Show when you _______, Tell when you _________ (Part II of 'show don't tell')

A foundational post

Some days ago I posted a piece about “Show don’t Tell” with a focus on “show.”

In Part II, we’ll focus on “tell” as well as some summative thoughts. We’ll look when “telling” might be useful or even necessary: the nature of “telling” while working through a first draft; in moving the plot and transitioning; with regards to character and tone and that key in writing fiction, human emotion (looking at both writing for young people and adults) and why you might in fact need to “tell” within this context. And some concluding thoughts on assembling tools, the aural experience of audio books, and more—a rewrite of the axiom to close. The unpacking here has taken me by surprise—

In Part I, I used two sentences as examples:

Telling: It was cold outside.

Showing: London winter made no effort to find friends.

Let’s reconsider the sentence It was cold outside. (In Part I, I spoke to the “showing” sentence.) Sometimes you don’t want the reader to have to spend time sub/consciously working through your words and meaning. Maybe they’ve spent such energy on a preceding paragraph, or they are about to with what follows. Not every phrase and sentence should be “work.” Sometimes you might even want the abrupt quality in straight-ahead “telling.” Maybe “telling” is the true voice of a character, or a narrator in that moment. It might be a piece of flash fiction, and a voice you want for some reason of form. Really, there are many reasons you might want to “tell.” The significant piece is to know when you are doing it, whether you need it, why, and what else it might be.