Knob
Showing and telling
You might say: show, don’t tell, scene and summary
Scene shows events moment by moment; summary tells them in compressed form. Burroway treats both as ways to manage time.
- What it does
- Sets the speed of the story: scene slows it down, summary moves fast.
- Ask
- Does this moment deserve a scene, or one line of summary?
- Trouble
- Big moments are summarised and small ones are dramatised.
What to look for
- Moment-by-moment action, dialogue and reaction
- Compressed background, routine or repeated events
- Big moments taking more space than small ones
Catalogue: Mode
- Show (scene): Moment by moment, with action, dialogue and reaction. Immediate and dramatic.
- Tell (summary): Compresses time. Useful for background, routine and repeated events, and for moving fast.
Connections
- Controls: Pacing
Sources
- Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 3e, scene and summary chapter
if you write in abstractions or judgments, you are writing an essay, whereas if you let us use our senses and do our own generalizing and interpreting, we will be involved as participants in a real way.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Showing and telling" (show-and-tell) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/fiction-writing/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal