michael-dean-k/

What are the types of telling? (in show vs. tell):

1. Telling is compression; instead of showing us a specific moment of when you were alone in the woods at the night, you compact the story and say “I'm scared of the woods.” In compression, you lose the details that help us get why (the weird sounds, the dead trees, etc.). It is oversimplified to insist that you should show every idea in lucid detail. It's too much to take on. You want to compress the inessential to create a hierarchy, so that the essential details are given space in proportion to their importance.

2. Telling lets you connect the dots and find patterns: “the definition of terror comes from X, and this relates to Y, and so it means Z.” If you want to come up with principles, you have to abstract things down to compact, vague placeholders; it’s the only way we can hold multiple things in our mind at once to see the relationships between them. The problem, when writers only exist in this word of abstraction, it’s dense and boring.

The trick isn’t to pick one mode or the other (show vs. tell), but to master how you blend between them. It means you can actually write about X 2-3 times, even in a single paragraph. ie: first you locate X (tell), then you show X in extreme detail and emotional power (show), then you connect X to related nodes Y & Z (tell). This is a tell-show-tell sandwich, with 75% showing. It gives you both depth (by showing) and width (by telling).

This means any piece of material you have is fractal. You have to be able to zoom in to find specific examples, and zoom out to find principles and patterns. A writer/editor needs to always be bridging between abstract and concrete; if someone gives a principle, they’ll say “give me an example,” and if someone gives a story, they’ll say “what is the larger principle?”