The Five Tools for Showing by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

 

The Five Tools for Showing

 

by Randy Ingermanson 

 

Advanced Fiction Writing

 

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Your job as a novelist is very simple: to create a movie inside your reader’s head.

Not a picture. Not a sound bite. Not a word salad.

A movie. Inside your reader’s head.

Do that, and you win.

When editors tell you to “show, don’t tell,” what they really mean is to create that movie in your reader’s head.

You have five tools for showing that movie. That’s all. Just five. Master those five tools, and you’re far along the road to novelist nirvana. Here they are:

• Action
• Dialogue
• Interior Monologue
• Interior Emotion
• Sensory Description

Action

Action is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being doing something. Some examples:

• Hermione jumped on her broomstick and raced after Malfoy.
• Michael Corleone pointed his gun at the head of the police captain and squeezed the trigger.
• C3PO pressed its fingers into the wall socket, tripping the circuit breaker and plunging the room into darkness.

Dialogue

Dialogue is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being saying something. Some examples:

• “You are the last man I could ever be prevailed upon to marry,” said Elizabeth Bennet.
• “Hasta la vista, baby,” said the Terminator.
• “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” said Obi-wan Kenobi.

Interior Monologue

Interior monologue is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being thinking something. Some examples:

• I’ve got to catch that bottle of nitro before it hits the floor.
• Bad news. He loves me and he loves me not.
• It’s not enough to win this fight just for today. I need to win the fight for all time.

Interior Emotion

Interior emotion is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being feeling emotion.

This is more complicated than the other tools, so we need to clarify a few points before giving an example. You don’t need to name the emotion. If you name the emotion, you aren’t showing it, you’re telling it. If you want to show the emotion, you show the character’s physiological response to the emotion, and the reader figures out the emotion and may well feel it right along with the characters.

Note that physiological responses are ambiguous. They are usually not enough to pin down the exact emotion. The reader also needs context. But once you’ve given them the right context, showing them the character’s physiological response will make them feel the emotion.

I’ll give just one example. You can easily imagine different contexts in which this physiological response might signal anger, fear, horror, or possibly other emotions:

• Luke’s face burned, but the inside of his stomach was icy cold.

Sensory Description

Sensory description is showing the environment in a way that appeals to the senses. Some examples:

• The dorm room smelled of peanut butter and dirty socks.
• Neon lights flashed red and blue and green.
• Thunder smashed outside the house. Rain pounded on the roof.

Mix and Match

You have five tools for showing your reader your story. You can mix and match them any way you like. Any paragraph you write can use any combination of these five tools. That gives you endless variety for showing your story.

There are other tools for telling your story—narrative summary and exposition are the most common. You may be asking if it’s okay to use these tools.

Of course it is! These can be powerful tools, used in the right way, at the right time in your story. It’s not possible to spend 100% of your story showing, with no telling at all. Telling gets your reader quickly and efficiently through the boring parts of the story. Showing takes your reader slowly and immersively through the exciting parts of the story.

As a novelist, you get to decide what percentage of your story to show and what percentage to tell. A modern high-octane thriller might spend 98% of the story in showing and only 2% in telling. A slower-paced, more reflective novel might spend only 60% showing and 40% telling.

Just don’t fool yourself. If you intended to show your reader mostly movie, but you wound up breaking into the movie in every paragraph to tell your reader interesting footnotes, then you didn’t do what you intended. You should at least know you’re doing that.

Homework

Look at the most recent scene you wrote for your novel. Highlight every word in the scene that is not action, dialogue, interior monologue, interior emotion, or sensory description. The parts that are not highlighted are the movie you’re creating in your reader’s head. The parts that are highlighted are the interruptions to the movie. Are you surprised how many interruptions you’ve got in your movie? Or is the proportion about right?

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About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

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