Pro tip: that 'show don't tell' advice wrecked my first draft

My workshop group kept telling me I needed to show more and tell less. So I rewrote a whole chapter where a character losing his job became a three page description of a coffee cup shaking on his desk. Turned out I overdid it so bad the beta readers couldn't even tell what happened. Sometimes you just need to say 'he got fired' and move on. Has anyone else had a writing rule backfire like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lucas1mo ago

That's a good question, @nina_johnson86. The thing is, they didn't miss it entirely, but the coffee cup shaking took up so much space that the firing felt like a minor detail instead of the main event. The rule itself isn't wrong, it's just that people treat it like a hard law instead of a tool. A better approach is to show the emotional moment and then just tell the fact cleanly. Like, describe the cup shaking for a beat to show the panic, then cut to "he got fired" so the reader knows for sure. Overdoing any rule will wreck a draft, and that tip is one of the easiest to take too far.

nina_johnson861mo ago

Did your beta readers actually miss the firing entirely, or did it just take them too long to figure out?