The Conjuring Trick 

By Ginny Fite

A few weeks ago, a long-time writing critique partner announced there was “a lot of telling” in my latest manuscript. Oh, dagger to my heart. He sweetened his assessment by saying, “There’s a lot of showing, but there’s too much telling.”

If you’re new to writing fiction, the distinction between telling and showing is the difference between seeing words on a page or seeing the story spring to life right in front of you, a trick akin to pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

This sleight of hand is the essential smoke and mirrors of fiction. When you show the reader what’s happening, the story harnesses the reader’s experience, emotions, and memories, and becomes so much more powerful than what the writer alone can put on the page. 

More than a clever hook or a tantalizing cliff hanger, this is the flash of connection that agents and publishers hope to find in a manuscript. 

It took me years to understand the mechanics of this trick. Even after reading every book that promised to tell me everything that I needed to know, after dozens of classes and workshops, and writing thousands of words, I still slip into “telling” like donning comfortable pajamas at three in the afternoon. 

The technique is hard to acquire. After all, whether you are showing or telling, it’s still words on a page leading the reader through a plot. This happened, then this happened, and then this happened. All words on a flat little stage. Until you pull the tab, and suddenly buildings and trees and people pop up, and sound rings out and feelings rise, and the reader is transported to a rue in Paris or a baseball field or the deck of a sinking ship in the Atlantic.

So where is that elusive tab, how does the writer know when to pull it, and how do you make this magic happen with your prose?

Imagine opaque wooden blinds on a window. On either side of the blinds hang cords that allow you to adjust the amount of light streaming into your room as well as how much of the outside world you can observe. Pull the blinds all the way and daylight floods the space; tug on a different cord, and you shut out the world almost completely. How you manage your experience depends on what cord you pull.

The difference between telling and showing is a matter of how much you let the reader experience. 

Maggie O’ Farrell begins her incomparable Hamnet with the line, “A boy is coming down the stairs.” This sentence is so bland and unembellished that it looks like telling but is, in fact, showing. 

We see the boy’s every step down the narrow stairway, we hear his footfalls, see the room he enters and the banked fire in the grate. We know the color of his hair and how he feels, and by the end of the fifth paragraph, about halfway down the first page, he is dear to us. 

We see what the writer sees in her mind’s eye as she writes the words. That is the trick. Not fancy adjectives and adverbs or even clever verbs—just what you see as if you were describing a real scene happening right in front of you. When you write what you see, the reader doesn’t read about what’s happening, she is there in the room.

The corollary question—what to show and what to tell—depends on the mood, tone, and pace you want to set for your story. What kind of story are you making? 

A dash of action, a paragraph of description, another that dips into character or a theme, a snippet of dialogue, a bit of lore, a sprinkle of flashback or a slight poke at that central wound, rinse and repeat and you have a chapter that engages the reader and makes him want to turn the page.

Now, I just need to remember this when I’m revising.

—

Ginny Fite is the author of nine published novels, the latest of which is Sanctuary, the story of a woman who will do whatever she must to save her children.

SANCTUARY

Sometimes losing your children is the only way to save them.

The year is 2039. Jean Bennett’s husband and sister have died from a mysterious illness. To save her children’s lives, she must leave the home she loves. Deep in grief, infected by a virus that might kill her at any time, and chased by government goons, Jean must be braver than she ever thought possible as she journeys to Canada to get her five children to safety. It should be a three-day car trip, but this ride is not like any they’ve ever taken. When Jean learns that children, originally thought to be immune, can be infected at fifteen, the stakes rise. Her oldest son just turned fourteen. Then their vehicle and all their supplies are stolen. As each new challenge changes her, Jean begins to understand what she must do to save her children. Just making it to Canada isn’t enough; she must make one final sacrifice.

The grueling journey of The Road meets the shifting perspectives of Station Eleven in this dystopian speculative fiction about a family that survives their worst fears as the known world and their certainty about who they are disintegrate during a thousand-mile race to safety. Sanctuary is a story about love and determination, a story of hope.

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