Fiction Writing 101: Showing and Telling

Telling is selling very well these days.  What I mean is: fiction that tells more than it shows is making a lot of money, so the old-fashioned rule of "show don't tell" really doesn't matter when it comes to selling books, especially ebooks, these days.  However, no matter how much moolah is being made, telling is a tedious way to transmit information to your readers.  Put another way:  it's a boring and mindless way to divulge info to your readers.  But it also happens to be quicker and easier for many writers to tell instead of show, and since some fiction writers feel compelled to write a novel a month, this is a way to reach that, uh, lofty goal.

What is telling?  Oh, you've read it, and you've definitely seen it in movies and on television shows.  It's all that boring exposition that does a heck of a lot of explaining.  When the writer feels it's necessary to give the reader pieces of information but doesn't quite know how to show it, that info gets blurted out, and it often feels like that.  Splat.  Okay.  That super duper important info is out there.  Now I can show something, hopefully.  It's not very literary to tell, tell, tell, but many readers find anything called "literary" to be snobbish.  Instead, writers nowadays are supposed to write fiction that can be easily plunked into any genre except the one called literary.  But I digress.

Super duper important information brings me to the topic of significant detail.  Significant means of consequence.  Yep, the details conveyed in fiction must be significant, and that means the details are essential to the story.  Here's the unfortunate news, my friends: discerning what is significant and insignificant is not something that can be taught.  The good news: it can be edited.  Of course, if a story is filled with insignificant detail it won't make it to an editor's desk.

A good writer instinctively knows which details are significant and which aren't. You're either born with this ability or not.  But please remember what I said in my previous post: when most of us blather on about something that happened to us yesterday, we include many insignificant details which slow down our stories and put our listeners to sleep or make them regret they got into this conversation, which is hardly a conversation but more like a monologue.

I have no tidy way of ending this significant post that tells more than it shows, so I will end with this Ernest Hemingway quote: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar, and all great writers have had it.”