Sally is on vacation this week, so I had some reading time in the coffee shop this morning. Since we’re talking about Showing versus Telling this week month, I picked out one of my favorite passages in an old novel that I thought might help her understand this concept.

I stressed last week the fact that Showing versus Telling centers around the Emotion of the story.  You tell actions, of course, and you can tell backstory, (but it’s much better delivered in dialogue) but the rule “Show don’t Tell” deals specifically with the subject of emotions.

You want to let the reader feel it, and the best way to do this is to bring them into the world and especially into the character’s skin.

We’ll be covering emotional layering later in the year, but for now, here are some basic rules:

• Delete the Adjectives if at all possible. Adjectives tell, specific nouns and active verbs show.
• Tell us when the character is doing something usual and normal.  He sat.  He didn’t bend at the knees and lower his body.  She took out the toast and buttered it.  Not, she gripped the bread with two fingers, trying not to let it burn her, and then, with a knife, spread butter across the surface.
• ***Physical Description is not telling.***    This is simply description. It has nothing to do with emotions except to describe some descriptive feature that may give a hint to an emotion. For example, if a character were to show up disheveled and a mean scrape along his face, we might get a hint that he was just injured. This would lead us into some sort of understanding of his emotions, but it does not tell us how he feels.
• Put back-story into dialogue.  Yes, narrative can flirt with  “telling” if it is a long passage of back-story because often back-story leads into some comment of the emotional state of the character. However, two lines of back-story are not telling.
• Here are some clue words to know when you’re telling:

Felt,  -ly words, watched, saw, was (when was is used as the action verb), saw, looked (like she “looked” happy) – anytime you use a word to simply state how something is.

• And the final key: Action is the heart of showing.  Remember, what does a POV character DO because of what it is  (aka, feels).

A man cries because he is sad, a girl cowers because she is fearful, a plane roars because it is loud.

This is a scene from Taming Rafe – one of my favorites –  It’s right after he’s discovered that Kitty – a girl he’s come to know – is engaged.

Rafe slammed his way upstairs, banged open his bedroom door. The entire house shook. Crossing the room, he ripped his Bobby Russell and Lane Frost posters off the wall and grabbed the box of videotapes he’d dug out for Kitty. He took his trophies, his ribbons, his two championship buckles, and the scrapbook he’d kept for himself over the years and shoved them into his PBR duffel bag. Then he threw them all over his shoulder and stormed back downstairs.

He took the back roads to the burial mound, driving as fast as he could without dropping one of the axles. He stopped at the bottom of the hill, lugged out the bag, and muscled himself up the hill.

He threw sticks and twigs together, and taking a lighter he’d found in Piper’s glove compartment, he knelt and lit a blaze.

The flame crackled as it devoured the sticks, then the kindling, and finally the larger pieces of wood he added for fuel. The flame showed no distinction between the fragile and the hearty, biting into the wood with tongues of orange, red, and yellow.

Rafe opened the duffel. Instead of dumping the entire thing on the flames, he pulled the items out one by one. His posters. They burned in a second, curling into tight balls. The ribbons, which sent out an acrid odor. The scrapbook. The fire started on the edges, burning away the accomplishments, the defeats. Then the tapes. The smell of plastic burning made his eyes water and sent black smoke into the now bruised sky. The trophies would take hours to fully burn, but their plastic mounts deformed and caved in on themselves immediately. Finally, the buckles. He dropped both of them into the flames.

The flames crackled, spitting and popping as they devoured his life. The bull rider. The man Kitty claimed she believed in.

Then Rafe drew up his good knee, crossed his arms atop it, buried his head in them, and for the first time since his mother died—even during Manuel’s funeral, even in the dark months that followed—Rafe let himself cry. 

I only have one moment where I “tell” his emotions response, and even that is a physical action – Rafe let himself cry.  I don’t say, Rafe felt such a sense of loss and betrayal. (Major telling!) Or even, The sense of betrayal choked him (further, but more telling), or even, “his throat closed up with the thought of losing Kitty. Better, and entirely acceptable.

But you truly feel Rafe’s pain in his actions:  as his truck careens over the hills, and the despair as he tosses his life into the flames.  I also throw in a metaphor – the fire making no distinction between fragile and hardy – meaning that heartache can happen to anyone.  (We’ll talk about using metaphors in emotions later this month). I hope you can feel his pain.

****Action is one of the most powerful ways we can express emotions.****

Next week, we’ll talk about how to write Deep POV!

Have a great writing week!

Susie May