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WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Show and Tell

Black and white photograph of a portion of an antique typewriter, showing A, S, Z, and part of X, along with two keys with non-English text.

Image by Valerio Errani from Pixabay

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

I watched the panel titled “Show and Tell: What Works and What Writers Get Wrong,” because even after years of writing, I still occasionally get notes on my stories (particularly flash pieces) about the reader thinking it’s a bit too “tell-y.” So I was interested in what the panelists had to suggest on the topic.

The main way they described the difference between showing and telling is that telling often involves exposition, while showing gives more sensory details and details that evoke emotional responses. One panelist said that when she’s reading something that talks about emotional connections between characters, she says “Prove it.” In other words, it’s best to show the characters having this emotional connection than to tell us that it exists.

However, the panelists also talked about the fact that sometimes, you can use some telling, and you don’t have to describe every single sensory detail. They recommended parceling out some of the telling so that it doesn’t bog down a story (particularly at the beginning). And they said that depending on your genre and age range, there may be different expectations about how much showing or telling the story uses.

One panelist talked about the idea of even fiction writing benefiting from a “thesis statement” like you might use in non-fiction writing. By having that thesis statement, you can ensure that whatever details you do include, whether told or shown, can be in service to that greater theme or goal. They also emphasized that this doesn’t all have to be perfect on the first draft, but that a lot of winnowing out of telling can happen on revision passes, when you can refer back to your thesis statement as you decide what to keep and what to cut. Finally, while they talked a bit about using things like an interior monologue for a point-of-view character, they also reminded authors to not get so focused on the interiority of a character that you forget to include what’s exterior to the character, like the setting and those bits of description that are necessary.

For a panel so chock full of great advice, this panel only runs 40 minutes, which makes it a quick watch on WriteHive’s YouTube channel!


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