"Show, Don't Tell." 

Those three little words get repeated a ridiculous amount of times. No matter who you are on Wattpad, If you get critiqued regularly, I bet you've been told that at least one time. If you've read a bunch of my chapters, you might have found I've touched on the subject of show, don't tell in the past. However, I've found this sort of advice misleading authors. In a way, it's kind of bad advice.

So what you're left with is a bit of a balancing act. The fundamental thing everyone needs to remember is that you're telling a story. You're trying to convey scenes to your audience. Whatever you do to achieve that goal is considered fair game, but how you tell your story can be just as important as what your story is about. 

I've been reading a lot of web novels lately, and I've found stories with basically nothing happening, that I can't put down simply because the writing is so good. If you have interesting characters doing interesting things, even if your story is cliched or not terribly exciting or new, you can keep people interested simply with how you do it. This is the fundamental problem with the "show, don't tell" advice. It focuses on the what, and forgets the how. 

People see telling as an active statement that describes something. Meanwhile, showing would be describing the scene in a way that conveys the same information.

"Jenny was Angry." Becomes:

"Jenny furrowed her brow, her mouth twisting and her forehead forming a scowl."

The problem with this advice comes in that it almost always increases the words it takes to say it. I conveyed Jenny was angry in three words, but by showing it, it ended up inflating to 13 words. That's just that much longer to convey the same exact idea, which is the emotional state of Jenny.

And this almost always ends up the case. Take my example above, and I bet a bunch of you were nodding and saying that my choice to show, not tell, was done right. But... I could have just wrote, "Jenny scowled." Like that, I showed anger and even said it in one less word with a stronger verb. But when you're writing your first draft, you usually don't think that far ahead. 

And so, what do you end up with? A little phenomenon I like to call "Overshowing". Overshowing occurs when you shove too much detail into something in a desperate attempt to convert telling into showing. Some of my previous advice in this very book can lead people astray on that very concept. I once wrote a chapter on describing characters. And at one point, I wrote this paragraph long character description and perhaps hinted at it's improved descriptiveness compared to just stating their eye color and hair color. And you've all witnessed books dedicating a descriptive paragraph every time someone "new" shows up in a story.

"I look up and see him, Jerry Francis. He had long blonde hair, a perfectly shaped nose, a strong jaw, and eyes that were just large enough to be considered doey. He had a tall build, with large arms and well-defined legs. He was wearing tight biker shorts and a loose fitting t-shirt that didn't quite hide the abs underneath his shirt. He gave me a bright smile showing his pearly white teeth."

You've probably heard this description or one very similar to it hundreds of times in hundreds of books. Maybe not the same adjectives, but certainly the same paragraph dedicated to describing someone in detail.

The problem isn't just that this is all tell and no show, but that this kind of information is just way too condensed. So, when someone tells you that you need to tell and not show, and you started rewriting it, you leave a show that is equally dense.

Simply put, in nine out of ten circumstances, there is no reason to put descriptions in such a densely-packed space. There is always the circumstances where your MC is looking at something. They just entered a magical castle and are flabbergasted by the décor, thus leading you to describe it. Your MC sees a tasty guy across the room, and she's eying his perfect boy body. That description makes sense.

However, those are surprisingly rare events. And the real problem comes that converting a tell into show can't be done by swapping out a few sentences, or by converting what already exists. In a lot of ways, the process of moving from a tell to a show is a complex one, and basically, needs you to rewrite your entire chapter to be able to put it in seamlessly. Showing should be seamless. That is to say, you are telling your story. At no point should you be saying things in order to describe your story. Your descriptions are a part of your story, not the other way around. 

The alternative, attempting to show descriptions by force leads to the awkward adjectives and other painful forms of explanation I described in the chapter "How Do I Describe My Main Character?"

That means when you describe someone, it should be logical, and what you describe about them should also be logical. Rather than filling your story with statements about what things look like, don't waste the words. Instead, practice on refining your story, creating sentences that are rich in description while furthering the plot.

And I must once against state that "rich in description" does not mean "has a lot of adjectives."

"The green spaceship flies off into the black space beyond as seen through the shiny, clear window by the blond-haired, blue-eyed, manly-looking protagonist." Is NOT what I meant which I say making something rich in description.

It should not interrupt the flow of the story. Your protagonist randomly having their hair fall in front of their eyes, and then they have to wave their hand, pushing back their blond hair? That's something that takes away from the story. It interrupts it. Unless his wiping the hair away from his face is integral to his character, it's interrupting the story and at that point, you might as well just stop the story and say "My character's hair is blond... it's blond guys... I really wanted you to know it blond... keep that in mind, it won't have any relevance to my story in the foreseeable future, but I just pushed out your memory of your deceased Oma so that you could remember my blond character."

And that in lies the major issue. Telling, showing... these are both fine things, as long as they fit in the story appropriately and do it in a way that makes the world and people interesting. Every time you feel the story has to be taken away to describe "generic hallway number 1"... you have to make sure that the story calls for it.

This isn't knocking on overly descriptive stories either. I know I've written my fair share. I have a lot of fun with descriptions. But they can be tedious to read, especially when you're writing something no one would care about. I'd care about the descriptions of a haunted house. I probably wouldn't care about the descriptions of your school's hallway, unless somehow that description distinguished your school from every other school. In a lot of ways, when you choose to describe, you need to guess what your readers are already familiar with, which is something that can change based on your target audience. Then you need to gear your descriptions towards filling in the blanks.

Just like a high school math class isn't going to review addition, because the prerequisite assumption is that you know addition like the back of your hand, the same idea can be levied at your writing. You have to assume the standards of your audience, and when you're describing something everyone does, like a wakeup routine involving brushing teeth and eating breakfast, or the Pontiac Buick you drive, don't waste time providing descriptions that don't help the reader visualize your world.

Now... sometimes you'll get that one reader who isn't familiar with, say... how a standard American high school would look like, even though there are like, a thousand shows depicting an (admittedly idol and glorified) high school, and so there is a risk there. But the reward of streamlining your story, saying more with less, will likely outweigh the loss. And besides, that's what commenters are here for. If you see a lot of people saying that they felt this area needed more detail, you might want to consider it.

However, when you consider it, don't just slap a few adjectives in there. You need to seriously think about how to rewrite your scene so that the detail becomes self-evident. I have an example of this (and I wouldn't even call it a good one) in How do I describe my main character. It's called the descriptive cue, and I'm sorry if it seems kind of vague, but it kind of is. Describing without describing is an art, hinting at detail without bogging down your work takes skill... and even experienced authors struggle with this and will continue to struggle with it for their entire lives.

You're always going to have descriptions. You'll likely have some amount of telling and showing. Sometimes, something can't easily be shown and attempting to show it would tear apart a previously good story. I've seen authors so desperate to show that they stop the story with flashbacks or other character chapters just because they can't stand the idea of "telling" and not "showing".

Now personally, I think a main character finding out about something is in a way a show of it's own, so you can skip scenes that happen off camera, and only hear what happens from a witness report. If it's done well enough, and most importantly fits within the narrative, it can be fun. Also, an advantage of web novels is the "after story"... an option to write one off chapters explaining details previously left out of the story, filling in the would-be plot holes with the behind the scenes events. Prequels, alternative points of view, all of these things are available to the industrious writer.

So if there is any point to my somewhat coherent rambling, it's that you need to think about how you say things, and focus not just on what is in the story, but how the story is being conveyed. In your drafts, make sure to refine, rewrite, and see if you can't ditch some of the detail. Sometimes, it makes a story better, sometimes, it makes the story worse... so in the end, your job is to pick what makes your story work!