E. Shelley Reid creates ten metaphors for writing to ponder over in the hopes of building confidence within college students with their own writing. They’re fun musings and most of these are helpful when it comes to the skills that Reid wants to metaphorize. Reid’s essay is much like Catherine Savini’s “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment” in that both teach how to come out with a richer understanding of your own writing, on which the latter I go into detail on in an earlier blog post. Some of Reid’s metaphors include things like telepaths with the “show don’t tell” rule, the little green ball for writing just the right amount of detail, the pink house to keep your reader focused on your theme or message.
My favorite is her one about telepaths and the “show don’t tell” rule. You can’t just expect people to know what you mean just by telling them, like “Haha, you know what I mean,” as the only line in a story. Of course the telepath knows what you mean, but the average Joe would probably think that’s the worst story in the universe.
“Show don’t tell” is a popular rule in fiction writing, and has been hammered into my brain in every creative writing class I’ve ever taken. I know it like the way a telepath knows the minds of others—that is to say, well. I know the rule well. It’s a simple rule: show what a character is doing, don’t just tell the audience. If a character is sad, don’t just say a character is sad, say how their brows furrowed, their lips quivered, their voice broke.
But I want to expand on this rule because, sometimes, it’s okay to tell and not show, but knowing when is a skill you have to build yourself. For fiction writing, you show emotions, internal conflict, actions. All the good juicy bits of a story. But you tell all the superfluous parts—time skips, passing memories, setting. But then why include them in the first place? To paint a broader picture. Large strokes for the foundation, smaller strokes for embellishment—not necessarily needed, yet the final piece looks richer than it did without them.
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