: Re: Am I breaking the "show don't tell" rule in the following passage? Then, as if sensing my presence, the girl turned around. She looked young. Probably sixteen or seventeen. She had long

@Smith147

Vote Up Vote Down

"Show don't tell" isn't really a rule in the sense that "don't murder the lead character halfway through the story" is a rule. It's a guideline that is especially useful to new authors. In fact, all storytelling is, well, telling, hence the name, and at any time you're going to be doing a variety of showing and telling to get your point across while keeping the pacing solid and moving the story forward.

As to this particular description... well, descriptions are generally speaking "telly" in nature. I'm not sure there's a lot of ways to get around that, except to intersperse description in amongst a scene and that may or may no work for what you want to accomplish.

Two points I do want to add about this kind of thing:

If it's your first draft, just put something there and move on. Always assume you will need to rewrite what you put down because, well, you will. I mean, unless that blocks you, then pretend that your first draft will be a magical gift. In any case, in my experience anyway it's better to make a stab at something and then move on then to spend a lot of time on the first draft getting a passage right. For all you know the passage won't even be in the final cut.
Regarding description in general and first-person in particular, I think the trick here is not so much to worry about showing vs. telling but to always bear in mind that you're looking at things through your protagonist's eyes. The neat thing about first-person and limited-third descriptions is that you often tell just as much information about your narrator as you do the described object. In this case, it's a bit on the neutral side but I can already glean a bit of anti-pale people prejudice (I mean, sometimes pale folks just don't have enough sunlight! They aren't all zombies). He's also the kind of person who says words like "crimson" instead of "red", which may or may not mean something later on.

(0)

Login to post a comment!