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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26499
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I really think people are much too obsessed with not telling. Many of the novels I enjoy most, tell. Lots.

If you have, for example, a group of characters recovering from a fight, just friggin' say so:

> For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds.

Really, please don't show me three weeks of recovering! I don't want to know what they ate and whether they brushed their teeth. Make it one sentence and be done with it. Thank you.

* * *

Re: Your edit

If something happens during the three weeks, you summarize ("tell") the week until that something happens, then narrate what happens as expansively as you do the rest of your novel ("show") and then summarize the remainder again.

Think of it this way: You constantly summarize uninteresting periods of time, but you probably don't notice it yourself. For example, when your characters are sleeping you don't "show" that but simply leave it out: `The next morning...`. But if a character wakes up during the night you continue your narrative in the middle of the night in stead of the next morning: `I woke up around midnight...`.

Your problem, as I see it, is that you think of that long period in your novel as a whole that you want to summarize, but have some things happening during this "summary" that you want to show in more detail, but don't know how. The solution is to stop thinking of the whole period.

Your think:

    --------------long period of time------------------
        event A event B

You should think:

    ---period A---event A---period B---event B---period C---

What you have is not one long period that you summarize and have to break out of, but a normal narrative with three unimportant periods (like nights) that you summarize.

Like this:

> For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. In the second week, one morning John was torn from his lazy revery by... The next week all was quiet again, until finally everyone was healed and itching to fight.

If your characters _do not act_ (that is, do not break their inactivity) but only _observe_ certain things, then you don't need to break your summary ("telling") and can simply tell what they saw:

> For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. During that time we saw the villagers raise unfair taxes and many other injustices, and they all served to steel our resolve to overcome Lord Dark. So when we were finally healed and ready to fight again, we...

Of course this is just a quick example, and you can go into much more detail in such a summary. There is nothing wrong with a few paragraphs of it. That's no different than taking some time to describe the setting or to provide a character's backstory.

Original score: 12