Writing: Revisiting Characters - Showing Less: Show Less, Tell Less, Show And Tell Even Less (Part Two Of Three)
I’m going to try and keep today’s post a little shorter because I have a habit of writing a lot, and I could blame that on my penchant for writing long fiction, but I, honestly, try every week to keep it under 4 pages.  It’s a curse, and a blessing. And I’m working at cross purposes right now ;)
Last week’s post was about about telling less. (Also you can refer back to this original post on writing Character CVs that’s referred to in that post - next week’s post is going to be insane with back-links) This week, we move on to the second bullet point in this mini-series:
2. Show Less. This part is also easy (All the points are easy, really, once you get used to them). The conventional wisdom is “show, don’t tell,” but when you do show, you may show a bit too much at first. Showing everything a person does or everything that happens is not necessarily what you want to do. At that point, it can sometimes turn into over-complicated Telling.
You can show, rather than tell about, things in a variety of ways. Showing the way people act, react, things that they react to, in dialogue, with subtext, etc. Generally, when you hear “show don’t tell,” what you’re being warned against is what we talked about in last week’s post, which basically means don’t write lines like:
He thought, what am I going to do now? I’ve missed the bus and I’m totally screwed!
When you could write a line like this (We’re sticking with Jimmy and his bus stop conundrum, because it’s completely devoid of engaging drama, and Jimmy worries way too much ;)
The bus sped away as Jimmy came crashing out the school doors and stopped dead in his tracks. An icy sweat beaded on his forehead, his shoulders drooping down as he took in a huge breath of air and let it out in a heavy blast.
(For the purposes of this post, this is the entire story. Extremely short)
We know what he’s thinking, or we can assume as much. And the two critical points, when dealing with showing, in order to show less, are:
a. What can be reasonably assumed
The first point is pretty self-explanatory:
a. Â What can be reasonably assumed.Â
If you can, for instance, take your writing sample and, while reading it in the context of the story you’ve written, surmise exactly what the character must be thinking or feeling, you’re probably right on target. It’s always best to get someone else’s opinion, if you have the slightest doubt.  But, mostly, it should be second nature to you.
If you saw someone running out of a school building while you were just standing there on the sidewalk, they were sweating like a pig and you saw them hang their head in shame and let out a gigantic gush of breath as they looked away from the bus that had just left, what would you assume about them? Probably the first thing you’d think was that, oh shit, they were supposed to catch the bus and they missed it.
Of course ,you could assume a million other things, like that they’d just lost a game of Scrabble and their mother was supposed to call them from the pay phone down the street and, in mid-sprint, they’d had a crisis of conscious and realized that they’d completely forgotten their grandmother’s birthday and needed to buy hamster food on the way home but didn’t quite have enough money.
You could assume all of those things. You could assume anything you wanted to, but given the situation and the limited facts available to you, namely the incidents occurring right at that time and Jimmy’s reaction to them, there would only be a limited amount of reasonable assumptions and, probably, in this case, just one that really makes sense to you immediately.
When the bus leaves, Jimmy comes bursting through the door, looks at the bus driving away and slumps in defeat, you’ll naturally assume he missed the bus. Whoops. Because who hasn’t had that happen to them?
But familiarity with a problem isn’t necessary to draw the correct assumption. All you really need are the right amount of elements required to make that assumption with fair accuracy. Which leads us to the next point
When it comes to showing, a lot of times people will overcompensate for their lack of telling by showing way too much.
When taken in conjunction with point number one above, regarding what showing’s all about (what can reasonably assumed from what’s been shown), showing unnecessary things can only lead to confusion on the part of the reader. For instance, if, instead of keeping that original paragraph brief, we’d written something like:
The bus sped away as Jimmy came crashing out the school doors and stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes looked off into the distance as an icy sweat beaded on his forehead. He pulled out his cell phone and began punching in digits, chewing at his nails as he paced back and forth, his shoulders drooping down as he took in a huge breath of air and let it out in a heavy blast. Seconds later, he threw the phone to his feet, kicking it out of the way and stomping on the ground, screaming like a lunatic. Etc, etc, etc…
In essence, sometimes, the more detail you add, the more possible interpretations you open up for the reader with regards to Jimmy’s behaviour (He’s a certified nut-bag, I swear ;) There are a number of reasons he could be upset, given the content of the modified paragraph above, and the reader would have to guess which one you wanted them to care about (or if, maybe, you wanted them to care about some or all of them).
So, in order to make sure that your reader makes a valid (or, optimally, the only reasonable) assumption based on what you’ve shown and not told, you have to keep the showing to a minimum.
This doesn’t mean that your prose has to be anorexic, or dry as toast, or even sparse (It can be flowery if that’s the way you prefer to write. I’m not here to judge). The only thing it means is that, when you’re writing (or preferably, after you’ve written) you should go over your work and ask yourself two questions derived exactly from the second point above (What is necessary):
What, in that little scene, could be removed without:
1)Â taking away from the story (there may be stuff in there that seems unnecessary, but is possibly contributing to a larger theme, some other subplot, or just the overall mood, etc)?
2) making it impossible for the reader to understand what’s happening in the scene?
If you confuse the reader by included too little detail, it’s, perhaps, the better alternative if you’re trying to be impossibly cryptic (or that’s part of the theme), but most likely worse, since the reader won’t be sure what to make of what you’ve just written. So, if you’ve stripped a bunch of stuff away from that last paragraph to trim down the writing and ended up with this:
The sweat beaded on Jimmy’s forehead.  He stopped in his tracks, shoulders drooping down, as he took in a huge breath of air and let it out in a puff
You’ve described his emotional state to a degree, but the object of his disappointment has been removed, so now the reader has to guess why he’s upset (assuming it hasn’t been set up earlier in the story). The part about the bus speeding away is absolutely necessary in order to frame Jimmy’s reaction.
You could take out other parts and it wouldn’t really matter, for instance:
The bus sped away as Jimmy came crashing out the doors of the school and stopped in his tracks, shoulders drooping down.
That should be enough to express the fact that he missed the bus and he’s none too happy about it. If you’d pared it down more, by removing the seemingly useless bit about his shoulders and left only:
The bus sped away as Jimmy came crashing out the doors of the school and stopped in his tracks
Your reader could assume that he missed the bus, but they’d have no idea how he felt about it. One would most likely assume that he was upset (otherwise, why would he be running), but he could have just been running out of habit, because he’s always late and, well, today he happened to miss the bus. No big deal. The perfect excuse for him to hang out with his friends and blame it on the bus schedule when he got home late.
So, to wrap this up (I think this will be my shortest post of late. Maybe), when you’re doing your showing (which is less than your telling, which was covered in part 1 about telling even less), you should double check it and make sure that you’re showing just enough and not too much (which may be a fuzzy line of demarcation, but still definite enough to be useful).
You can make sure that you’re showing the proper amount by asking yourself two simple question about your “showing” passages:
1. What can be reasonably assumed (from what you’re showing, which should be the one thing you want your reader to assume)?
2. What’s necessary (in your showing, so that the reader can reasonably assume what you want them to)?
The two points feed off of each other like the Ouroboros, so you can go back and forth between them, or start with 2 instead of 1. It doesn’t matter, as long as you can answer both questions to your satisfaction.
It’s entirely possibly that only one thing could be reasonably assumed by your reader and nothing in your writing is unnecessary, which is great.  Don’t go looking for problems where there are none, just keep an open mind. The more you read your own writing, and the longer periods of time that you do it, the more likely you are to miss things. And the places where you can reduce both your telling and your showing can hide themselves just as easily as a typo, because, if you know your story and you’re reading it for the fiftieth time, your subconscious mind will fill in what’s supposed to be there and you’ll miss it. Which is why I always recommend having someone else look at your writing, as well as yourself (but, maybe, save asking that favour until you’re just about done with your work. Helps keep your friends your friends ;)
So, that’s that.  Easy peasy, as they say somewhere I’ve never been but lots of other people seem to visit frequently.
Next week, we’ll look at taking the less showing and less telling we’re already doing and applying a third concept of “Showing And Telling Even Less” to your work.  This is married to the first two pieces, but also a slight deviation, and a great way to make sure your work is accessible to, and personally engaging for, the greatest number of people (essentially everyone). Like I wrote before, it’s magic, and probably one of my favourite things to do when writing.
Until then, hopefully this post has been helpful for you (another tool for your toolbox). Best wishes to you all with your writing and in your lives,
