{"id":1008,"date":"2007-06-01T13:54:41","date_gmt":"2007-06-01T11:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.larshvidberg.dk\/blog\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2007-06-01T13:54:41","modified_gmt":"2007-06-01T11:54:41","slug":"about-telling-and-showing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/?p=1008","title":{"rendered":"On telling and showing"},"content":{"rendered":"

An often used bon-mot of writers and teachers of writing is “tell don’t show”<\/strike> “Show don’t tell”. This means that a text becomes boring if it tells us what to think about what is going on, instead of showing us this through action. Simply stating “he loved her very much” is boring tell<\/em>, and furthermore strangely unconvincing because it is a clich\u00e9. But showing us how he gives her flowers, or runs in front of a moving train for her, is showing<\/em> us how much he loves her.<\/p>\n

However, things are not so simple. The dictum of “tell don’t show”<\/strike> “show don’t tell” often paralyses a writer, who thinks that he must always come up with imaginative and new ways of showing everything. But please remark how the very telling sentence “he loved her very much” can become very showing by a slight change of perspective to “he used to say that he loved her very much”. The flat telling, clich\u00e9d sentence suddenly becomes filled with irony and doubt, and although we know too little about him and her to really know anything, it shows us a much more interesting situation. Did he use to say it because he didn’t mean it? Or because he meant it too much?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An often used bon-mot of writers and teachers of writing is “tell don’t show” “Show don’t tell”. This means that a text becomes boring if it tells us what to think about what is going on, instead of showing us this through action. Simply stating “he loved her very much” is boring tell, and furthermore … L\u00e6s mere On telling and showing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whiteberg.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}