Show and Tell

It can be a struggle to balance showing vs

telling in your work. Too much show and you’ll bore your readers; too much telling and your readers wont care about our characters. Ultimately it comes down to your choices when to deploy one or another and not to.

Right now I’m struggling with how much to show versus bogging down the story line and how much to tell to get the plot moving again. there’s an art to writing when it comes to balancing out things and in the end it comes down to your choices as an author.

For me one area I show too much is in dialogue. I love words and can write pages of back and forth exchanges between the characters. Now while I like them the reader wouldn’t necessarily like them, so I’m trying to rein in this tendency of my and summarize where appropriate to keep the flow going while building tension, characterization, and advancing the plot.

An area where I don’t show enough is in describing locations and what the characters are wearing. It usually slips my mind because I don’t care what someone is wearing, but what they’re doing or saying, but I know my readers care about these thing so I try to incorporate them when I remember to.

Another area I struggle with is in the passage of time. In my current WIP time has a way of slipping passed me. When I’m in the thick of it time becomes secondary to the plot until I come up for air so to speak. I know it will be something I have to deal with in the rewrite, but I’m not too concerned about it.

Ultimately it gets easier with practice to balance them but not without putting in daily writing goals.