more impressive than a cutlet

Like, distraction? Bam. Bandits.

Everyone in a hurry & in need of more exciting stuff? Boom. Bandits.

Arthur needs someone to save? Kaching. Bandits.

They don't get faces, or names, or a story, they're just this sort of force of nature that can hit anyone anytime as long as you're in the woods and want to show off or smth.

This was funnier in my head.

“If you’re happy and you know it…“ 

People throw around the phrase “Show, don’t tell” all the time. But what does it mean? Really?

When I’m editing a client’s work, I always explain what I mean when I say “Show, don’t tell,” so I know we’re on the same page (pun intended). 

FYI: This advice is really 2nd or 3rd draft advice. Don’t tie yourself in knots trying to get this perfect on the first go. First drafts are for telling yourself the story. Revisions are for craft. 

Ruthlessly hunt down filter words (saw, heard, wondered, felt, seemed, etc.). Most filter words push the reader out of narrative immersion, especially if you’re writing in 1st person or a close 3rd person. “She [or I] heard the wind in the trees” is less compelling than “The wind rustled through the trees” or “The wind set the bare branches to clacking.” Obviously, the point of view character is the one doing the hearing; telling the reader who’s doing the hearing is redundant and creates an unnecessary distance between the character’s experience and the reader’s experience of that experience. Was/were is another thing to watch out for; sometimes, nothing but was will do, but in many instances—“There was a wind in the trees” “There were dogs barking”—“was” tells, whereas other phrasing might evoke—“The wind whispered/howled/screamed through the trees” “Dogs snarled/yipped/barked in the courtyard/outside my door/at my heels.” 

Assume your readers are smart. What does this mean? Don’t tell the reader what your characters are thinking or feeling: “Bob was sad.” How do we know? What does Bob’s sadness look like, sound like? What actions, expressions, words indicate Bob’s sadness? Does Bob’s sadness look different than Jane’s would?

It also means that you need not repeat information unless you have something new to add to it—even if it’s been several chapters since you first mentioned it. I think a lot of readers fall into this trap because writing often takes a long time. But what takes a writer days or weeks or months to write might take a reader fifteen minutes to read. So, if the writer keeps telling the reader about so-and-so’s flaming red hair or such-and-such’s distrust or Bob’s blue eyes or Jane’s job as a neurosurgeon, the reader gets annoyed. 

The last thing you want is your reader rolling their eyes and muttering, “OMG, I KNOW” at the story you’ve worked so hard to write. It certainly means you don’t need to have characters tell each other (and through them, the reader) what the story is about or what a plot point means.

Along these same lines, let the reader use their imagination. “Bob stood, turned around, walked across the room, reached up, and took the book from the shelf.” Holy stage directions, Batman! A far less wordy “Bob fetched the book from the shelf” implies all those irrelevant other details. However, if Bob has, say, been bedbound for ten years but stands up, turns around, and walks across the room to fetch the book, that’s a big deal. Those details are suddenly really important.

Write the action. Write the scene with the important information in it. Let the reader be present for the excitement, the drama, the passion, the grief. If you’re finding yourself writing a lot of after-the-fact recap or “he thought about the time he had seen Z” or “and then they had done X and so-and-so had said Y,” you’re not in the action. You’re not in the importance. Exceptions abound, of course; that’s true of all writing advice. But overuse of recapping is dull. Instead of the reader being present and experiencing the story, it’s like they’re stuck listening to someone’s imperfect retelling. Imagine getting only “Last week on…” and “Next week on…” but never getting to watch an episode. I’m editing a book right now with some egregious use of this. The author has a bad habit of setting up a scene in the narrative present—“The queen met the warrior in the garden.”—but then backtracking into a kind of flashback almost immediately. “Last night, when her lady-in-waiting had first suggested meeting the warrior, she had said, ‘Blah blah blah.’ The queen hadn’t considered meeting the warrior before, but as she dressed for bed, she decided they would meet in the garden the next day. Now, standing in the garden, she couldn’t remember why it had seemed like a good idea.”

That’s a really simplified and exaggerated example, but do you see what I’m getting at? If the queen’s conversation with the lady-in-waiting and the resulting indecision are important enough to be in the narrative, if they influence the narrative, let the reader be present for them instead of breaking the forward momentum of the story to “tell” what happened when the reader wasn’t there. Unless it’s narratively important for something to happen off-page (usually because of an unreliable narrator or to build suspense or to avoid giving away a mystery), show your readers the action. Let them experience it along with the characters. Invite them into the story instead of keeping them at a distance.

Finally, please, please don’t rely on suddenly or and then to do the heavy lifting of surprise or moving the story forward; English has so many excellent verbs. Generally speaking, writers could stand to use a larger variety of them. 

Make your descriptions pull double and triple duty. Describing people, places, and objects is fine. Necessary, even. But one of the quickest ways to ramble on telling instead of showing is when you include descriptions that don’t reveal more information than just what people/places/objects look like. It’s particularly easy to fall into this trap with character and setting descriptions.

This week I edited a sample chapter of a manuscript set in the 1970s Middle East that had the potential to be both captivating and rich in setting. Unfortunately, the author didn’t think to tie any of the descriptions of the apartment in the first scene or the characters that inhabited it together in a way that revealed any truly engaging information. Two militia soldiers sent as messengers for a certain faction invade the family-of-five’s home, and the narrator gives a lot of detail about the living room in which the characters sit down, including the colors of the couches and chairs, the positioning of them in relation to the coffee and side tables—and a tray of cigarettes and cigars sitting on the latter. Several paragraphs later, one of the soldiers is suddenly rolling a cigarette between his fingers before he and his companion stand and leave.

Not only did the author not provide adequate details as to where this cigarette came from, they missed out on the opportunity to show who these characters are by having them interact with the environment. The unwilling host could have motioned toward the tray, a “help yourself” gesture—or maybe he intentionally didn’t but one or both of the soldiers take from it anyway. Or maybe the soldiers intentionally refuse the offering and instead one of them reaches for one of his own cigarettes. Maybe they each grab a handful, far more than manners would dictate polite. Maybe they tip the tray over and grind the cigarettes and cigars into the carpet before leaving, a petty form of revenge against being denied their request. Or maybe they don’t and instead leave the bigger threat hanging over the host’s head.

Not one of these descriptions says the same thing as the others, which is why it’s important to critically examine every detail given in a particular story. An intentional and skilled author can turn any told description into information that SHOWS something important that will deepen the reader’s understanding of what’s happening in a given scene. Descriptions should never be throwaway mentions. Not considering the deeper implications of what you’re writing is the fastest way to telling the reader things they aren’t going to find interesting, which brings me to…

Generic descriptions. By now, you probably know what types of throwaway character “tag” actions you default to. You know the types, the ones that often are inserted to break up or react to dialogue: smiling, grinning, nodding, sighing, shrugging, laughing, blinking, looking (at), folding arms, and rolling eyes, just to name a few. They’re easy descriptions to insert, and when used sparingly, they CAN mean something more than is outright stated, but overuse will without question kill their effectiveness. I’ve edited so many manuscripts where characters do things that just… are things? But these things either don’t seem to have any greater meaning or they’re blatant telling, e.g., “I don’t know why you’re still talking about this.” John rolled his eyes, annoyed.

Can you say telling?

A certain manuscript I edited had almost four hundred uses of smile/smiled/smiling and almost three hundred uses of nod/nodded/nodding. I was ready to start slapping characters somewhere around the one-quarter mark of the manuscript because these descriptions meant nothing. As placeholders, they’re fine, but authors need to go deeper if they want to avoid readers rolling their eyes in annoyance like poor John.

“Sir, may I trouble you for a sip of water?“ 

These are for science.

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Sincerely,