: Re: Is show not tell less useful advice in first person Following the first answer for this question What does Show don't Tell actually mean I followed to the Chuck Palahniuk exercise and tried

@Annie587

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Amadeus has given an excellent answer to your conundrum and the article by Palahniuk is excellent. I just wanted to add one little point from experience that I hope will spur you on (can't comment as too new to this branch of StackExchange).

I sympathise, because scenes like this are difficult to show and not tell. You are right that showing Jack talking too much has the potential to bore the reader, but you could lengthen the scene, or draw these character traits across a few scenes, making sure that the information Jack is imparting is relevant and interesting to the story (even though he uses too many words to get there). Do you need to blurt out right at the outset that Jack talks too much and the narrator doesn't like it? Or could you draw those character traits out over a longer time? Showing just a bit here and a bit there as the scene/s moves forward, having the reader see the narrator getting gradually more and more frustrated, until he breaks and maybe even blurts, 'You talk too much, do you know that?' rather than trying to pack that information into a few brief lines?

What you've set up has the potential to be really interesting in terms of creating two characters who 'gad' each other, and you could really play on how much they irritate each other as the scenes move on (if they are going to spend time together).

Chuck's advice to 'unpack' rather than pack, is bang on. In his examples, he takes a lot more time and words to convey the same information through showing instead of telling, but that vital unpacking is what makes a scene feel real and three-dimensional, and the characters feel three-dimensional too.

It feels like a lot of work upfront, and I often find myself resisting the urge to unpack, because it does take so much time and effort. But, in the long run, it will actually save you time, because:

When you don't unpack and delve deeply in the way Chuck describes, you create scenes that feel sparse and two-dimensional. And that has a compounding effect on the whole novel. The reader (the agent or publisher) who loved your idea, who loved your pitch, your concept and your story, gets to the end and thinks, 'Nah, I didn't really buy it.' And they may not be able to put their finger on why they didn't buy it, but somehow the whole story didn't quite feel real.

You then have to rewrite, unpacking it all anyway. It really is worth the time and energy it takes to do it out of the gate. So, don't rush. Go slowly, live each second of your story, unpack and explore your moments and your characters.

HTH, Good luck!

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