As a parent, I can assure you the old “show and tell” exercise from elementary school is still going strong. Kids bring in a treasured toy or other artifact from home and stand before the class to explain it. As a writer, I see the old adage, “Show, don’t tell,” remains in the top five of writer advice maxims. But our kindergarten teachers were correct all along. It’s show AND tell, not show all by itself. You need both to tell an effective story, and the secret is in the balance of the two. But which is which? And how do you know when to show and when to tell?

A good rule of thumb is that the bulk of “telling” often comes between scenes to establish time, place, setting, mood, and so forth. Then there are bits of telling interspersed when you want to make a quick point but don’t want to weigh down the action. I’ve illustrated an example below with the scene where we meet Annalisa Vega in Gone for Good:

Detective Annalisa Vega had sworn off dating when the third guy in a row ended the evening by asking to see her handcuffs. Or maybe her stomach had turned during the last homicide she’d worked, in which the ex-husband blew out a glass door with a double-barreled shotgun, hunted down his terrified wife, and executed her as she cowered next to the bed they’d once slept in together. Hard to make upbeat chitchat over apps and cosmos after viewing the remains of a relationship like that. [This is pure telling. Establishes voice, character background, and POV.]

This guy is different, Sassy had assured her when she’d arranged the setup. I know him from church, which he attends with his mother. But don’t worry—he doesn’t live with her. Lured out from her reclusive lair by this ringing endorsement, Annalisa now regarded her date across the narrow two-person table and tried again to sell herself on his numerous good points. Todd Weatherby, tax attorney, had a full head of dark hair, nice teeth, no food on his tie, and he’d selected a lovely Wicker Park restaurant for their first date. Italian, with cloth napkins and a real candle flickering on the table. Her mother would be over the moon for him. [Still mostly telling!]

Annalisa wasn’t sure if this last point was for or against Todd Weatherby. Her mother, who had been positively apoplectic when Annalisa had up and married a cop at the tender age of twenty-one, now reminded her constantly that “the clock is ticking” since she had turned thirty. [Yep, here we are on the third paragraph with more telling. Why so much telling? We could leap in earlier with the conversation, but the set-up gives you a reason to care about it. By the time Annalisa and her date begin speaking, we already know she’s impatient for a real relationship and skeptical that this guy is The One. So we’re interested to see if her assessment is correct.]

“Annalisa is a pretty name,” Todd said gamely. “Is it Spanish?” [This starts the showing. We ‘see’ this conversation taking place rather than having it relayed to us.]

“Portuguese.” Her great-grandfather’s grandfather had emigrated to New Bedford in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s when the city boomed thanks to a thriving whaling industry. Family lore said Great Grandpapa Vega had once worked alongside Herman Melville, but Annalisa suspected this was just a fish story. Whatever the case, her own great-grandfather had jumped ship and moved west to Chicago to cash in on the surge of construction after the Great Fire. The Vegas hadn’t budged in the hundred years since, living and dying within the city limits like the place had a wall around its borders. [Here is a bit of telling mixed in with the showing.]

“Todd is a nice name,” she offered. “Is it, um . . . English?”

“Maybe? I’m named after my uncle. He runs a button manufacturing plant in New Jersey. Did you know buttons date back to almost 3000 BC? Their earliest known use was in Indonesia, back when they were made from shells. But later . . .” [More showing. Rather than telling the reader Annalisa is bored, we see her lack of interest in Todd’s topic of conversation.]

She repressed a yawn and drifted away inside her head. Maybe next time she could ask Sassy to recommend a good movie or a talented masseuse. I should just accept my destiny and adopt a cat, she thought. Or maybe two. They could keep each other company while she was at work. Todd was still talking, and she forced herself to focus on his words. He had his wine glass in the air as if to make a toast. Obligingly, she lifted hers as well. “To us,” he said. “We are fated to be together always.”

“Uh . . . what?” She held her glass back. [This is a pointed bit of showing. Annalisa taking back her glass from the toast shows us her unpleasant shock at Todd’s words.]

“Us,” he repeated, looking chagrined as he motioned between them. “You know—death and taxes. We’re inescapable!” He grinned at his own joke about their respective careers, and her smile became frozen in place. “Get it?” he prodded.

“Oh, I got it.”

He cleared his throat. “Are you interested in the dessert menu?”

Decision time. Ticktock. He looked at her with hopeful eyes. She knew she could do a lot worse, but she didn’t want a lackluster relationship just to say she had one. She wanted her parents’ marriage, soul mates for forty-four years and counting. George and Maria still held hands under the dinner table. Meanwhile, Annalisa went on these going-nowhere dates, making talk so small she needed a microscope to parse it. Her ideal dessert at this point was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, alone, curled up on her couch with a Netflix backlog. “I— ” In her purse, her work phone started to chirp, and she pulled it out for a look. Dispatch had sent a text asking her to call in, Code 10-54. A body. “Oh,” she said with what she hoped sounded like regret, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. It’s work.”

“Work? Even at this hour?”

She was already gathering her things. “Homicide doesn’t punch a time card,” she declared, maybe too cheerfully.

Todd deflated in his chair, unable to argue with this truism. “Death,” he said glumly, taking up his glass again. “It’s inescapable.” [Poor Todd. I don’t think he’s met his love match.]

In short, you need “telling” in your writing to impart backstory, inject character inner narrative, and to keep the action moving along. Use showing to illustrate key plot developments, emotion, and characterization. But, contrary to most advice out there, you absolutely do need both.

Lo, many years ago now, I wrote a fair number of X-Files stories and put them on the internet for others to read, enjoy, and critique. The stories were tremendously fun to write, and along the way, I learned a great deal about the craft of writing and how to reach an audience. One day I will tell you about the time I missed the ending to my story by about nine chapters. Today I’m here to talk about the relative benefits and drawbacks to gatekeepers. A gatekeeper in this sense is anyone standing between the writer and her potential reading audience. Fanfic has essentially no gatekeepers, whereas the traditional publishing world is full of them. Each approach has its own advantages.

Fanfiction has no barriers to entry. If you have a story you want to tell, you can type it up and share it with the community in a matter of hours. The downside to this, especially for readers, is that many stories are published before they’ve had time to cook. (“Hey y’all, here’s something I wrote in homeroom!”) It can be difficult to find a quality story among all the noise. The upside is that everyone with a cool idea gets to test it out; there is no gatekeeper to say, “Sorry, there’s no audience for that” or “Shapeshifting aliens are so last year.” The readers get to vote with their clicks and their comments.

Traditional publishers have the same problem as fanfic readers: they want to find the good stuff so that they can put it on the shelves, but the sheer volume of manuscripts coming at them means it’s difficult to sort the quality manuscripts from the ones that are ill-suited. So the publishers transfer the first-pass filter onto literary agents. Most often, if you want a traditional publisher to read your work, you first must acquire an agent. The agent is the first gatekeeper.

If you’re curious what that process looks like, you can go here to see several examples of the query letter, in which the author tries to convince the agent to take a look at his or her work. The agents have weighed in with their responses—and they don’t always agree!

If the agent likes your work enough to represent it, he or she will then try to convince an editor to take your book on. The editor becomes the next gatekeeper. Editors, if they like the book, then turn around and try to convince the publishing house to publish it. So yep…that’s a third round of gatekeeping. If your book manages to get past all the steps, it now has a shot at connecting with an audience. Yay! You’re not done with the gatekeepers, though, because there are still booksellers who decide whether to stock it, publicists who decide how much attention to give it, and reviewers who decide whether to offer any commentary. Whew!

The benefit to all of this is that the process weeds out most of the terrible books with hackneyed plots, wooden dialogue and horrible grammar. The writer also receives a certain amount of “street cred” for having made it to a bookshelf. Moreover, this filtering is a boon to readers. Tens of thousands of books are published each year, and readers have precious little time. They are looking for cues and advice that says, “Read this, not that.” The agents, editors and publishers have done the work to say: here are some excellent books. Choose one of these.

The downside is that this process starts way back with just one or two opinions acting as a go/no-go signal on a book, and these opinions aren’t always right. The agents and the editors may miss books that readers would love, if only they got a chance to see them. For example, romance novelist Rosalind James wrote to several dozen agents seeking representation for her work and was initially turned down by every one of them. So she decided to self-publish her books and has sold thousands upon thousands of copies. The gatekeepers standing between Rosalind and her audience were just plain wrong.

With fanfic, I acted as my own gatekeeper. The only metric I used was whether I thought I would enjoy writing the story or not. Each time, I wasn’t sure how the story would be received. Some were wild hits, popular even fifteen years later. Others were rather duds. I couldn’t have predicted which would be the winners during the writing process. I put the story out there, and the readers got to decide.

So there you go. Writers may not have any idea if they’ve crafted a compelling story. Agents might mistakenly pass on the next bestseller. Readers, though, are the ones who sit in final judgment, and they are never wrong.

Preparing to write a book can be a daunting progress. It gives me the sweats each time. How do you even know where the beginning is? What if you can’t find the end? And, curse it all, what the heck do you put in that big empty middle? Some writers are plotters, meaning they construct detailed outlines for each chapter before they start the story. Others are pantsers, meaning they make it up as they go along—flying by the seat of their pants. I am somewhere in the middle. I’ve found if I write a detailed outline ahead of time, I won’t write the actual book because there is no surprise left in it for me. However, I do like to have a loose roadmap so that I can see where I am going.

There is no one path that a writer must follow. The best techniques are the ones that work for you.

When I am starting a new book, I picture myself standing in front of a long wall filled with doors. I could choose any door! Eventually, I pick a beginning, and that means choosing one of the doors. Once I go through it, I have a new wall in front of me with fewer doors, because the possible directions of the story have been constrained by the place I began it. So I pick one of these new doors and go through it to advance the narrative, and in doing so, reduce my choices for the next chapter even more. By the time I get to the end, if I’ve done my job right, there should be only one door. It’s marked THE END, and it’s the logical conclusion to everything that’s come before it.

I also subscribe to the Alton Brown theory of scene construction. Alton Brown has a rule that every tool in the kitchen must serve multiple purposes. No point in having a juicer that only does lemons, for example. Likewise, a scene in your book should ideally have multiple reasons for its existence. Here’s a short scene from something I wrote ages ago:

James Dean Trumbull had, at age thirty-nine, outlasted his namesake by a good fifteen years.  His mother had fallen in love with the fifties film idol’s tragic, romantic saga, and since Jimmy’s father was not around to dispute her name choice, James Dean had been reborn in a Hoboken hospital in 1960.  His mother was a great believer in karma, and she had felt the previous James Dean was cut down before he could achieve the successes due him.  By christening her son in the dead man’s name, she truly believed that fate would pick off where it had left off, and Jimmy would enjoy a magic carpet ride into history.

Forty years later, she was still waiting.

Jimmy sat at his cramped kitchen table, surrounded by avocado-colored appliances, and leaned closer to the scanner.  He had a cigarette in one hand and a pen in the other, just in case he heard something worth writing down on his brand-new tablet of paper.

Amy entered the room just as he was blowing out a smoke ring.  “If you must do that, at least go out to the stoop,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face.  She had

her night watchman’s uniform on, with its sensible black shoes, blue polyester pants, and a shiny metal gun hooked to her hip.

“Can’t,” he told her.  “Got to be in here to listen.”

“You listen to that damn box more than you do me.  Sitting here all the time with that radio playing constantly.  What if one of the kids had a nightmare or something?”

“I’d hear ’em.”  He blew out another long train of smoke and aimed it upstairs to where their children lay sleeping.  The police scanner crackled as the dispatcher radioed an armed robbery in progress.

Screw that, he thought.  Get to the good stuff.

Amy’s keys clattered onto the counter as she fished around in her purse for something.  “Well at least do the dishes if you’re going to be sitting here in the kitchen all night.”

“Something big is going down,” he said.  “You can tell.  No one’s saying anything yet, but you can hear it anyway.  They’re all on edge.”

She picked her heavy winter coat up from the back of a chair.  “You think you’re the only one with this toy?  You think there aren’t a hundred reporters out there listening to the exact same thing you are?  And they’ve got jobs, Jimmy.  The papers are going to take their stories over anything you might come up with.”

“That’s why I’ve got to stay on top of this.  I have to find an angle no one else has.”

Amy shook her head as if she had heard this story before.

“You wait,” he said.  “You’ll see.  I’ll get my headline and then everyone will want a piece of me.  I’m going to be an overnight sensation.”  He grinned and reached for her ass.  “You can say you knew me when.”

“I know you, all right,” she replied, ducking him.  She shrugged into her coat and picked up her old leather purse.  “I’ve got to run or McCracken will have my ass.”

“He can’t have it.  Your ass is mine.”

She made a face, but he could see the smile in her eyes.  “There’s leftover cupcakes in the fridge,” she said, leaning down to kiss him.

He’d seen them in there, right next to the beer: chocolate frosted cupcakes with little hearts on them for Valentine’s Day.  Amy talked tough, but she was such a sap.

“I’ll see you at six,” she said.

“Drive safe.”

She left out the back way, into the alley, and cold air stormed in through the kitchen, stirring the curtains and lifting the pages of his writing tablet. A voice crackled through on the scanner. “Five-six, be advised, the suspect has a previous warrant for attempted homicide.”

Jimmy leaned back with his smoke and listened.

This scene introduces Jimmy Trumbull as a would-be reporter searching for a big crime-related scoop. He’s a family man, watching the kids while his wife Amy works, but we can see there are limits to how much of himself he’s willing to give up for them: he won’t go outside to smoke.

The crimes he is waiting to hear on the radio form the backbone of the mystery, but the twist here is that Jimmy is the killer. He’s waiting for the cops to discover his handiwork. Finally, the other player introduced in this brief exchange is Amy’s gun. It’s crucial because the story ends with her using that gun to shoot Jimmy.

All this information is packed into 700 scant words. So that’s my other piece of book advice: make each line work hard for you. With all the effort you’re putting in, the least those words can do is hold up their end!