I’ve written a lot about storytelling and what I call story-showing. I talk about it even more. So I figured that a fun quiz might spotlight the differences between the two along with why one is so much more effective than the other.
Ready? Okay, here we go.
Do the following passages represent storytelling or story-showing?
- The man felt so bad he had to sit down on the curb.
- A sharp pain rocketed to the back of the man’s head, searing his eyeball along the way. Unable to stand, he dropped to the curb.
- The farmer feared that his crop would fail and his family would starve.
- It hadn’t rained in weeks. Months, actually. Without water, the crops would fail. Without crops, the farmer thought to himself day after day with mounting dread, my family will starve.
- The teenager was walking out the door when her mother demanded to see what she was wearing under her hoodie.
- “Wait!” exclaimed the woman in leggings and a t-shirt as the teenager moved toward the waiting car. She knew her daughter considered her impossibly old and out of the loop but her own teenage antics were still fresh in her mind. “Let me see what you’ve got on under that hoodie.”
If you wish that all quizzes could be this easy, you probably figured out that all the even-numbered passages represent story-showing.
So what’s the real difference, aside from the fact that they’re a bit longer than their storytelling counterpoints?
The story-showing passages allow you, the reader, to experience what’s happening instead of just being told about it. And that makes all the difference. With storytelling, you’re not even on the sidelines. You’re being told about the game instead of seeing and hearing it for yourself. And, let’s face it. That’s just not as much fun.
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