Show Don’t Tell and Depiction Versus Description

For the longest time I couldn’t properly place my choice to write my novels with a bit less description and a lot more dialogue and human interaction. Until recently when I watched this idea channel video which discusses at some point the concept of our very depiction focused society, and then it all made total bloody sense.

You see, a lot of the articles and tips sections I read about writing a novel, talk about how important description is, and how it’s especially important to a fantasy series. In fact, in many cases a fantasy series isn’t even considered epic fantasy if it doesn’t have just so much description in it that you feel like you’d get more fun out of smashing your head on the insanely long and big book than reading through it. And I’m sorry, as awesome as epic fantasy series’ often are, they are always bogged down with so much other junk and description and there’s no denying that. Every person I know who’s read the more recent Game of Thrones novels have repeatedly mentioned that it takes a while to get into it, but it’s well worth it.

And I’m sure that’s true. They are probably brilliant and great novels. But they still have all this massive content in there, that no one wants to read and guaranteed many people skip over while still completely understanding what is going on. And this is because many epic fantasy series include so much extra information that it bogs down the really great stories. Even the later Harry Potter novels suffered heavily from this as well. It’s as if in an epic fantasy series it suddenly becomes okay that you don’t have to edit and cut out all the bullshit fat description that wasn’t needed. It’s like this is the only genre that it’s accepted in, which seems odd.

That said though. This is largely the reason why I avoid a lot of description, instead I focus more on the characters and if I’m writing in first person I make sure to include commentary from the narrator, because commentary is another form of dialogue, just dialogue the character makes with them self.

I’ve actually discussed the whole description issue in books previously, here. In which I talked about the excess in a novel. But this whole concept of depiction versus description is massive. And the very words I had been trying to look for. You see, describing things is great for other people to then create images and such from (though usually never completely accurate), and this includes the use of description in novels, but the point of a novelist isn’t to describe something so people can create depictions of it. It’s to depict the story themselves. And it’s easier for a reader to get the image of a scene in their head from things like dialogue with subtle touches of those narrative words.

Don’t believe me? Well. One of the biggest pieces of advice that is often told to writers, is: Show, don’t Tell.

Guess what showing is… depiction.

Guess what telling is… description.

The best novels out there, show and don’t tell, which means they have minimal description going on and just let the characters or the story show itself. And I think putting it in this context would help a lot of people out. Cause it’s great to say show don’t tell, but in practical application, people often don’t know what that means in terms of what they should do to alter their writing to be better. By saying you should have less description and more of the story focused; that touches the purpose of show don’t tell, while actually making it practical advice a writer can put to use.

It’s a lot like trying to talk about pace, which is just something you have to learn from writing stories over time. But in this case, show don’t tell is something we can actually teach people to pay attention to and do. We were just doing it poorly.

So instead of ‘Show, don’t Tell’, think: Depict the scene, don’t describe it.