other than yeah that was strange.
Osirantinous  replied: Sapph, firstly - thanks for including my short story here. I hope it means it included some of your points rather than being a fine example of one that doesn't! And your article was a timely reminder that no matter how short we're writing, we still have to have a well crafted story. It has to make sense to readers (or leave them with a hook). I'm going put up your points on my whiteboard to remind myself.
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