Suzy Vadori

Show don’t tell Writing Podcast: Episode #85. Bad Showing and Good Telling

Suzyvadori
 

Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast Show Notes & Links

Is it ALWAYS more important to Show? When can you TELL? Join Suzy and her guest this week, book coach Julie Artz for an energetic conversation about when you should reign in your showing and opt to simply tell. 

Looking for a writing retreat to really focus on your writing? Join Julie Artz and Emily Colin this year: Details here: https://www.julieartz.com/writing-retreats

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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)

85. Bad Showing and Good Telling

Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away.

As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show.

I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to

Julie Artz: transform your writing.

Suzy Vadori: Today we’re in for a treat. Welcome back to the show, my good friend and [00:01:00] colleague, Julie Arts. In fact, Julie and I have worked together for many years. We are both author Accelerator certified coaches.

But what’s funny is this year in particular, I, I’ve met many writers who have gone to some of Julie’s events and not known that we work closely together and said, oh my gosh, do you know Susie? Or asked me? Do you know Julie? You’re like the same person. So I love, love, love having her on the show because we can actually talk a lot about, we have a lot of the same language and a lot of the same energy for writing, and you are gonna learn so much from her today.

Julie Arts is an author accelerator certified founding book coach, and a sought after speaker and writing instructor. She’s a former Pitch Wars and team pit mentor. She’s a former S-C-B-W-I regional advisor, and she keeps her industry knowledge sharp through her blogging, teaching and volunteer work for W-A-F-W-A-D-F-A-A-W-P, and the Authors Guild, and lots of other [00:02:00] letters out there.

She is just an absolute walking encyclopedia of writers organizations, a consummate social justice minded story. Geek Julie lives by an enchanted river in Fort Collins, Colorado with her husband. Two naughty free familiars, and two college stage children who occasionally manifest. Welcome to the show, Julie Arts.

We’re gonna talk today about good telling and bad showing.

Julie Artz: Yeah, absolutely.

Suzy Vadori: Good. You know, you are actually the very first guest. This, this podcast has been running over 80 episodes now. You’re the first guest that I’ve had on twice. You are welcome anytime of the day to geek out about writing with me.

Julie Artz: I did not realize that, Susie.

It’s awesome.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah, it’s great. And, and when we talked about this that, you know, this was your idea, the good telling and bad showing. This is the show Don’t Tell podcast and we talk a lot about it. If listeners are interested in, you know, how [00:03:00] to show, instead of telling then episodes 45, 46, 47, go listen to them so that you get the basics.

And Julie’s episode was actually number 43. We talked about the value of critique Partners last year. And it’s an awesome episode. So if you were thinking about going with a critique partner, go listen to that and Julie will teach you the good, the bad, and the ugly of that. But today we are gonna flip the table a little bit and talk about when it’s, you know, when we wanna have some good telling and when showing can be terrible.

I wanna, and we’re gonna talk about that in a second, but Julie. Just because I talk all the time on this podcast about show don’t tell. As you know, it’s my favorite topic. Each of us that teaches writing kind of has a different take on it. And I think this is why it’s one of the most difficult concepts to get.

’cause there’s so many layers. So I’m just gonna lob it out there and ask you, Julie, to say, what is the concept of show Don’t tell in your own words and, and how do you think about show? Don’t tell.

Julie Artz: Yeah. Yeah, [00:04:00] that’s, that’s a great question. Well, one of the reasons that I wanted to come on and talk about this is just because, A, I like to be provocative and, and b, I really believe that there is no rule in writing that you can’t break except maybe that romance has to have a happily ever after.

That’s because, so even show don’t tell it isn’t universally applicable. Right. So to me it’s more of finding the balance between showing and telling. It’s about knowing when to show and when to tell. And so for me, that’s what I focus on when I’m teaching this topic or with when I’m reading pages for another writer.

Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. And I just wanna talk about the Happily ever After. For a moment. We’d like to be provocative. I agree. Rules are made to be broken, but please, listeners, learn the rules first, because if you break every single rule in your genre. You’re not, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble finding readers.

They’re gonna be really frustrated, and that’s the rule that Julie was just talking about. [00:05:00] It’s not like a rule because you can’t have a sad ending in a romance. It’s like readers are expecting it. If you call it a romance, but you can write a romance with a sad ending, just tell us it’s a romance. Call it run fiction or something.

No call on y’all.

Julie Artz: It’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a fiction that has a, a failed romance arc. Right. There are definitely, we can all think of tragic romance stories, but they’re not genre romance because genre romance, the readers are spicing happily ever after or happily for now.

Suzy Vadori: Right. And those rules in genres are really just a contract with your reader.

I pick up a book. And I expect something, and if I don’t get it, then I’m gonna write you a terrible review because it wasn’t what I expected. Not because it isn’t a brilliant book, right? So just know that.

Julie Artz: Exactly, and, and a thing that I like to tell writers is that when you’re breaking a rule, first what you said, learn the rules first and then break them.

But second, also understand there is usually some sort of cost. So you have to weigh the cost versus the [00:06:00] benefit. I’m gonna break this rule, I’m gonna do something that’s not standard for genre. And I have to know that that might pull some readers out of the story. So I either need to make other aspects of the story even better, or just to weigh that cost and make sure it’s really, really worth it and that you’re not just breaking the rule for the sake of breaking the rule.

Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. I mean, like if you were to listen to you and many listeners to this podcast, listen to other podcasts as well, or learn from other writers, other coaches, other editors. And the thing is, is it’s almost impossible to apply everything that you know about writing because it’s just too many things.

You have to pick and choose. You have to do a few things really well. And show don’t tell is one of those things where I te I tend to teach rules that will. Reach the most readers, right? So, so I want you to not have those costs or not have those barriers. And so I teach you what standard or or whatever.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t break it. And I hear this all the time when [00:07:00] people finally learn, show don’t tell, and then they become this like teetotaler about it and they’re reading other books and they’re like. Susie, I read this book and they had this terrible telling passage, and I’m like, it’s fine, right?

Like you can’t do it a hundred percent of the time. And then the other thing that I hear from writers is, but Susie, like when I’m showing and I’m doing all the things and I’m like showing my emotions and, and draining the well dry and describing everything, it’s cheesy. It’s over the top. I hate it. And I like to say, that’s great.

Unless you’ve been doing this for a very long time, I can guarantee you that you probably aren’t showing enough. So, but there are, there is a point in time when writers turn in pages when I’m coaching them, like about the six month mark when they finally figured it out, and they’re really comfortable and comfy and confident doing this technique where I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Now you’re showing too much. Right? But, but it’s really far. For most writers, it’s not mm-hmm. Not the case when you’re first starting it. Okay. Do you find that? Like, is that why you, when is [00:08:00] showing too much? Is there a point where it feels cheesy? Why is that, and is there, like what is over showing to you?

What does that look like?

Julie Artz: Yeah, that’s a great question. So two places that I definitely see this. Are. For example, when a character is going on a journey, I get so like

Suzy Vadori: half of the stories out there,

Julie Artz: I get my purse, I go out the door, I walk, I’m showing, I walk down to the bus stop, I get out my bus pass, I get on the bus.

The actual scene, the actual action doesn’t happen until I arrive at the location. So that is the perfect place to take all that showing out and just put a towel. I took the bus downtown.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah, exactly right.

Julie Artz: It’s not exciting. It’s not a scene. It’s actually just a transition piece, and I think that’s where there’s really good telling.

Versus bad showing, which is I got up in the morning, I brushed my teeth, I flossed my [00:09:00] teeth, I put my pants on. Like, we don’t need to see unless Draculas probably floss. Yeah. And

Suzy Vadori: I

Julie Artz: mean, there’s,

Suzy Vadori: there’s a reason, there’s a reason that writers do this. And, and I know I’m gonna call some people out and I’m gonna get a flood of emails like, oh my gosh, I’m so embarrassed.

I do this. And so if you do this in your writing, do not despair. It is normal for you when you start writing. The reason that we do this is because we don’t think about it. We learn to show, and then we just sort of drain. I call it drain the well dry. But the easiest way to start a scene is to have the person waking up and to tell you what they did from the beginning to the end.

And, and the thing that we need to manage is that passage of time, right? And so for those out there who’ve never heard me say this. If you have a scene with your character waking up, that is usually for about 50% of agents, it will be an automatic rejection because you haven’t learned how to manage the passage of time and it isn’t very interesting.

So if your book starts with your character waking up, please start it five minutes later. It’s as [00:10:00] simple as that because if you doing that, then they know that you haven’t studied enough and that you haven’t picked up on this. But yeah, what Julie said. Where we’re trying to show everything that happens in their entire day and that isn’t interesting.

Your job, you might need to write that I, you know, you might actually need to write that because you don’t know what her typical day looks like, but your job as the writer is to actually curate this information for us. You have the ability to move us forward in time and backward in time. Jump to the moon.

If you want to in your story, use that power wisely, because if you’re making us go on the bus, and I see that a lot, like sometimes writers will tell me when I say that about a scene and, and they’ll tell me, oh my gosh, Suzy. The point was to show that she was really bored all morning. And I’m like, it worked.

She was bored, but actually the reader was also born. And so you can do that with a couple of quick sentences. Telling us you can show boredom pretty quickly, but then don’t leave your reader in that state too long. ’cause it it is, it’s boring.

Julie Artz: And the scene [00:11:00] can be said actually for scene or chapter endings.

If you started a scene when the, the character woke up and you go through their entire day and then end when they go to sleep again, just think about cutting the last couple of paragraphs. You a, have a cha, a tighter chapter, and B, you’re not giving the reader the opportunity to say, oh, the character went to sleep, so I’m gonna put my book down and go to sleep too.

You’re gonna leave them on something that’s gonna. Propel them to go to the next page. So

Suzy Vadori: assume, okay, we assume your characters go to the bathroom, that they brush their teeth, that they eat meals, and that they sleep at night. We, we will assume that as readers, we’re pretty smart and we are also humans.

We know how it works. If there’s something weird or quirky about, you know, your particular species of human or other species that you are writing about where that is interesting, then cool. Show it to us once, but please don’t show it to us every day. Right?

Julie Artz: Absolutely. I was just watching over the break [00:12:00] the the Anne Rice interview with a vampire remake and we get to see the coffins that they sleep in, but we don’t see it in every day that they go through.

Right. We see just this, oh, these are vampires and they sleep in coffins, and then you see it once you kind of know how it works and then you move on. I thought that was a really, really nice example of you show it. The assumption is they sleep in these every night. Now we know that we don’t need to see it.

Every single day. The scenes don’t start with them waking up and opening up their coffin lid and jumping out.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Unless it’s a shtick. In movies, you can do that where you so show something over and over again. And the repetitiveness, we don’t want that in books. Okay. So where else do you see over showing?

So that was like. Show me drain in the well dry every movement of their day. Maybe start your scene later or end your scene earlier. Where else do you see it?

Julie Artz: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I often see it as an overreliance on flashbacks. So obviously [00:13:00] flashbacks. I won’t say flashbacks, but I will say character backstory is really, really important.

Suzy Vadori: Well let define that for our readers. Backstory versus flashback.

Julie Artz: Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great word for

Suzy Vadori: our listeners.

Julie Artz: So, so a flashback is where you jump back in time and show us an actual scene from before the story started

Suzy Vadori: where we’re like there in story press, we’re kind of in the character’s body experiencing it

Julie Artz: there.

We’re in a, we’re in a scene, we’re in a fully fleshed out scene that set back in time. We’ve pulled the reader fully out of the story present. We’ve gone back in time to show them something important, and flashbacks can be really, really powerful. So I am not in any way saying never, never, never use a flashback.

But here’s what I see because backstory, which is all the things that happened before the story started. Is really important to driving character, motivation and why the character does the things in story present that they’re doing. There can be a sense that I have to show all those really important moments in a fully fleshed out scene.[00:14:00]

But again, I was talking about cost earlier and there’s a cost to the reader every time you pull the reader out of story present and put them in the past. So you only wanna do that when it’s really, really important. I would say like major emotional turning point. That has some sort of anchor to what’s happening in the story present.

Something that you can’t just get away with doing. What I like to call the Lisa Kron style mini flashback, which is like a sentence.

Suzy Vadori: I

Julie Artz: love my, oh, my goldfish that died in third grade had the same name as your goldfish. Ready, like as to use a terrible example that I don’t know how you would put it. We don’t need to see you getting the goldfish in third grade and realize that his name is Charlie.

You just need to know I want to have a goldfish named Charlie. You have a goldfish named Charlie. Isn’t that funny? We don’t need to see a whole, a whole scene about that. It’s not

interesting

Suzy Vadori: enough,

Julie Artz: right? It’s not emotionally charged enough. It’s not moving the story forward in some way. It’s a scene that you, as the, as the author know happened, but that the [00:15:00] reader doesn’t need to know.

Suzy Vadori: And I mean, the main problem, ’cause especially if you’re writing for the listeners out there, especially if you’re considering writing or you’re writing right now, a dual timeline, which has some scenes in the past and some scenes in in the present. The problem with the scenes in the past, there should always be less, in my opinion.

I mean, I’m always willing to break a rule, but the reason is because it’s really difficult to create tension in the character’s past. We know if you can’t put them in mortal danger because we know that they exist still. Mm-hmm. You can’t, you know, you can’t marry them off to the wrong person because we know how it turned out.

Like we kind of have an idea that they’re a functioning human still. So it’s pretty tough to create a lot of tension in the past. So, as Julie was saying, the moments that you wanna use those flashbacks are to understand their motivation, to understand something that happened in their past that might help the reader predict what they’re gonna do in the story present.

’cause story present is where all the tension is, right? So when we create these huge [00:16:00] flashback scenes and you show going to buy Charlie the goldfish, right? I have lots of funny stories about goldfish. We had one once, but anyway, I won’t repeat them here ’cause they’re probably not

Julie Artz: good.

Suzy Vadori: But again, they’re not relevant.

You don’t need to hear about our goldfish. But yeah, so that’s a great one. Anything else? Where do we over show? I’ve got some too, so let me know.

Julie Artz: I do think that sometimes writers think. That they’re showing when they are actually telling. And where I see that really come up a lot for writers is in internals with the, in the interiority from the The point of view character.

Yeah.

Suzy Vadori: Like inner inner thought, inner thoughts. Yeah.

Julie Artz: Right. Inner thoughts and dialogue. Because what happens is I mark up some pages and I say, here is a giant block of info dump. Show don’t tell. Like, you know, weave this in. And so then they take it and they make it into a conversation that conveys all the same [00:17:00] information and they’re like, look, I showed it because it’s dialogue now.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah,

Julie Artz: it is. In fact, still telling that you think is showing because you made it dialogue.

Suzy Vadori: And I think, you know, for me, dialogue is a great place where bad showing actually lives. It does a bunch of things that we’ve already discussed. Sometimes it’s like filling time, right? Like, how are you today, Julie?

I’m good. How was your day? It was good. And you know, one of the worst, I say this all the time, but one of the worst bits of advice, quote unquote air quotes advice that I hear given to writers is to go sit in a coffee shop and listen to how people talk, and then use that to inform your dialogue. Because here’s the thing, when we are bantering in a coffee shop, there’s a lot of debt space and a lot of sort of meandering stuff.

It’s really boring to read. Right? Mm-hmm. And there’s something I like to call, I don’t, this might have a real name. Maybe Julie can tell you what the real name is. I call it prompting dialogue. [00:18:00] Right? So it’s like, and what else? Julie? Oh yeah. That’s cool. And what does that mean, Julie? Like where you’ve got this secondary, like it’s a way to hide all this information where you’ve got this secondary character, but it’s not a real back and forth.

It’s like fake or, pardon? And I didn’t hear you. What was that? And then they repeat it and I’m like, what is this character doing? Like cut all of that please. It’s so boring. It’s so funny because what I call that is, well, you know Bob, well, you know Bob. Yeah. And, and maybe that’s, uh. Here. Well, and well, you know, Bob, that’s like the one Yeah.

And I, I know what you mean by that. And that’s like almost to set up your info dump. Well, you know, Bob, the reason, you know, I’ve been, Suzy’s been having this podcast since, uh, 20, whatever, I don’t even know. 20, 24. And this is the second time I’ve appeared on this podcast. And the first time I appeared on it was.

On the value of critique Partners in episode four. Are you guys bored yet? I’ll stop. But you get it right and that’s like, you know, well, you know, Bob, it’s, it’s like if you could put [00:19:00] that at the beginning of your sentence, you’re definitely input up.

Julie Artz: Okay, so can I tell you something funny? I wanna circle back to what you were saying.

Oh, please. Going to the coffee shop and listening to conversation. Do you

Suzy Vadori: love that advice? Do you give that advice? Actually,

Julie Artz: well, let me tell you. Let me tell you what I do. What I have my writers do, I do recommend that, but they can’t stop there. And you can do this if you don’t wanna go listen in a coffee shop, you can actually.

Turn on a podcast and grab, you know, three minutes of back and forth dialogue. Or you can turn on a television show or something like that. And live TV is better than, than a television show since the shows are scripted or whatever. But what you do is you take it. Then this is the key piece. You make the highlights real.

Yes. Of actual real human conversation. Right. You’re, you’re really taking out all the, hi Susie. Hi Julie. How’s it going? How was your day? You know, and skipping to the good stuff. The tension stuff. The stuff [00:20:00] moves the story forward.

Suzy Vadori: Exactly. It’s. Yeah, there’s two parts to it, so definitely you can get inspired by that and how people talk and the intonation, but putting it all on the page is awful.

I like to say that, you know, great dialogue in books is a more sparkly version of real life, right? Like we are okay sitting in silence. I mean, not Julie and I, but. I see that

Julie Artz: present Don

Suzy Vadori: very well. We actually see each other in person pretty frequently. We’ll be together in a few weeks and yeah, there’s very rarely a pause, but there’s many people in my life where we can sit in silence and you could show that as well, but you, that’s a great place to tell.

You know, they sat in silence for a few moments, comfortable with each other’s company. Never gonna happen with Julie and I and we’re okay with that?

Julie Artz: Absolutely.

Suzy Vadori: Perfect. Okay, so the other play, I mean, we’ve talked about info dumps, we’ve talked about sort of like managing the passage of time really poorly.

We’ve talked about trying to hide all your stuff in your dialogue and thinking that you’re showing. What [00:21:00] about repeating information that readers already have? This is one that I see a lot when I’m developmentally editing books and they’ve done a scene. But we are, and they show the whole thing. And it’s like them telling, it’s like they went to the battle, we saw the battle, we saw the best friend die in his arms, and then he goes the next day and tells the best friend’s, widow all about the battle and shows it again and tells us all about it.

And I’m like, it’s kind of showing like it might even drop into it or something else. And it’s probably very descriptive, but it’s just something that your reader needs. Do you see that?

Julie Artz: Right? Absolutely. The thing with that is that you have to constant, constantly be thinking about your characters and at the same time about the reader’s experience.

So there can be a truth there, which is that the widow needs to know what happened to her spouse and that that, that your main character is the person who can tell about that battle. But it’s also true that the, that the reader has [00:22:00] already seen the scene. So then you don’t wanna read a summary of the scene again.

So then what you can do is use some good telling, right? That’s where you can say, I had to sit there and tell her everything that had happened the day before and watch her. Cry and then you go back, you’re done with the towel, you go back into the scene and maybe we see her sobbing on, on her shoulder and and talking about what happened.

And you go into a grounded scene from there with just a little bit of summary telling to avoid repeating the entire scene that the reader has. Witnessed.

Suzy Vadori: And then what about mechanical action scenes? This one’s like hilarious to me. When I see like, ’cause we’re showing, I’m talking specifically about action scenes, like fight scenes, sex scenes, something where we’re like, and then I put my right hand on his left shoulder and then I turn a quarter to the left and you know, we end up with all these mechanics and we’re showing, I mean, it’s [00:23:00] tactically showing.

It’s pretty bad showing. Do you ever see that one, Julie, or anything like

Julie Artz: that? I think that there’s a spectrum there as well, because sometimes in an action scene, especially in early draft, you will see so little description that it, that it feels like things are impossible. There’s a third arm. Would be required to do the thing, but there is a balance, right?

Because if you show this happened, then this happened. I mean, again, we’re always thinking about tension and what’s propelling the story forward. So we need just enough betting information so that the reader can imagine the fight scene, but not every single thing. He punched me and then my nose tickled, and then I fell down, and then I stood up again.

Right? Because what we’re trying to do is create this propulsive action. And, and in order to do that, I think you have to have a real sense of the tension. You want the words to be short, the sentences to be [00:24:00] short and snappy. The action to be propelling forward, and I’m just gonna put it in a plug right now for who I think writes the best fight scenes in the business.

It Fonda Lee.

Suzy Vadori: Oh yeah, I know.

Julie Artz: Yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. Because she’s got that martial arts background, so you know when she’s writing a fight scene that she’s actually experienced something, probably not in space. Right. But she has experienced some semblance of that fight. And so if you need. Help with your fight scenes, going to somebody that that does it really, really well.

Like Fonda Lee. There are definitely others. If you’re not writing a martial arts fight, but are writing a sword fight, there are other people that you can go to, for example, look at the mechanics of it, look at what they. Go on the page and what they, what they leave off. I mean, the answer ultimately is leave anything boring off.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Leave anything boring off. But also I find especially newer writers tend to pull way back in their point of view when they are in those situations and they like climb [00:25:00] up onto a wall and start looking at it from a hundred feet away and they say, you know, heard blah, blah, blah, and my blah blah, blah.

And you know, especially in the sex scene or in a fight scene, you wanna be in the character’s. Body and experiencing it, and it’s a way to make it less mechanical and more about what they experience and what they feel in that moment, because that’s what you want your readers to do, is to actually experience getting kicked in the head, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, or whatever the case might be. What that feels like internally, not from the ex, you know, not external and showing the blood dripping down the forehead. If you can’t see it yourself, what you do is that searing pain and your thoughts muddled in like something else. Right? Like, so stay internal mm-hmm.

In those moments as well as, as a way to change that really bad, showing into something that’s really cool.

Julie Artz: And we think sometimes too, a way to get into that character’s body if you do feel like you’ve zoomed way out and are watching the fight scene from above is to think about the all the [00:26:00] senses, right?

It’s so easy to think cinematically, and I’m just going to think of what the character sees, but what. What does it feel like to get kicked in the head if I have a helmet on? What does it sound like to get kicked in the head? You know, what, what does it smell like to, uh, to have your bell rung in that way, right?

Like

Suzy Vadori: to taste blood, to taste pennies to whatever. And yeah. I mean,

Julie Artz: feel the blood trickling down your scalp because you can’t see it, but you can feel. I

Suzy Vadori: started to get a headache. Julie, you’re doing such a good job that it’s starting to feel like I just got kicked in the head.

Julie Artz: That’s what it feels like to get an edit from me.

Suzy Vadori: I think you’re a little bit more tough love than me. I don’t know. Sometimes I have clients, writers that I work with long term that say, yeah, Suzy, for I get your edits, and then. I walk around my house for an hour and swear at you, and then I’m like, take a deep breath.

Julie Artz: Yep, she’s right. And,

Suzy Vadori: and

Julie Artz: we go.

Suzy Vadori: Right?

So, um, yeah. It’s, it’s hard, but, okay. [00:27:00] Kicked in the, that’s

Julie Artz: real.

Suzy Vadori: That’s

Julie Artz: real. It’s real.

Suzy Vadori: Well, that’s what takes, that’s time to process

Julie Artz: those feelings.

Suzy Vadori: That’s, you wanna work with a pro, right? Because we’re not, we’ve seen it. We’re not going to mince words, and we’re gonna, we see these patterns over and over and over again, which is why we’re talking about them today, so that you won’t have these patterns in your books.

Okay. So you talked earlier about us, you know, show, don’t tell, like focus on the interesting bits. And it’s a matter of emphasis. And you know, our mentor, Jenny Nash, CEO of author Accelerator, likes to talk about it as like speaking about cinematically zoom lens. So zooming in is showing right, like I’m zooming in and I am seeing people on a bridge and I’m following them and I can hear what they’re saying and they’re crossing the bridge, or I decide it’s not important.

Boring dialogue do not show me. And I zoom right out and maybe we’re playing montage music and we say they cross the bridge skipping happily hand in hand. And that’s all we care about. Right. And it’s one sentence.

Julie Artz: Mm-hmm.

Suzy Vadori: Versus, you know, three [00:28:00] pages of dialogue that is really mundane and boring. And that is your job as a writer is to figure that piece out.

So sometimes you need to zoom out and tell us. Okay, so what does that look like, Julie? And where can we, where should we be doing that?

Julie Artz: So I’m thinking of an example of, of a scene that has multiple people, like let’s say more than 2, 3, 4, 5. You could even in, in a big battle scene or something else, have, you know, 10, 15 people probably not gonna have that many named characters in the scene.

Probably more like three to five people. So if you had to show each one of them come through the door and sit down in the coffee shop, Susie arrived and then three minutes later Julie arrived. And then I

Suzy Vadori: read a scene like that. Yes, for me. I’m not gonna lie. I read a scene like that yesterday and then

Julie Artz: comments later, four minutes later, Danny walked in and, and said, Hey, you guys are early.

What’s going on? Hi Danny. We’re working our friends into this scene. [00:29:00] But you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to watch a parade of each of each character walking into the scene. But on the flip side, again, this is why I’m thinking of show and tell as like a, a continuum or a spectrum. Yeah. Is on the other side.

If we just start with Susie and I talking in a scene in a coffee shop, and then three paragraphs into the conversation, Danny pops in, but she’s been sitting there the whole time, but we didn’t know it.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah, yeah.

Julie Artz: Which is also not right. So you have to find that balance of, can we tell, you know, five of us, were gonna meet at the coffee shop to talk about our next trip, and then you can just say.

Everybody was there, but Julie, who was running five minutes late, and you can dive into the scene with that little bit of what I call scene grounding, right? Like always thinking about like, do we know where we are, what time it is, where we are in space and time? Who is there? And then, then you can jump into the scene with those pieces of information right off the top.[00:30:00]

Yeah. And you don’t have to say, you know, after a good night’s sleep and Cheerios for breakfast, Julie got up and realized she needed to go to the coffee shop to meet up with Bubba. Just like we’re meeting at the coffee shop to talk about the thing. Right? Yeah. And then just get on with it.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah. I mean, and there’s, it’s tricky, right?

You’re right. We don’t wanna drain the well dry and show everybody in a crowd or everybody in a room. I like to teach that we show a detail or two about somebody, right? Because it’s really hard to picture a crowd. A crowd is hard to picture. It’s not one of those things that you can visually, and there’s so many different things.

You know, the crowd gathered to watch the beheading. It’s like, okay, maybe we’re medieval, maybe we’re not, I don’t know. But the crowd gathered to watch the beheading and a young mother grabbed her toddler in the front. Like it gives me something to think about. You can do good time. So without showing the whole darn thing, and it, it’s like a cheat.

You feel like you’ve seen something in the crowd. You haven’t [00:31:00] really, right. Maybe there’s a detail. She’s got a dirty apron on, like it was white once, but now it’s tracked with mud. Okay. The people, you know, maybe it’s wet outside. Maybe it’s like Woodstock style mud and I’m dating myself here, but, or maybe, maybe it’s raining or.

Maybe we have a crowd that isn’t well to do versus every, you know, the men in the front wore blue blazers and were straightening their ties. Like, just give us something to picture. But yeah, please don’t describe the whole scene for three pages and Right. And list a bunch of names. Okay. Where else can we tell.

Julie Artz: Well, let’s see. We talked about scene grounding and passage of time. I like to think about telling when there’s a big change of location. ’cause again, we talked about how you don’t need to show every bus journey, but you can probably only get away with, unless you’re writing a road trip story or a journey story where, where the journey is part of the plot.

[00:32:00] Most of those logistics of, um, moving from place to place can just sort of happen because nothing. We’re just getting people from point A to point B. Nothing is happening

Suzy Vadori: unless it’s, you know, unless it’s girl on a train and you wanna actually show what she’s seeing on the train, like if it’s part of the story.

Julie Artz: Right.

Suzy Vadori: But it general, it usually isn’t.

Julie Artz: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I think then, then you get into, again, long pieces of showing. But they don’t have any tension. So you mentioned Jenny Nash earlier, and one of the things that I love about her inside outline is this concept of here’s what happens. Then here’s why it matters.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah.

Julie Artz: So if you can’t answer that question why it matters, or if the answer is, the reason the bus trip matters is because I have to get my character into town, then the journey itself doesn’t matter. Just being in town matters. And so you can, you can just skip that part.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah. It’s a [00:33:00] good, it’s a good question to ask yourself, does this matter?

Do we need it? And don’t keep it just because you like. What you wrote. Don’t keep it just because it helps your word count. Get rid of it and then leave those moments. Leave that word count. Leave all that extra space in your book to go and implement. Showing on those really big ones, like if you’ve got magic or you’ve got a fight scene or you’ve got something.

I mean, it’s bad showing if you show us, but you only show us a paragraph of something. Really fundamentally, the biggest moment, the climax of the book. And we kind of summarize it in two sentences. You haven’t done your job right? Mm-hmm. Like make it big. Mm-hmm. Make sure that your reader doesn’t miss it.

Okay. How about like we, we talked about like good telling is when we summarize something that’s unimportant. When we wanna manage the passage of time, there are some places in your book where you can tell us a little bit more and it’s tolerated like those little info dumps. And you know, when we first meet a character, you could probably get away with a few sentences of describing them.

Please [00:34:00] don’t do that after three chapters when we’ve already been hanging out with your character. And then you stop the action to like describe their clothing and their looks. Please don’t do that. Do it if you’re gonna do it. Give us a couple of details. Do it the first moment that we meet them because we need that, right?

Or as Julie mentioned, the grounding at the top of the scene when we, you know, we wanna talk about who’s there, who’s hat are we in? Where are we in time and space, and where are we? Like what’s the setting? And so those are great places that you can kind of hide a little bit extra info without it feeling weird.

Julie Artz: I agree, and I like to think about it in terms of layering too, because, so the first time you see a character, you probably wanna give them. Some, if they have a defining characteristic, you wanna get that on the page because if we’re meeting a lot of characters in the opening of a book, sometimes it’s hard to remember if we just have a name.

So we get a name and we get Susie with the curly hair and we get a name. We get Julie with the hot pink glasses, right? And then [00:35:00] that’s something that we can latch onto. And then, then maybe the next time you see us, you get another piece of information that’s sort of slowly building the character over time.

And that’s so much more effective than stopping the action. To, in detail, describe Susie and then in detail, describe Julie in a paragraph each.

Suzy Vadori: Now again, you may need to do that. Dear writer, you may need to stop and write on a different piece, piece of paper on in a different file, all the details about your characters.

Who do they look like? What do they, you know, all the things to keep it straight. What is their eye color? It’s really hard to find eye color if you’re writing book three in a series for a character that was fleetingly in book one. It’s difficult to search if you wanna keep track and a little trick to, if you’ve got a lot of characters, new books, sometimes you can pick like a celebrity or something and be like, okay, they have the features of so and so.

You can pick Julie. She’s really, really awesome. You know, you can give hot pink glasses. I don’t What color are your eyes, Julie? I can’t actually tell. They’re brown.

Julie Artz: They’re blue. They’re blue.

Suzy Vadori: Are they blue? Okay. I didn’t

Julie Artz: know. Well, [00:36:00] they have a little hazel in them too, but yeah,

Suzy Vadori: yeah, yeah. See, it’s hard to remember.

So, but yeah, so we, we keep track of those little details, but dole them out along the way, as Julie said. And when I say, you know, you can give a little bit more information on first meeting of a character or the first time that we visit a location. It’s like a couple of details. Maximum three. It’s not three paragraphs.

So we don’t wanna stop the action. Okay?

Julie Artz: Absolutely. So, and there’s a few places where you’re gonna need a little bit more, right? If you’re writing historical fiction, if you’re writing sci-fi fantasy, you might have some additional world building that you need to incorporate, but we’re still talking about weaving details into action versus just plunking three or four paragraphs that shows off your great.

World building skills or your great historical research that you’ve done. Right, exactly. We fit into the action, make everything do double duty. So when Susie was talking about looking at the crowd and the mother and the daughter were sitting there, that’s the place to weave [00:37:00] in what the clothes that are from 1700 sprints look like.

Just a few key details to give the flavor of the, of the historical setting. Right. Rather than exhaustively digging into her shoes were this and her dress was this, and the little girl was holding this in her hand and their hair was plated in this way or whatever. You can definitely go overboard. Yeah.

So pick the key details that are gonna be memorable that evoke the, the setting, but keep the story moving forward.

Suzy Vadori: Well exactly. Keep it moving and, and, and, you know, have them interacting with the setting to describe it, rather than standing there and looking at it. Have them interacting with the clothing, with the.

With the objects with the world, and those are ways like to sort of combine that description that can feel really heavy with the action and moving the story forward and kind of making everything have a meaning is awesome. Awesome.

Julie Artz: I like to say everything should do double or triple duty, right? So when you’re describing something, make sure that it’s something that would be [00:38:00] relevant to your point of view.

Character, right. If I walk into a room, I might notice different things. Then Susie would notice when she walks into a room, because we’re different people, we have different interests and different things would occur to us. And so you wanna have that same specificity in what your character sees and what they describe.

So if they would not care about it or describe it, then it shouldn’t be on the page. And if they do notice it, there should be a specific reason, not just because you really wanna show off. That you’ve done exhaustive research on the clothing of 17 hundreds France.

Suzy Vadori: Yeah, exactly. And, and as Julie said, there are certain genres that have a little bit more tolerance for that and actually expect it.

And the two are science fiction and or historical fiction mainly. There are others as well, when you know, or if your character. Is a particular history buff Sure. But keep it short. Uh, keep it short and make it part of their character and make sure that it’s all completely relevant. I always talk about this one example, [00:39:00] but science fiction, I can tell you it’s probably in the double digits of books, drafts of books that I’ve read where people are reading spaghetti for no apparent reason.

And I asked them in on the spaceship and I asked them like, why isn’t the spaghetti floating or whatever, and they’re like, no, there’s gravity. And I’m like, why is it spaghetti? And the answer is, ’cause I had spaghetti for dinner before I wrote that scene. So, so be really, you know, be really mindful that everything, I mean, why not pick hydroponic vegetables that are grown on the port side of the, of the ship?

Then you’ve incorporated some world building and shown us what they actually eat versus just picking something that has no meaning. And as Julie was saying, doing double, triple, quadruple duty if you are really key. Okay. Amazing. So I was so excited to talk about this topic, Julie, and this did not disappoint.

What’s the bottom line on like good telling, bad showing? What’s the, what could we take away from this conversation?

Julie Artz: I think the key is to really think about the [00:40:00] tension and the way that you’re moving the story forward. If you’re doing things that are stopping the action cold in its tracks without a good reason.

You know, sometimes you might need the character to, to pause, go lick their wounds and come back to the action. But for the most part, if you’re abruptly stopping the action to provide us with three riveting paragraphs about the historical research you’ve done, you probably are, are doing the, the bad kind of showing, or you’re doing a little bit too much telling.

So just keep thinking about the reader experience, keep thinking about what’s reasonable for the character to know and be talking about. And keep that mind to the narrative drive the tension that’s gonna be running through the book, the thing that’s gonna keep the readers turning pages.

Suzy Vadori: Amazing. Amazing.

Okay. I’m sure that you will probably be show, because we will brainstorm more things to talk about when we’re in person together in a few weeks.

Julie Artz: I’m counting on it.

Suzy Vadori: Where can listeners find you and your services? Tell us a little bit [00:41:00] about what you do. We did it at the beginning, but tell us a little bit about how they can work with you.

Where we can find you.

Julie Artz: Yeah. My specialty is actually that stage of revision that is gonna push you over the edge to break the rejection cycle and get you to the Yes. Right. You’ve taken the classes, you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve gone to the conferences, and you’re still not quite getting there. I can help you demystify that process, identify what’s going on and help you fix it.

So my superpower is working with writers that are at that stage in the game, and I have both one on one and, and group packages for that. You can find me everywhere. I’m Julie Arts on my websites, julie arts.com. I’m Julie Arts on all of the social medias. I’m really enjoying Substack right now more than I’m enjoying social media, so you will find the freshest information from me on my Substack versus on.

The metaverse.

Suzy Vadori: So I think a lot of our listeners feel the same way that social media is [00:42:00] not where they wanna be and we talk a lot about other alternatives for sure. Okay, so thank you so much for being on the show. Okay, definitely, definitely. Go find Julie. She’s got tons of different programs, so always new things coming up.

We’ll drop some links in the show notes where you can find Julie. And thank you so much for geeking out about good telling and bad showing today.

Julie Artz: Great. Thanks for having me, Susie.

Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning into the show. Don’t Tell Writing podcast with me, Susie Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or the book that you’re planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find. You could subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening to show you the show.

That’s how other listeners will find us. Also visit susie [00:43:00] Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about all the upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. You want my eyes on your writing?

Submit a page in your current draft for a chance to come on the podcast at the link in the show notes. I’d love to chat with you about your writing in my always positive, incredibly supportive way so that you can make great strides towards your writing goals. I’m here to cheer you on. Remember that book you’re writing is gonna open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make that it the absolute best it can be.

See you again right here next week.

 

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