English is not my first language, and I always thought I did a lot of showing in my stories. Found out that nope. So, I don’t know what your mother language is in writing, but this may be useful for you: explaining is not showing. ‘She said quietly’, ‘he walked fast’, ‘screamed loudly’ and etc. are not showing. It’s advanced telling. You just explain in more words the same idea. Boom.
So, once I understood the diversity of English language, I stopped using adverbs and comparisons. ‘She whispered’, ‘they ran’, ‘shouted’ or even ‘screamed’ is enough. You don’t really need more. As a non-native I thought I should explain like how they screamed or danced or spoke, but - in fact - you need to show how they did it but without adverbs and ‘like…’, ‘as…’, ‘as if…’ etc.
It was hard at first, because I had to rotate my writing to a completely different format. Like what do you mean ‘his heart was pounding really loud’ doesn’t work? It doesn’t. For English it looks too simple. For writing in English it looks like you just described the exact thing that was happening.
I mean, when I ask you to tell me about the sun, you won’t just tell me ‘the sun is shining’, right? You’ll tell me it’s yellow, that it’s the center of the Solar System, that it has some specific temperature and degree, that the other planets rotate around it and its effect on the other planets. So, when you say ‘she spoke fast’ it’s your ‘the sun is shining’. Like, it’s blunt. I know that, that’s obvious.
I know I use a lot of so, so - yes, when you tell how people do something or what they’re like - you are telling and not showing. ‘They walked fast’ should be about their steps, other people watching them, buildings/objects that change in the vision, whatever, but not ‘walk fast’. Don’t be a ‘thanks, cap’ meme. Show ‘walk fast’ by showing what walk fast really looks like.
And bonus: readers don’t like when the author is watching the characters from above as if playing the dolls. To make the scene breathe, you should pass it through the character. Yeah, yeah, ‘the sun was shining’, ‘the birds were singing’ - what was it for your character? How did they see it? Did they even notice the birds or sun? Are they the type that notices such things? If you give the descriptions, make readers understand why they’re important for that specific character. They heard the birds singing and reacted somehow or they went out and hid under the sun. Why were the birds and the sun there?
