Showing posts with label Showing and/or Telling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Showing and/or Telling. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Showing vs Telling: Examples and Exercise

This is to show you what showing and telling looks like side by side. Writing these up, for me, was certainly an exercise. I really needed to pay attention to show more for "Showing" and tell more for "Telling". I hope I did them both justice. Doing an exercise like this can really open your mind up to what showing or telling exactly feel like when you write them out.

The stories themselves, short and unfinished, are not from any story I have ever written. These were written on the spot but I hope you can get a gist of what showing and telling are.

To those of you who already are experts, let me know if I got them both right. Certainly there might be some mixing going on but the "Showing" to generally be only showing the story an the "Telling" should generally be only telling the story. To me, telling is like a kid telling a parent about a dream they had. "And then, I met a cat princess. And then the princess and I became sisters. And then we were flying in the sky. And then, we found a land of marshmallows. And then..."

So here are three stories each with a "Showing" version and a "Telling" version.

Story 1: A Winter Scene with Pigeons

Friday, August 5, 2016

Showing or Telling: Don't bore the reader, entertain them

I have said that description is magic.

I have said that here.

But don't be too descriptive within the same paragraph where a character has said something otherwise it just gets so lengthy and you don't feel like reading it.

Such as,

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

How to: Colors of Things and Feeling the Five Senses

Moved from the original post on my other blog, World Problems and Randomness.
Which explains the bluntness and the sarcasm and the frankness.
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Colors of Things:
Eye color, hair color, the color of clothes, accessories, and anything else your character owns

Okay that's it! I'm gonna talk about this.

"His grey eyes made contact with my blue ones"

This is a sentence from someone's writing piece (I am not stealing because it is something someone partially posted on Whisper) but I have seen lots of people do this (I'm not calling you idiots. I do it, too. And I stop myself but sometimes...well *looks sheepish*).

Imagine a moment when someone is looking into your eyes. Do you think "His brown eyes made contact with my brown ones?" NO! We do not normally think about the color of our eyes. The color of the eyes of your character has little value. The color of your character's ANYTHING frankly has little value.

UNLESS...