Doesn’t matter which writing conference, seminar, or workshop you go to. It’s almost guaranteed whoever’s teaching is, someway or another, going to mention the idea of “showing” not “telling” in your writing. It’s one of the topics I mention most when trying to get most writing concepts across—especially when I’m judging contest entries by unpublished writers.

One of the areas of writing which is more prone to telling rather than showing is when it comes to setting details. (I’ve already discussed this when it comes to describing characters here and here.)

In a post in the Stir Up Your Setting series, I mentioned that, just as having a character stand in front of a mirror and do a top to bottom description of her physical appearance is a huge no-no, having a character walk into a set and “case the joint” is a no-no. It’s important to weave details of the setting in through the character’s actions and the flow of the scene, not just give it as a telling info dump at the beginning of the scene and figure that will suffice for “setting.”

This point was brought vividly home to me yesterday as I sat at the computer working on some busy-work-type stuff (yes, even those of us who are self-employed have the occasional busy work) with HGTV on in the background looping episodes of House Hunters. A young couple moving to Denver were looking for a house with at least 2,000 square feet, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and plenty of storage. First house they went to was relatively new, which meant the kind of house with a huge master bedroom, spa-like master bathroom, and a walk-in closet.

When I first moved to Nashville, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that had a very large master bedroom as well as a huge walk-in closet—large enough that what I considered to be a large quantity of clothes didn’t even fill the rack on one side of it, and that was with my chest of drawers in there, along with everything else I owned that needed to be stored in a closet. After a year of discovering that I hated living in an apartment complex, I moved into a duplex in a residential neighborhood—a 1940s GI-Bill cracker-box house that hadn’t been overly large before it had been split down the middle into two dwellings. I was fortunate to have good attic space there—with a boarded floor—for storage, which was good, because the closets weren’t overly large. Then, in 2004, I moved a block away into a house—a stand-alone, share-no-walls-with-anyone house. Which meant more storage space because it was bigger, right?

Wrong. In this house, even though I have a hall closet in addition to a linen closet in the bathroom, I have less storage space because I have small closets and an unusable attic. Over the past five and a half years, I’ve considerably pared down the amount of stuff I own—and even still, I have old bookcases in my bedroom I use for storing clothes and sheets and purses and other items I have no room for in my tiny closets.

So when this couple on HGTV stepped into what looked to be about a 6′ x 8′ walk-in closet, my immediate thought was, I wish I had a huge closet like that! The first words out of the female house hunter’s mouth? “Wow, this is a small closet.”

Which, of course, made me start thinking about writing (as pretty much everything does) and why specificity is important—because without specific details, we’re leaving a lot up to the reader’s perspective. And if their perspective is different than ours, they may not truly “get” what we’re writing about.

I could write something like this:

Jennie stared at the interior of the closet, aghast. How could she be expected to live with so little storage space?

What does that tell us about the closet? About Jennie?

How about this:

Jennie stepped into the closet, aghast. Though it extended the full length of the bedroom, the walk-in was so narrow, she could have lain in the floor and touched the side walls with tiptoes and fingertips. How could she be expected to live with so little storage space?

Or:

Jennie opened the closet door. “Why are all the clothes hanging diagonally?”
. . . . .“Uh . . .” The real estate agent reached around her and wiggled a few items. “Looks like the coat hangers are deeper than the closet is from front-to-back.”
. . . . .She crouched low and reached her arm into the dark corner beyond the open door—and jammed her fingers when they reached the side wall in short order. Not even wide enough for her to straighten her elbow. How could she be expected to live with so little storage space?

See how using specific details tells us something about Jennie without my actually telling you about Jennie? And how it tells something about the size/age of a house without telling it’s a newer home or an older home, one that likely has quite a bit of square footage versus one that doesn’t?

Of course, as with everything in writing, there’s a balance needed. Sometimes, you do just need a quick description if it really isn’t that important to the story/character.

Jennie stuck her head into the closet in the master bedroom. Though smaller than the walk-in she had in the apartment, it would be adequate. With only two days left to figure out where to live, she couldn’t be overly choosy.

How much detail do you like to see in books? Are there times when you wish the author would give you more or less description/specifics?