It's hard to make progress as a writer without moving past the early stepping-stone of thinking one has to 'show' rather than 'tell'. The longer this 'rule' is put into effect, the more its inaccuracy is realized: you can only 'show' something in a story by 'telling' the reader something else. The two are actually inherently cooperative.
But a bigger problem also becomes apparent - both what you 'show' and 'tell' in you work are known, intended quantities from your perspective as the author. Yet, the joy of the art of writing rests not in what you limit your work to, but in how you enable your reader to go further with your ideas than you have on the page. How you enable their agency as a participant in your craft.
In the preface to his tales of Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman emphasizes that the point of myths, and the stories that compose them, is not in the telling, but rather the re-telling. I don't think this is restricted to the larger, grander narratives of mythology: every story achieves its true goal not when it's told, but when the reader wants to, to some degree, retell it.
Everyone here became a writer because they read something and decided that reading and receiving a story wasn't enough - they wanted to tell a story of their own. A children's story best proves that it has captivated its audience when it manages to enter a child's individual space of fantasy play. Likewise, a story has only truly achieved the life of a work of art, I believe, once it has captured the imaginations of others to the extent that they want to stretch it, squeeze it, poke at it, take it apart, put it back together again, add to it, adapt it - and so on. Not in the case that it's dissatisfied people, though, as that too can lead to people wanting to make adjustments. When a story naturally prompts the brain to say 'do more with this' - that is when it has become more than just another narrative.
Because of this belief, that storytelling is only successful in execution if it encourages some kind of retelling, I've come to cling to a dichotomy that I find better than 'showing vs telling' for thinking about how to engage and excite your reader - 'enabling vs disabling'.
The simple question is this: does what you've written, from a word to a paragraph to a whole chapter, encourage the reader to do more than what's on the page?
Exactly how much from you've given them can never be a definitive quantity, but you can get a feel for whether you're being rigid with the imagination you're allowing your reader, or expansive. Withholding certain bits of information or worldbuilding can enable your reader to fill in those gaps themselves for the time being, as questions and curiosities. Withhold too much, or the wrong things, however, and you can disable your reader from being able to think ahead. Think about mystery fiction - the reader needs enough clues to be encouraged to piece together what they think happened, but not too many or they'll consider the case too simple, or see too many possibilities to care about dwelling on any of them.
'Enabling' the reader includes the facet of 'showing' something rather than telling it: you're enabling them to imagine it for themselves. But when you think about enabling, rather than simply showing, you can keep your mind open to the agency of the reader. Does this thing need to be 'shown' to the point that nothing else can be imagined, or can it be left more vague, more questionable, so that the reader feels drawn to the details around it even more, to try to figure out a more exact understanding of it themselves? Enabling the reader, giving them space, can be enough encouragement in and of itself for them to roam around that area. But you can also set up particular moments in your scenes to give the reader more of a 'push' towards thinking about something more on their end. It's rewarding when you respond to that push as a reader, and start to realize that the narrative is written with a great amount of depth for you to delve into.
'Disabling', of course, also includes 'telling' something - you disable the reader's ability to reach that idea themselves. A reader feeling too disabled by the way a story is written can exacerbate any concerns they have for attachment with the characters. It can feel even worse, however (or at least, it has for me), when the attachment is there but the room for the reader to have their own independent thoughts and feelings is missing: the characters live on the page, but feel dead beyond it. The effect of a book of film being 'instantly forgettable' is akin to this. Some people describe this as simply a 'lack of depth', but I think it's more often a case of cave without an entrance. There's always some kind of room for the reader to think about the characters of a story more on their own, but is there a way in? It doesn't matter how 'deep' you consider your characters to be, as a writer, if what you've written lacks an access point for that depth. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your reader.
While 'showing' and 'telling' can remain to be helpful concepts for thinking about the sentence-by-sentence expression of the events of a story, I think 'enabling' and 'disabling' are more productive terms for both the reason why we show and tell certain things, and the management of the 'woods' of the story as opposed to the 'trees'. An enabled reader receives what you've written and becomes eager to make something more of it themselves, whether that's delving into the depths of what meanings can be made beneath the surface of your story, or building new narratives on top of it the firm foundation for imagination that your storytelling proves. You have to enable your readers if you want your work to be remembered beyond the last page. It's not enough to simply tell your story - you have to make your audience want to take part in the telling too.
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Originally Posted by Jeko
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