Why is “show, don’t tell” incomplete writing advice?
By the time a student has heard it from enough teachers and critique groups, the rule is absolute: showing good, telling bad, always show, never tell. For more, see show versus tell and ways to show heartfelt author appreciation.
Show don’t tell is half the advice. Knowing when to tell is the other half.Share on X
This is nonsense.
Novels require both showing and telling. All showing would take 400,000 words to cover what 80,000 can accomplish with strategic telling. All telling would produce a summary instead of a story. I think the absolute version of this rule has done more damage to new writers than almost any other piece of advice, because it teaches them to distrust a tool every good novelist uses on every page. The craft is knowing when each one serves the scene better.
I’ve written dozens of novels across multiple genres, and the show/tell balance is among the most consequential decisions I make on every page. Shield of Ashes handles it differently than Killer Cuts.
That handles it differently than Peacekeeper. The balance shifts based on genre, tone, pacing needs, and what each scene demands from the reader. The Showing and Telling Handbook covers this in complete detail.
Watch: Show vs Tell - When to Tell, Writing with Jenna Moreci
When Should You Show Instead of Tell?
Show when you want readers to inhabit a scene. When the moment deserves lingering. When slowing down serves the story.
Emotional peaks demand showing. In Shield of Ashes, a crew discovers their interceptor missed. A city of fourteen million people just died because they failed. This moment can’t be told. The faces of crew members. Silence on the bridge. Someone’s hand trembling over controls that can’t undo anything. The weight of what they couldn’t prevent settling into bodies carrying it forever. Showing this lets readers inhabit the horror. Telling them “the crew was devastated” would be true and completely inadequate.
Transformation moments demand showing. Killer Cuts shows everything, including the murders. No telling at all. Readers watch the hairstylist and postal worker transform through actions, dialogue, and physical responses. It shows the murders and the enjoyment. The psychological descent happens on the page. Telling readers these characters became monsters who enjoyed killing would be weak. Showing readers creates complicity. They watch it happen. They can’t look away. They understand from the inside.
Character-defining moments demand showing. When a character realizes the depth of a betrayal, when a relationship fractures, when someone makes a choice that changes everything: these can’t be summarized. Readers need to experience the moment alongside the character. The physical sensation of understanding, the world tilting, the recalibration of everything they thought they knew. Tell this and readers understand intellectually. Show this and readers feel it viscerally.
When Should You Tell Instead of Show?
Tell when tension is high and plot needs to move quickly. When lingering would kill momentum. When information matters but dramatization doesn’t.
Transitions demand telling. Three weeks pass between chapters. Telling handles this in a sentence. Showing three weeks of daily activity would be absurd. Characters travel from one location to another. Telling handles this unless the journey itself matters to the story.
A critique partner who circles a one-line transition and demands a full scene is making a mistake. That advice turns a brisk chapter into a slog, and the writer who follows it loses the reader right where the story needed to move.
Technical information often deserves telling. How Imperial STL technology works matters for Peacekeeper’s plot. Showing this through characters experiencing it works for initial encounters. But sixteen books of space travel can’t dramatize every journey. Eventually you tell: “The ship emerged three days later at the edge of the Corvax system.” Readers have the information. Story continues.
A missile launches in Shield of Ashes. The launch itself gets told. Readers don’t need to inhabit the launch sequence. They need the information: a missile is airborne. Telling delivers this efficiently so the story can move to what matters, the human consequences.
Backstory readers need for context gets told efficiently, not dramatized in flashbacks interrupting momentum. Unless the backstory reveal is itself an emotional peak (a character learning something devastating about their past), telling delivers context without derailing the present narrative.
The Information Hierarchy
Not all information deserves equal treatment. The question for every piece of information in your story is: does this need to be experienced or just known?
Must be shown: emotional peaks, character transformations, relationship-defining moments, climactic events. Anything readers need to feel.
Can be told: transitions, technical information, backstory context, secondary events. Anything readers need to know but don’t need to experience.
Can be omitted: anything not serving character, plot, or theme. Just because something happens doesn’t mean readers need to know it happened. Selecting wisely serves readers better than including everything.
How do showing and telling control pacing?
The balance between showing and telling is one of your primary pacing tools.
Want to slow down? Show. Dramatize. Let readers inhabit moments fully. A conversation summarizable in a sentence takes a full scene when shown. This isn’t padding if the scene justifies its length through emotional weight or character development.
Want to speed up? Tell. Summarize. Deliver information efficiently and move on. Three months of travel becomes one sentence. A secondary event becomes a brief mention. This isn’t laziness if the material doesn’t deserve full treatment. The balance shifts constantly through your novel. Show heavily in character-establishing scenes. Tell efficiently through transitional passages. Show again when emotional stakes peak. Tell when plot needs to advance rapidly. The rhythm of showing and telling creates the rhythm of the reading experience. Writers who follow the rule to the letter never find that rhythm. Every scene plays at the same slow speed, the book runs long, and the reader starts skimming exactly where the author worked hardest. I blame the teachers who handed them a slogan and called it a law.
What Is the Most Common Show-Don’t-Tell Mistake?
The most damaging mistake is doing both at once, and it’s the error I mark most often in a draft. A character’s action shows their psychology. You show the moment effectively. Then you add a paragraph explaining what the action reveals. That double coverage tells the reader you don’t trust them, and it breaks the spell you spent a page building by reminding them somebody is standing between them and the scene.
Trust your showing. If showing is clear, readers understand. If showing isn’t clear, the solution is better showing. Amateur writers often distrust readers because they distrust themselves. They’re not sure their showing is clear enough, so they add telling as backup. This weakens both. Showing loses power because telling undercuts it. Telling seems redundant because showing already communicated.
Instead of: “Her hands trembled as she read the letter. She was devastated by the news.” Cut the second sentence. The trembling hands already show it. Let them.
AI and the Telling Problem
If you write with AI tools, know this first: AI tells, relentlessly, and it will do it to every scene you hand it.
Ask AI to help with a scene and it’ll explain what characters are feeling instead of showing feelings through action and dialogue.
It’ll summarize events that deserve dramatization. It’ll tell readers what to think about moments that should speak for themselves. “She felt betrayed” instead of showing betrayal’s physical and behavioral manifestations. “He was angry” instead of showing anger through clenched jaw and bitten-back words and hands gripping the table edge.
Fighting this requires explicit instruction. “Show this scene through action, dialogue, and physical sensation. No internal summary statements. No telling readers what characters feel. Let behavior and reaction demonstrate emotion.” Even then, AI drifts toward telling. Training pulls it toward explanation. Review AI-assisted work for telling intrusions. Strip out summaries. Cut explanations. Keep dramatized moments. AI often buries decent showing under a layer of telling. The job is excavation. The Showing and Telling Handbook covers this in detail, including prompts for converting AI-generated telling into effective showing.
I use AI every day for transcripts, summaries and rough outlines, and I’d never hand it a scene to write. The telling problem is one reason why. A draft built on its prose reads like a report about a story, and writers who publish it that way are teaching readers to stop trusting them.
Going Deeper
For complete instruction on show/tell balance at novel scale, including scene-versus-summary decisions, backstory integration, pacing control, and the challenges of showing violence and emotional extremity, see the Showing and Telling Handbook. For examples of showing and telling in practice, see Show Don’t Tell and Showing and Telling. All available in my writing courses.
Show don’t tell survives because it’s easy to repeat and easy to enforce, and I think that’s all it has going for it. Writers deserve better than a slogan. Learn what each tool does, use the one the scene needs, and stop apologizing to your critique group for a sentence of summary that moves the story along.
