Show, don’t tell, beginning authors are told. And it’s good advice. Put the reader inside the scene and let them watch it unfolding. Don’t give them a character (or worse still, a narrator) who fills in all the backstory in paragraph after paragraph.
Like all good advice, as you gain more experience you know when to ignore it. Showing is usually best. Except when it isn’t. Use the comments to share an excerpt with either sharing or telling, and tell us why you chose to do it that way.
I’ve been thinking of taking one of my newsletter short stories, and turning it into a novella for a box set the Bluestocking Belles might publish for Valentine’s Day 2019. Because of the format, they tend to have a bit of telling — purely and simply to keep the story short. Like this bit from the story I might rewrite, The Mouse Fights Back. (For those who don’t subscribe to my newsletter, each one contains the start of a short story written exclusively for newsletter subscribers and a link to the rest of the story plus all the others I’ve written so far. Click on the link in the side menu to subscribe for this and heaps of other free stuff.)
They were trying to kill his Mouse.
The runaway carriage might have been an accident. Such things happen. Mouse was shopping, with Jasper and two footmen in attendance, when it careened down the street, and only Jasper’s quick thinking and quicker action saved her from injury or worse. He thrust her into a doorway, protecting her with his body, and the carriage passed close enough to tear the back out of his jacket. The footmen both jumped clear. Hampered by her skirts, Mouse could well have been killed.
The shot that just missed her in Hyde Park must surely have been deliberate, though the magistrate called to investigate insisted on regarding it as carelessness at worst. “Some foolish young man making bets with his friends. Not at all the thing. Your wife could have been hurt, and how would they feel then?” Tiberius’s own investigators found a trampled spot in the bushes, probably the place where the assassin had waited to make his shot.
Tiberius doubled the guard on Mouse when she went out, and thought about confining her to the house, but couldn’t bear to curtail the freedom she was enjoying so much as she visited the art galleries, shops and museums she’d been barred from when she was under her aunt’s paw.
His own estate, his investigation into his uncle and stepmother, and Mouse’s affairs kept him busy during the day, and he couldn’t escort her as often as he wished.
As her husband, he now owned her inheritance, but extracting it—or, more likely, what was left of it—from Lord Demetrius’s hands was proving to be difficult, with his uncle’s lawyers throwing up one obstacle after another. Tiberius didn’t need the money, but he would be damned if Lord Demetrius was going to have it. Besides, as Jasper said, if they could prove the wicked uncle had stolen from Mouse’s trust, they would have a reason to have him arrested, and the whole sorry saga could be put to rest.
And then he could spend time with his delightful, fascinating, sweet little wife, who was blossoming like a rose away from the bitter atmosphere of her aunt’s home. The old harridan’s oppression had not suppressed Mouse’s intelligence or her sense of humour. It had made her afraid of almost everything, and every day he saw more reason to admire her courage as she fought through her fear and faced the world with a cheerful smile.
He dodged five more suspicious accidents and outright attacks, but none of them bothered him as much as the crowd of drunken slum dwellers who mobbed Mouse and her footmen in the street as she emerged from his house. He sallied out with the rest of the household and drove the attackers off. She was shaken, but not hurt. This time.
“You need to send her to Redfern,” Jasper scolded, after Tiberius had hugged her, examined her for injury, and handed her over to her maid so she could wash and change. “Every time she goes out in London, she is in danger.”
He was right. At the earldom’s principal estate, Tiberius could control every inch of ground for acres around. He had purged Redfern of the few servants who owed allegiance to Lady Bowden, and those who remained had either been born and brought up on the estate, or were people of his own. She would be far safer there. But he hated the thought of staying in London alone.
