Show, don’t tell. We've all heard that advice. So, what is "show," exactly? In a nutshell, “show” is scene. And scene is made up of these basic building blocks: action, dialogue, description and, yes, exposition (tell). But it's useful to think of "show, don't tell" as "scene versus exposition." Scene allows the reader to be right there with the character, in real time, in the now. When you allow the reader to be there with the character, in scene, you don’t have to explain or tell much, because the reader will experience the event for themselves. And when you do that, you can convince the reader that they are seeing just about anything. Explain it in exposition? Not so much. It’s like this: tell us, and we have to take your word for it. Show us, and we’re there.
It’s the difference between your buddy telling you about a flying saucer landing on his lawn, and you being there when it lands. If he tells you about it, you have to take his word for it (and you likely won't). That's tell. But if you’re there -- seeing the flying saucer drop out of the sky, smelling the smoke as it lands and scorches the lawn leaving a crop circle -- and you witness the little green woman waving at you from the window of the spaceship then, well, you’ll believe it. That's show.
I’ll just say that again: tell the reader in exposition, and they may not buy it. Show them in scene and they will, no matter how weird or unlikely the event. If I tell you that the sky rained flowers, would you believe me? Likely not. But here, in this scene from my literary novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, my character experiences just that:
"As I watched my father bring in the last of the heifers, the anger of the storm ended abruptly and an awful calmness smothered the house. I pressed my face against the window and saw a rain begin to fall, so gently the raindrops seemed to float. Then I saw they weren't raindrops, they were flowers, violet flax, fluttering to the ground. In no time at all the rain covered the earth in flowers. I opened my window and crawled out onto the purple carpet, took my shoes off and paddled around in pools of flax. The fragrance was intoxicating. The clouds moved on, and still the violet flax drifted down from a blue sky."
We're there, walking in a shower of flowers, because we experience in full scene. That's show, don't tell.
(By the way, this scene was inspired by an experience my mother had, where a severe storm whipped up a flowering crop on her family farm and flowers really did flutter down from the sky. I didn't have to go far to find the magic realism you see in my novels.)
