The juicy good bits of...
Janice Hardy's Understanding Show, Don't Tell is the second slimmest book in my writing library. At a scant 116 pages it's focused on one thing and one thing only: elucidating the difference between shown prose and told prose at length. You can tell that the author of this book has a particular axe to grind with this often quoted phrase, and is dedicated to getting to the bottom of what it actually means in practice.
The first chapter here goes into quite a bit of detail as to the difference between shown and told prose. There's a couple of examples, but the one that sticks with me personally is this:
Told prose is something you cannot act out in the real world. Shown prose consists of physical actions that are possible to do.
So, for instance:
You can act out saying "I hate you", but saying it "angrily" is more difficult. "Angrily" is not a physical action.
You can act out "walking slowly", but in practice you are doing something other than "walking" when you are "walking slowly." Are you shuffling? Strolling? That verb is shown, walking slowly is told.
And of course, it's almost impossible to act out verbs like "realized" or "wondered" in physical reality.
The book then goes on to say that you do not and should not always show, contrary to some people's views on the matter, and, unlike many books, goes into why.
According to Janice, readers dislike told prose because it makes them work less. If you tell, they
If you show, then your reader has to work for their enjoyment by visualizing the scene and anticipating what might happen, and this is actually good for them. It is hard to be enriched by an object you are not invested in, and investment happens by interaction. No self-respecting tiger would be as interested in watching another tiger bat around a pumpkin full of meat as them doing it themselves.
Thinking about it a little deeper, this helps me understand some other advice I've heard about writing as well - the instructions to "leave a little mystery" or "delay information until the last moment possible." These pieces of advice can be taken too far, of course - if your reader has no idea what's going on for too long, they'll often lose interest - but like a seasoning, a dash of work for your reader is actually a good thing. It's like salt in a dish - a little is a lot better than none, but you can overdo it.
Contrariwise, telling can sometimes skip past information that the reader already knows, or that would be extremely tedious to introduce in a fully shown way.
The next section goes into why telling happens.
Telling happens when:
Number three here is my bugbear as an erotica writer. Getting immersed into erotica often means getting immersed into being horny and/or kinky, if you're going to show the scene in full vivid detail, and I have fears about respectability in my head that sometimes make me flinch, even when it's not a particularly extreme scene. Similarly, I've had issues writing heavier material as well, stuff that touches on my personal baggage - Cut-String Heart took almost eight years to write because it dealt so heavily with my baggage surrounding my father, and part of that was flinching away from the cornerstone scenes of abuse that are foundational to it.
Getting immersed into your own work helps you show. Getting knocked out of that headspace makes you tell. This is part of why 'inspired' work is better than work that the writer struggles to produce - the writer is "closer to the material" in the first case, and it shows.
Continuing on, we have a highlighted sentence from my last readthrough, which I'm going to reproduce here in full:
[The] sense of a person behind the words is what keeps a far narrative distance from feeling told.
This hooks into ideas I first encountered in Elizabeth George's Write Away regarding perspective - close narrative distance versus far - and I'll deal with it in more detail in that book's review when I get to it. The important thing to me is that the closer the narrative distance I can get the better, in my view; the impression of a character as vivid and real is stronger when you're in their head hearing their thoughts and feeling their feelings. This is still something I'm actively working on in my writing.
The next interesting bit (in my opinion) is the list of "filter words." These are verbs like "saw", "heard", "felt", "knew", "watched", "decided", "noticed", "realized", "wondered", "thought", and "looked." These are called filter words because they place a layer of indirection between the scene and the audience. You're always filtering the story through your viewpoint character (even if you're using third person omniscient!), and the less visible that seam between character and author is, the more immersed your reader is likely to be.
The book then goes into an extended taxonomy of tells to try and help you locate them; I'm not going to relay all of this, because there's quite a lot of potential signals, but I will point out one category that I've seen advised in favor of doing!
Emotional tells are things like "he slammed the door in anger" or "her heart brimmed with joy" or "he felt the sorrow rising as if to sweep him away". These phrases I have seen actually recommended by another book - Write Like the Masters. Write Like The Masters' introductory section deals with a particular author who is constantly saying "his heart swelled with joy" and other such things, with such frequency that the emotions are always on the page. These "emotional tags" are considered immersive by the author of that book. So what gives?
The answer here is likely "it depends." I'm going to pull one of my favorite passages from another work, Trouble With Horns by Quietvalerie, to illustrate my point.
We moved closer as we danced, until we were deliciously pressed together from boob to hip. My nerves were singing with sensation and due to her slight height advantage over me I found myself looking up into those bright eyes of hers. When I saw them filled with a searing desire that I knew was mirrored in my own, I had a momentary surge of confidence.
My head tilted up the inch I need to in order to bring our lips together, and my awareness of the world narrowed with a snap. The contact between us sang to me with a soft raw stinging feeling that I desperately craved more of. She growled into our kiss, and pulled me closer against her body even as her warm lips gently moved against mine. I god what was I feeling? How could making out on the dance floor feel this damn good? Was this what chicks felt all the time, or was there something else going on?
I struggled to keep dancing as the sensations of our kiss caused my skin to burn with need for her, and I almost cried out in sadness when she pulled away. She turned, weaving through the shifting crowd of dancers to the edge of the floor. Had I done something wrong? I stood there, abandoned and feeling almost sick with disappointment when I saw her turn back to me.
Through the crowd I saw her cock an eyebrow and motion with her head towards the door that led out the back of the Inn. Oh! I felt a giddy grin bloom across my face in response, and followed her off the dance floor. I dimly noted Jill watching me from behind her drink back at the booth. She knew where I was going, good.
When I got out into the cool night air, I looked around for the girl with the fire hair, and saw her disappear into a nook behind the stable. I was a little apprehensive, maybe this was a trap? Was she going to try and stab me again?
This passage relies heavily on emotional tags, but it doesn't feel tell-y (at least to me) because we're so plugged into the perspective of the viewpoint character. The emotions wash over us as feelings that are raw to the character, that they're experiencing viscerally in the moment. This whole section could come across as told because of the phrasings like "I felt" and "in sadness" that are explictly proscribed by Understanding Show, Don't Tell - but because we're deeply in the viewpoint character's head, it just works. This is emotional tags done right, at least in my view, because we're not overworking the scene by demanding that we show the details of every single fleeting emotion as it runs along at a steady clip.
The substance of this book - the part that I come away with - is not a list of red flag words to catch told prose, but the understanding that the whole story should be filtered through my protagonist's head as seamlessly as possible - much as dialogue might be filtered by coming out of the mouth of a particular character, as The Key To Freakishly Good Dialogue explains. (Seriously, watch it, it's one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten on dialogue and it's marvellously applicable to absolutely everything.)
I've gone on at enough length; thanks for sticking with me to the end, here.