: Re: Is it okay to include world-building facts by "telling" instead of "showing"? I know we need to show and not tell, but is it still okay to sometimes tell instead of having to show it? For

@Ravi5107385

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The problem with telling is not that telling things straight is bad, sometimes it is awesome. The problem is that if you feel that the reader needs to know something to understand the story but there is not a good way to "show" it, one of those beliefs is usually wrong and you need to stop and think about it.

Option A

You might be wrong about the readers needing to know about it. This is generally fairly harmless. People reading world building heavy genres generally enjoy getting some extra info. Only worry is what to embed as short asides in the story and what to put in an appendix or a web page.

Anything you embed within the story should be short and somehow on topic to where you put it. If it takes the reader out of the story and breaks immersion, well, that is, I believe, why "show not tell" is such a common advice.

Anything people need to actually stop to think about or that takes lots of text to explain properly should probably be an appendix at the end. It pads the word count and readers do not usually mind. If they finished the book and made it to the appendix they presumably are interested in what you created.

Option B

You might be wrong about the showing being hard and this is actually a bigger problem. If it is important to the story, it should also be important to the characters within the story in roughly the same time and proportion. If it seems otherwise, it is possible you are missing something fairly important about the story you are writing.

This is the other part of why "show not tell" is good advice. Trying to figure out how to show things you consider important is a valid method to "debug" your storytelling and find out what you might be missing.

Just remember that option A is real and fairly common if any world building is involved. Good world building requires that you love the setting and its details to some extent. This means that you are inherently biased when deciding if it needs to be in the story.

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