ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ might mean in practice and learn how ‘showing’ can be a particularly effective technique in short stories, a form which requires concision yet still needs detail. Janet Burroway highlights the paradox in the dictum ‘show don’t tell’, which ‘can be confusing, considering that words are all a writer has to work with’. Burroway suggests the writer needs to depict events through lived experience, offering information about sensory perceptions, the characters’ voices and the actions involved in dramatic scenes. Showing is sometimes described as scene – meaning that the story is dramatised by the writer, creating one or more scenes and locating events in a specific place or places and timeframe. Scenes more readily involve readers in co-creating the story, prompting them to ask questions and to use their imagination to picture people, places and events.
