Showing the Word Budget

“Show; don’t tell” is amongst the most oft-repeated writing axioms, and it seems that every author is obligated at some point to express their thoughts upon it, even if that’s Orson Scott Card asserting that it’s a meaningless phrase. After all, isn’t writing all about telling a story? Perhaps for that reason I’ve struggled to internalize and implement this particular bit of advice, and though I think that I now understand what is intended by it, writing about it in a comprehensive, cogent, and insightful way remains elusive; hence, this will not be a complete analysis of the “show; don’t tell” concept, but rather a specific examination of it in the context of short stories, for my recent two-thousand word efforts for the Elegant Literature contests have highlighted a key element of “show; don’t tell,” which is the unspoken cost of showing: it’s wordier.

Without entering the debate on whether anything written can really qualify as “showing,” the intention is that allowing story elements, characterizations, and so forth to become evident to the reader through implication and hints laid out in scenes and narrative creates a superior experience to simply stating such elements as facts. In longform writing, this works well, and the flaw in implementing it is less readily apparent than in the short form, where it quickly becomes obvious that implementation will lead to a bloated story far beyond any reasonable definition of a short story’s wordcount (even by my distended standards ala certain Blood Magic episodes). In short fiction, it is not a matter of showing instead of telling, but of choosing what is most important to show, and telling the rest.

I think of word limits as budgets. I have some number of words with which to tell my story, and I cannot spend more than that number. Take In My Defense as an example. This story works within its word limit because it’s almost entirely telling, which I was able to get away with by making it epistolary (in a way, an epistolary story involves a lot of telling but is showing in the meta-story sense, which is just one example of how the axiom can break down, and a thorough examination of the matter is beyond the scope of the present post). If I had to show the initial approach, the briefing, the travel to the cave system, the exploration therein, the decoding steps, and the subsequent public reaction that led to the letter’s writing, I would probably be looking at a minimum of twenty thousand words, ten times the word limit for which it was written.

Instead, I budgeted my words. Since the lead scientist’s characterization and how the narrator/letter writer became involved in the project were important, I showed their initial interactions more than I told them. Other events, like travel to the cave, I simply told, because they weren’t important enough to spend the words on showing. Many elements I even left out entirely, to be conveyed either by implication or the reader’s imagination. Most of the narrator’s decision-making and characterization is done through telling, which only works because, again, of the letter conceit. A short novel’s worth of events can thus be compressed into a short story, but only by telling instead of showing. And this was a story that received an honorable mention.

The point is that you can never show everything. Even in giant series like The Wheel of Time (I really should reread those soon) or Stormlight Archives there must be significant amounts of telling, and not merely in the sense that all writing is telling. Authors have to budget their words and choose what is important enough to show, and what can merely be told. To make the telling work, it can be integrated and disguised, but it still must be done. The epistolary technique I discussed in reference to In My Defense is is one method, but there are endless others. It can be as simple as tucking your telling into sentences here and there within your showing of something else, or making it written in a character’s mental voice, but it must be done.

There is far more that we could discuss about “show; don’t tell,” and which we probably will discuss in the future. This post is really just a start, a fragment of that longer discussion looking specifically at the idea of budgeting words and deciding what to show and what to tell in shorter forms of writing. What is here important to understand is that there is a kind of opportunity cost to showing; it inevitably means you must not show something else, even if you’re writing a web novel of over eleven million words and counting. With word budgets in mind, I hope that you go forth and write, and don’t be afraid to tell.