A place to discuss the craft of writing: tricks, philosophies, styles

[StillStunned]

Sometimes "tell" works best. It's been a while since I read Pride and Prejudice, but if I remember rightly the happy denouement at the end all happens in "tell" mode.

And anyway, it's difficult to write a story with no "tell". A monologue or dialogue with no narration, perhaps. "Tell" has a purpose in writing. When people say "show, don't tell, they usually mean "I think this should have been shown, not told." But it's never quite so black-and-white. Sometimes the writer has reasons for telling rather than showing.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Agree. "Show don't tell" isn't quite that cut and dried. There are moments when tell works better than show. Effective exposition can work wonders. However, as advice for new writers, "show don't tell" is generally good because so often new writers do waaayyy too much telling and their scenes become so impersonal and bland.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

Inspired by Salinger's "A Good Day for Bananafish," I have been playing with the show/tell idea experimentally, using long passages of dialogue for the "show."

The first half of John's Wife Needed Money begins as almost relentless dialogue; other than one paragraph of exposition near the beginning and tags to indicate the passing of time ("a few days later"), everything is "show" until she decides to have his baby. Then it's a lot more exposition with little showing. I have also just finished another LW story that is even more skewed toward showing without telling, with almost nothing but dialogue in six of the seven chapters. (I also snuck in one and a half brazen Salinger allusions. If anyone cares about that, I'll let you know when it passes moderator approval.)

I did it exactly the opposite in Another Man's Trophy Wife, even rendering reported speech as exposition rather than dialogue for the first half of the story. The second half switches to mostly dialogue.

In My Sluttty Cheerleader Fantasy (a much-improved edit of which is due to be posted relatively soon, and when that happens I'll post it in the "best stories" thread because it will be my new best), I alternated between long chunks of exposition and long-ish dialogues.

In all three cases, I did it with a bit of mischief, kind of trying to see what I could get away with. All three stories have done pretty well by my standards.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Except when telling is the way to go for that particular story and is done reallly well. I'll make note if I find such stories in the future.

That is certainly true. But I do think it's best practice to default toward more telling, less showing. That's a lesson I learned from others here when I was starting out, and I think it's made a significant difference in my writing.

 

[ElectricBlue]

That is certainly true. But I do think it's best practice to default toward more telling, less showing. That's a lesson I learned from others here when I was starting out, and I think it's made a significant difference in my writing.

Don't you mean more show, less tell?

 

[Publius68]

I’d say that a lot of us, myself included, fall into the trap that Show means dialogue. I don't really think it necessarily does.
You can do a lot of Show without dialogue. You simply have to describe actions and resulting emotions in a fluid, narrative form that embodies Consequences.
The Tell that is deadly is the series of declarative sentences, one after another. Stuff like this:

Our friends Dave and Carol came over last night. It was fun. My wife Denise (she’s really hot) welcomed them in. Denise has always had a fantasy about Dave. Dave was flirting with her all night. We got drunk. Denise got so worked up, she sucked Dave’s cock right in front of me and Carol! We did not get angry. Carol was sitting in my lap fucking me at the time. [What follows is an insanely detailed, impossible to follow, set of sexual descriptions that read more like the assembly instructions from a Heathkit radio than erotica.]

I joke about things moving that fast, but we all see perfectly good story ideas wasted on Literotica because the author just works in short, declarative sentences. But don’t throw out exposition with the bathwater. Well told, an information dump, the ultimate Tell, can be a story unto itself.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Don't you mean more show, less tell?

Yes, thanks for noticing that.

 

[StillStunned]

’d say that a lot of us, myself included, fall into the trap that Show means dialogue. I don't really think it necessarily does.
You can do a lot of Show without dialogue. You simply have to describe actions and resulting emotions in a fluid, narrative form that embodies Consequences.

Very good point, and the opposite is also true: dialogue can be "tell" just as easily too.

The most commonly used examples are the "As you know" conversations, but dialogue that's used to convey information that isn't borne out by the rest of the story, or by the characters' actions, is also "tell".

 

[SkyBubble]

I’d say that a lot of us, myself included, fall into the trap that Show means dialogue. I don't really think it necessarily does.
You can do a lot of Show without dialogue. You simply have to describe actions and resulting emotions

You can say what the character is feeling, or you can describe what the character does that reveals that feeling.