Resist the urge to explain
Renni Browne and Dave King coined this phrase in their fantastic book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. And it’s something to live by.
They use the concept in connection to dialogue tags – don’t have someone say something and 
then tag it with the obvious: “I’m so happy!” she said brightly. Yeah, if she says she’s happy, she’s not going to do so slowly or in a dejected tone of voice.
Instead, you can show an action that goes along with the exclamation: “I’m so happy!” she said jumping up from her seat and enveloping Guy in a big hug. Now we not only know that she’s happy, but we can see her being happy.
If you feel you have to explain your dialogue, it’s not written correctly. You should be able to hear exactly how it’s said and so should your reader—from context, from actions. Resist the urge to explain.
But the key point I’d like to get across here is that your readers are actually intelligent people. You shouldn’t explain things to them. Assume that they’ll get it.
This concept goes hand in hand with showing vs. telling. If your characters behave joyfully, have bright happy conversation in quickly paced dialogue (few, if any tags), then you never need to say that they’re excited or happy. Your reader will get it. You don’t have to tell your reader anything, you’re showing it to them. Resist the urge to explain.
The same goes with italics. Some writers love italics (yes, deliberately italicized ). They use them all the time to tell the reader how they should be reading dialogue or what they think is important. They slant their lovely words and scream out to the reader “Hey! Pay attention here!” But do you need to? Will the reader not get it on their own from the context or the words being spoken? Yes, sometime italics are necessary, but, really, I've seen some writers go way overboard with their use of them. Resist the urge to explain.
And finally, the last place where a lot of writers need to remember to resist the urge to explain is in info dumps. That’s where a writer will give much more information than is strictly necessary. Describing a scene in two or three paragraphs when two or three words—maybe a sentence—will suffice. Or giving a paragraph or more of backstory when all we really needed to know was that the character doesn’t like broccoli. We really don’t need to know, in detail, exactly what spurred that hatred of a poor innocent vegetable. Don’t tell us. Just resist that urge to give over all the details you learned about your character.
The same goes with research. Yes, I’m sure you’ve done all the research necessary to understand your character's job, or the time period, or the precise weapon that’s used to kill the victim, but we don’t need to know all of those details you learned. Resist that urge! Just tell us what we need to know, the rest will come out word by word, here and there in your prose. The feeling, the ambiance, whatever it is will appear on your page (or not, as is appropriate). If you dump all of your research on the reader, they’ll get bored really quickly, or distracted from your actual story. Don’t do it. Resist that urge.
Readers are extremely intelligent people—hey, they picked up your book, didn’t they? So give them the benefit of the doubt and resist that urge to explain.
Have you read a book recently that made you just cringe or want to throw it against a wall because there was too much explained? Tell me about it! What annoyed you?
