Show don’t Tell Writing Podcast Show Notes & Links
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In part two of this three-part series, Suzy dives deeper into the practical application of Show, don’t Tell. For this lesson, she focuses on the advanced strategies, including how to target specificity, avoid white wall syndrome, and deal with repetitions.
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Episode Transcript (unedited)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to Show. Don’t Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We’re gonna explore writing techniques. I’m gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers’ careers that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
And I’m also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you’re just starting out, you’re drafting your first book, you’re editing, or you’re currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show’s gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn’t even know you needed, but you definitely do.
I’m so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, [00:01:00] and you’re gonna also have some fun doing it. Let’s dive in. Oh, this is the episode that I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time, and that is where we talk about show Don’t tell.
Some super advanced strategies that you’ve probably never heard anywhere else before. If you haven’t listed to part one in this series where I talk about why show don’t tell matters and why it’s not just tired writing advice, and I addressed three of the most common writing advice on show. Don’t tell that you’ve probably heard before, but with this fresh take.
Then go check that one out. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Today in part two, I’m gonna talk about these next level strategies. Now, I like to say that writers are gonna be working on show, don’t tell their entire writing career, which might sound like a slog, but it’s not. It’s actually so, so fun. And once you get the hang of it and you know where to find these bits that you might be telling and you get super [00:02:00] creative about how to solve the problem.
Then it can be a lot of fun and it can actually make your revision go a lot faster. So let’s dive it. In episode one, I talked about why you shouldn’t name emotions and how you can change that. I also talked about using ly adverbs and why it’s like the super full pot in the industry. I also talked about how to break up info dumping, why it happens, why it’s boring, what to do about it.
Okay. Those are in episode one. Today we’re gonna talk about these exciting ones, which are why you shouldn’t recap events that happened off screen, showing many versus one. So how do you actually show people around in a crowd or show people that something happens more than once? You know how? How does that actually play into show?
Don’t tell. Being specific versus vague and saying what isn’t in the scene and why it is the worst thing that you can do. So this first one that we’re talking about today, recapping events [00:03:00] that happened off screen and why it’s almost always telling and why, how you can fix it is something that’s going to seem really obvious once you know it.
It’s like me talking about the guy that I saw this morning that was walking his dog and he was juggling balls and then he slipped on a banana peel and he fell, and all these things, and I’m laughing and tears are streaming down my faces. I’m telling you this story and you’re like, Susie, that wasn’t funny.
And I said, ah, you gotta be there. Right? You had to be there. And here’s the thing, is telling somebody something happened after the fact. Isn’t very exciting and we don’t get the full experience. Whereas if you were to describe it’s, I could bring you there to that moment and show you, maybe I took a video or maybe I could just, you know, use my time machine and bring you to that moment and you could witness it.
You would have that hilarity moment that I had, and then maybe we’d have an inside joke together that we would talk about for the next 30 years. It’s a huge, huge difference, [00:04:00] and I can’t do that justice by just telling you what happened. You had to be there. So the same thing can happen in your story if your characters are standing around, sitting around TA, telling each other about a, the blood that they spilled in an epic battle.
To the battle. By all means, please do not skip over it. I see this happen so many times where we’re so excited about something and the choice that writers make is to have to skip over that battle ’cause they didn’t wanna write it or they didn’t think about it and they didn’t write the battle. And instead, all we hear about is the battle afterward.
From a plot standpoint, you’re still giving us all that information. You’re setting up this, you had to be there moment and it’s going to be boring. You’re telling me what happened in the battle instead of letting me see it and show it and feel it and hear it and smell it and all the things and be in your character’s body as they react and go through [00:05:00] the battle.
That is the beauty of writing, is being able to be in those character shoes for things that. You know, if you’ve never been in a battle, which I never have, but if you’ve never been in a bloody battle, I get to experience it for the very first time that way, and it just sure isn’t the same if they tell me about it later.
So how can you fix this if you can’t bring us into the battle for some reason or another? Well, first of all, let’s talk about how to find it in your writing. Okay? It can take a bunch of different forms. A lot of times I like to say if you’ve got people standing around talking and nothing is actually happening and you’re scene, you probably have a problem.
Right? So either bring the battle to that or bring them to the battle, or go drop into a flashback and show us that that snippet of time or jump forward, right? Bring somebody else in who can actually give color about the battle, who can interact with it, right? There’s lots and lots of ways to make that scene come to life that isn’t telling.[00:06:00]
The same thing can be true. You see this one a lot of times, anytime that you’re recapping something that we already saw. Sometimes I see this, a writer has written the battle and we are there to witness all of it, and we go through all the heartbreak as their best friend dies of their arms and it’s heart wrenching and terrible, and then they go home and they tell the best friend’s widow.
Story and they tell it all over again. Okay, this has a slightly different issue, but it’s the same problem in that we are now standing around and seeing the widow’s reaction, and writers will tell me, well, the widow needs to know, and the reaction is important. This is a great place where you don’t want to be showing again, so we’re going to be.
Talking about this in episode three, where we are actually going to fix that and show how we can tell a little bit. Another thing that you can do, if you have to have to recap something or tell something that isn’t happening there because of the way that your story is [00:07:00] structured, because of your point of view, there might be a reason why you can’t do it.
So instead of having them standing around doing nothing, telling each other about this story, then you could also have something in that scene that mirrors or contrasts, or. Challenges you to think about it, right? If they’re pouring tea and they drop the scalding tea on somebody as the knife slices through in the story, are there things that you can do to make it more 3D to make it more interesting than people just standing around talking?
That is always going to be a tell. You wanna bring that scene to life, you wanna make sure that they really experience it. And please, please, please don’t skip over those wonderful moments. They see this so often where writers have this wonderful climax in their brains, and then they don’t write it. They skip ahead and they tell us what happened after the fact.
This is always telling, and the best course of action is to bring us to the moment and show it. Okay. This [00:08:00] next one is about using generalities, and it is absolutely imperative that you make it more interesting than that. These generalities actually show up as. Bunch of different things, and now I’ve just done it.
I said a bunch of different things, right? So watch for that. Watch for if you’re saying things or stuff, or many times that something happens, or if you’re using a collective point of view, they walked hand in hand. All of these things, it’s kind of a weird thing, but the way that the brain works when they’re reading, it’s hard for your reader to picture something that is a collective.
It’s really hard for them to picture a crowd, for example, right? It’s really hard for them to picture a bunch of objects without knowing what they are. Okay? So I’m gonna address these in a few different ways because you don’t want it to be really easy for your readers to gloss over it and never really building a scene or creating something in their minds.
What actually happens is if you don’t tell us what it is. There’s [00:09:00] this weird default in the brain and it’s called white wall syndrome or white room syndrome. And sometimes I use it to, to show why you need to ground people in a setting. But here I use it to say that if we don’t know what is there, we picture this sort of white fuz that’s the default.
And so it’s this weird thing. We don’t want your readers picturing that. So replace these weird, like general words with specifics and get as specific as you can. Sometimes this is a symptom of a larger problem, and I can tell when I’m editing somebody’s manuscript. If they haven’t made decisions, for example, about how the magic in their story works, or they haven’t made decisions about how the government in their story works, then they use these generalities and you could literally fill them in with anything.
It’s really, really hard for your reader to get to, so we wanna replace them with as specific as possible. If you haven’t made those decisions, and that’s why it’s there, make the decisions, [00:10:00] right? Take a beat, go to a brainstorming document and come back to that scene when you’ve decided what that detail is, because if you don’t, then it will always feel vague, and it’s really hard to find this later.
So this would be an example of something that’s too general, right? The drawer she opened was full of stuff. Okay. I could actually picture so many things that could be in there. Is it food? Is it wizards? Wands? Is it bouncy balls? Like I have absolutely zero idea, right? But let’s say that it’s a junk drawer.
Then you might be better off to say, rather than it was full of junk, which I could think was like so many different things. Zoom in, take your camera, zoom in. Show me one or two or three specific things in that drawer. It starts to build the picture of the hole. Okay, so the junk drawer contained broken sunglasses, an obsolete camera and a half used tube of [00:11:00] stick nestled among other forgotten belongings.
So now you know that there’s a lot of stuff in there, but you’ve given me a good example. You’ve given me something to zoom in on. That is showing versus telling, right? You can tell me that it’s full of junk or you can show me a couple of things. So use this technique to list off a few specifics that are actually there to help your reader sort of glom onto it and have ground them in that moment.
Okay? So another example, it’s too general. A crowd gathered. Okay, well, I don’t know anything about that crowd, and I’m not gonna picture it because it’s too hard for me. I can’t picture a bunch of people. But instead, you can evoke the feeling of a crowd by describing one person in the crowd or two people in the crowd.
Okay, try this. A young girl with dark hair and bright eyes made her way through the throng of people, her head only reaching the shoulders of the adults she moved with. Okay? We’re zooming in. We’re giving [00:12:00] our readers one image, one moment, one person, so that we can get a sense of the crowd, right? We’re still saying there’s a crowd, but we’re also giving them a specific moment to hang onto.
This concept of generalities versus specifics actually applies in lots of ways. So we just talked about if you have a group of things or if you have a group of people. What about a group of time? Okay. I’ll just explain what I mean by that. If you say oftentimes he went fishing down by the river. Okay.
That’s cool. That shows a pattern, right? But it’s really hard for me to picture again, it, the human brain just can’t create that. Oftentimes it can’t create it because it can’t create a bunch of things all at once. When it’s only one sentence, there’s not enough time. Right. So instead, what you can do is zoom in on one particular moment and show us that day.
You’re almost always gonna be telling, if you’re recapping, oftentimes what [00:13:00] happens, and he does this, that, and the other thing every single time. Whereas if you zoom in on one day, so one of the days when he went fishing, he went down by the river and he slipped and fell in and got his feet wet. Right. We can picture that because you’re bringing us to that moment instead of telling us a very, very general.
Idea of what might happen many times. How about this one? He picked something up and poked the fire. Okay. If you haven’t, then it might turn out that way, but what about he picked up a hot poker or a metal poker, or he picked up a twig from the forest floor and poked the fire, or he picked up a dragon’s tail and poked the fire, right?
All of these things evoke different. Pieces of your story and you can use them. So make your story actually work a little bit harder. Make your words work a little bit harder, and anywhere that you’re creating something really general, [00:14:00] either lumping a bunch of things into one or just being really generic about what it is, take a beat, make it more interesting.
You’re not gonna add that many more words, even if you added three things and listed three things that’s in that junk drawer. It’s three words, but you’ve just created a ton more interest than if you just said that the drawer was full of junk. This is a great way as well to slip in world building. So a lot of times, especially if you have a really detailed fantastical world, or if you have a world that isn’t on earth, but it might be another political spectrum or it might be just something that’s different from us.
It can be really boring to have pages and pages and paragraphs and paragraphs of description, and you don’t want that because then you’re in the info dumping, which is addressed in episode one. Instead, use these little moments to do something worth world building, right? So if you have [00:15:00] something of interest, don’t just use something really vague.
I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve read. Science fiction stories where the people are sitting around eating spaghetti because, and then I asked the writer why they used spaghetti and they used spaghetti because they were eating spaghetti that night for dinner, and it’s the first thing that came to their mind.
Make your examples. Your specifics work way harder than that, right? They were eating a hydroponic plant. They were eating a chemically induced, I don’t know, right? Something in that science fiction story that has something to do with your world building. So anytime that you’re bringing in things that feel unrelated, notice it.
Okay? Don’t be general. Be specific. Use that so that you don’t have to write paragraphs and paragraphs about how they grow hydroponics on your planet. You’re actually just showing it in the moment, in the scene in that particular instance. It’s a very effective way to get super specific and to make your words work way [00:16:00] harder.
Okay, and last but not least that we’re gonna discuss here in this episode is when you are showing me something that isn’t in your scene. Now, let me phrase that for a minute, because for the same reason that that’s hard for you to understand when you do this, it’s hard for your reader to picture. So, for example, if you are saying that there was nothing in the room, or that the room was empty, right?
So instead of telling me that the room was empty, show me what is there. Okay. Instead of telling me that there was nothing in the dark or there were no books on the shelf, you’ve missed an opportunity to show your reader a detail or two about what is there. Again, it can do a lot to further your story.
It can help you with world building. It can help you with your character arc. It can help you with lots of different things. Okay, so if you say that there’s nothing in the dark. That means that you’ve missed this opportunity to show me the soupy fog that swallowed up the character’s view [00:17:00] of the forest.
And if there’s nothing or no books on the shelf, you’ve actually missed an opportunity to show me the bare slats of the bookshelf covered with a thick layer of dust. It gives us a lot more information, right? A thick layer of dust suggests that this has been abandoned for a while, that these books weren’t taken off the shelf 30 seconds ago.
There’s so much more work that you can do. Showing me that there’s nothing on the shelf actually doesn’t wake your reader’s brain ’cause they don’t even bother to picture it. You can even take this one step further by saying, don’t tell us who isn’t in the scene. So Roger wasn’t there. You don’t have to say that Roger wasn’t there.
If you show me that Sally and Bob were the only people there, right? So watch negative phrasing and telling me what isn’t there. Just take that opportunity to set the stage. Instead, let’s test this one. If you are to write, he was gone, right? The only thing [00:18:00] that your reader could kind of conjure if we don’t know where we are or what’s happening is this kind of gray or white box, right?
He was gone. It doesn’t actually have the dramatic effect that writers hope it will because of that. Brain science, right? Because your reader doesn’t picture anything, so you think it’s gonna be awesome. They disappeared. But it isn’t. Nothing happens in your reader’s brain. It doesn’t light up at all. So what would be better is if you describe what’s left right?
Try this instead of he disappeared. How did he disappear? Did he like, just like magic disappear? I just snapped my fingers, right? He just disappeared. That’s not very satisfying. Instead, show us what that looked like. Maybe his body shrank to a pin prick, then disappeared with a pop. We’ve got a sound now as well.
We’ve made it 3D. We’ve shown for a moment that his body shrank, so it was there and then it got smaller and smaller and smaller. Right? There’s something way more interesting about that than [00:19:00] just he disappeared, so his body shrank to a pinprick than disappeared with a paw. Leaving me alone with my screams echoing off the four white walls.
We have so much more information there than just he disappeared and I screamed. Right. We can leave. Even if it is a white room, then we know that there are four white walls that are left, and if you describe it, then your reader can actually picture it in their mind. They’re gonna have a way more interesting experience with your book than if you just let them disappear.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive on show, don’t tell, and you’ve got some new ideas to go back and look through your manuscript, your book that you’re writing right now, and find those pesky tells. ’cause once you find them, you can have so much fun adding, showing details so that your reader can experience your cascading purple waterfalls or your dark musty caverns up close.
It’s not about adding tons and tons and [00:20:00] paragraphs and pages of information. That’s not what showing is all about. It’s about being specific. It’s about being visual. It’s about using the five senses. It’s about interpreting it in your character’s point of view. It’s about making meaning of it so that you’re not just giving us a fact, and then another fact, and then another fact, and then another fact.
Until we have so many facts in our arms that we drop your book. We go out and do something way more engaging in the real world, what we want to do is light up our reader’s brains so that they stay immersed and that they can experience the world through your characters’ eyes. Adding these details to your book while you’re revising, it will actually stretch your brain in the most creative way.
You’re gonna find that this is so much fun. You’re gonna challenge yourself to find these moments and to brainstorm ways to make them better. And I gotta tell you that show tell, and finding these and making them showing [00:21:00] might just become your favorite part of your writing process. In episode three of the show, don’t Tell Deep Dive.
I’m gonna share with you places where you can tell, okay, so there comes a point in time when I work with writers and it’s always show don’t tell, show don’t tell, show don’t tell. And then all of a sudden I go back to them, I say, Hey, you’re showing too much. You can tell here. And they go, what? Understand.
It’s a balance. And we’re gonna, in the next episode three, we’re gonna talk about when to show and when to tell, and some ways to use telling to your advantage.
Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing With me, Susie Vori, help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop [00:22:00] on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
If you’re feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you’re writing that isn’t quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review episodes. Remember that book? And your writing is going to open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make it the absolute best you’re feeling called to write that book.
Keep going, and I’m gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.