But how do I do it?

One of the first pieces of advice all new writers hear is “Show don’t tell”. But what does it mean? And how do you do it?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Really, it’s about the difference between telling someone about an event and RECREATING that event on the page so that they too can experience what it was like to be there. How do we do this? By WRITING IN SCENES!

When we write in scenes we are, as much as is possible, translating experience into word pictures that a reader can see, hear, smell, feel and taste through their imaginations interacting with our words on the page. It’s the difference between telling someone, “I had a really rotten time at school. I was bullied,” and showing them by writing a scene of you being bullied at school so that they can walk in your shoes for a minute or two – so they feel the spit-ball land on the back of your head as you walk through the schoolgrounds, so they smell the rotten egg sandwiches the bully put in your locker, so they hear the taunts and feel the hurt inflicted. 

HOW DO YOU DO IT?

Look through what you’ve written, whether it’s memoir or fiction it all works the same. Find a passage where you’re telling – don’t worry we all do it, even experienced writers have unwanted patches of telling in their first drafts – something that has potential for a scene. For example, “My father was a really great man”. Instead of telling us, SHOW US how he was great, in his own unique way. 

Write the scene of how he did you wrong, show us the good he did. Let us hear him speak, the things he said, the smell of him. Find a moment of a harsher side of him too, so he becomes more than a caricature of goodness. Develop the scene fully. Show us the conflict. Think of each scene as a little mini story painting a picture of the life you want to portray, the plot point you want to illustrate, the character you want us to understand.

Here’s an article on HOW TO WRITE A SCENE IN 6 EASY STEPS and another on WRITING CONCISE SCENES.

TELLING A LITTLE BIT

Though mostly it’s best to write predominantly in scenes, telling is also an important part of shaping and most especially grounding our stories. At the start of a scene for example you need to make sure the reader knows where and when they are in time and place and who the POV character is for the scene. Make sure you GROUND YOUR READER with a little bit of telling – it doesn’t have to be much, a sentence or two. 

For example: When I was seven years old, we lived on the banks of the Oxley Creek in a sixties fibro house my father had renovated himself, so all the doors and windows hung slightly awry. Then you can go into a scene set in that slightly crooked house.

OR you can use telling to cover a large period of time when nothing much happened. Don’t feel that every single detail needs to be included in your story. Unless you’ve been poisoned, we really don’t care what you had for breakfast, or if your character has chestnut curls after a recent trip to the hairdresser – unless they’re disguising themselves on the run from police.

Instead, you can use a brief passage of telling to fill us in. For example: Three years later I was still on the run, but I was desperate to see my mother again. My sister had got a message to my hut on a Thai island. Mum was sick. I had to see her. No matter the risk. So I dyed my hair brown and curled it, padded myself with cushions, plastered my face in dark tan foundation and took the risk of getting on a flight back to my hometown. 

READ widely in your genre of choice and mark out passages of telling between scenes. Can you spot them? Now have a look at your own project. Are you mainly telling? What sections might work well as scenes? 

Now WRITE THAT SCENE. Use the tips in my articles on writing scenes to help. Your writing will come alive on the page and your readers will feel as if they too are experiencing the story events, not just hearing about them.

GOOD LUCK! Let me know how you go!

Lots of love

Edwina xx