I was racking my brain for a topic to write about today and I figured I’d mention my own struggle with showing and telling.
Most of the work I’ve posted on this site under “Projects” is a first draft. With the exception of the story titled “Hunting”, you can tell that I have an overdeveloped tendency to rely on exposition. I tell a lot more than I show.
“Hunting” is the oddball here. For that piece, I made a concerted effort to write as much of the first draft as possible in dialogue, getting the work across in conversations. Even with that goal, you can still see areas where I slipped up and went full telling mode.
In the project section is a story titled “The Concert” which, for now, is just a short blurb about the story’s pending publication. When the story is released in May, I’ll post the link and the original draft of the story. That first draft is entirely exposition (in addition to having a few other issues) and doesn’t really work.
As I write more, I find myself keeping the need for showing as a priority. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post more of the stuff I’m working on (and revise some of the work that’s already there).
I want to keep this short today and I’ll close with a question for anyone who stumbles across this post:
When you’re writing dialogue…
Do you have an actual conversation with your characters?
Matt Hardman 
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