Show, don’t tell is the most repeated instruction in fiction writing. Writing teachers, craft books and critique groups all recite it as if saying it louder counted as teaching it, and that habit annoyed me for years.
It used to be the advice I disliked most, because it meant nothing to me. I ignored it, since it was three words with no instruction inside them.
You’re telling too much was something I heard constantly in critique groups, never once with an explanation of what that was or what to do instead.
And I had an objection. It’s obviously easier to write that Sally felt angry than to describe her so that a reader concludes it. Does the showing version not take considerably more words for the same information? That objection deserves an answer, not a repetition of the rule, and this book is the answer. Telling pushes readers away. Showing pulls them in. Showing lets a reader imagine the story, and telling does the imagining for them.
What does show, don’t tell look like?
Side by side. That’s the only way the difference becomes usable. Telling says Mark was nervous about the job interview. Showing gives you damp prints left on his resume as he shuffles the pages for the third time, the receptionist’s smile landing like a spotlight, and his hand going to his tie knot again.
Telling says the house was old and creepy. Showing has paint peeling from the shutters like dried scabs, a porch sagging under rotting boards, and a door creaking somewhere inside on every gust. The book is built on pairs like that, chapter after chapter, because an abstract principle a writer can’t apply on a Tuesday is only a slogan. Those pairs were my favorite part to write, because every one of them is the explanation I wanted from a critique group and never got.
The book on this: Show Don’t Tell explains the most repeated instruction in fiction writing instead of repeating it, including where showing fails and how to find telling in your own draft.
Is showing always better than telling?
No, and a whole chapter exists to say so. Overdone, misdirected or applied mechanically, showing produces its own failures. The most common is over-describing. A beginning writer reads show, don’t tell as describe every movement, and you get a character reaching for a door handle with his right hand, grasping the cold metal between thumb and forefinger, and twisting it counterclockwise.
Nothing in that sentence needed showing. Only the significant actions do. A book that teaches a technique and never teaches its failure modes is producing writers who will overapply it. That’s how the advice got its reputation in the first place.
I think that’s the biggest failure in how this rule gets taught. Beginners get handed a hammer with no warning about their thumbs, and then the same critique groups that pushed the rule pile on them for bloated, over-described scenes the rule practically ordered them to write.
What’s purple prose?
Writing so ornamental that the reader becomes aware of reading.
It’s a failure where the language announces itself and you can feel the writer reaching for an effect. The term comes from Horace, who compared out-of-place ornate passages to purple cloth sewn onto plain fabric, a patch that draws the eye for all the wrong reasons. The distinction that matters is the one writers get wrong. Purple prose isn’t the same as vivid writing. Vivid writing uses precise, specific detail to put a reader inside a scene. Purple prose uses elaborate language to draw attention to itself. That difference is why the chapter sits next to the one on showing going wrong. Both are what happens when a writer applies a good principle without a stopping condition.
What’s interiority?
The inside of a character, and the hardest territory in the book. Every story exists in two places. The world outside the character and the world within. Actions, dialogue and sensory detail handle the outside, and the inside is where readers fall in love with somebody.
Interiority is thoughts, feelings, realizations, memories, and the running commentary a person keeps in their own head. It’s also the most misunderstood ground in fiction, because it sits exactly on the border between showing and telling and crossing to the wrong side is easy. That’s the chapter where the rule gets difficult, and it’s the reason a whole book on three words is justified.
How do you find telling in your own draft?
Systematically, because telling leaves tracks.
The revision chapter runs a series of passes instead of asking you to reread and sense it. The first is an emotion word hunt. Search the manuscript for words that name a feeling. Angry, sad, happy, afraid, excited, nervous, relieved, ashamed, proud, confused, devastated. Each one is a place where a state was announced instead of produced, and not all of them need changing. What matters is that you can now see them.
That’s the practical half of the book, and it’s why there’s an annotated scene in the appendix. Reading about showing and knowing what to do when you open your own file are different skills.
What is an info dump in fiction?
Dialogue is where I find the most telling in otherwise careful drafts, because writers relax once the quotation marks go up.
Data thrown at a reader because the writer decided it was necessary. The author believes the information has to be there and, instead of weaving it into the story, delivers it all at once. Every film that opens with narration is doing it. The scrolling text at the start of Star Wars is an information dump, before the film has begun. That’s front-loading exposition, and it’s the largest scale version of telling there is. The temptation is always backstory. Something happened before the story starts and the reader needs to know, so it gets delivered in a block. The chapter is about the alternatives, all of which are slower to write and considerably better to read.
I’ve got no sympathy for the opening chapter that exists to unload a world’s history before anything happens. The writer is protecting their research at the reader’s expense, and the reader is the one who closes the book.
Why do strong verbs beat adverbs?
Because a weak verb propped up by an adverb is telling in miniature. (More on a list book of strong verbs)
Most telling at sentence level is a general verb doing no work while a modifier explains what the verb should have conveyed. Replace the verb and the modifier becomes redundant. That’s the test the chapter gives you. Cut or replace the five weakest and see what happens to the paragraph.
That’s showing operating below the level people usually discuss it. The advice is normally given about scenes, and a great deal of the problem is in individual sentences where nobody is looking.
Where does dialogue fit in show, don’t tell?
On both sides. That surprises people.
There’s a chapter on telling in dialogue and a separate one on showing through it. Dialogue feels like showing by default, because characters are speaking, not a narrator explaining, and that assumption is exactly why so much telling hides there.
A character who announces what they feel, or explains the situation to somebody who already knows it, is telling with quotation marks around it. The reader notices, even when they can’t say what’s wrong.
Dialogue is where I find the most telling in otherwise careful drafts, because writers relax once the quotation marks go up. I enjoyed writing those two chapters more than almost any others, since this is the telling nobody warned me about either.
Splitting that into two chapters was deliberate. Finding telling in your dialogue is a different skill from using dialogue to show.
| Problem | What it looks like | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Named emotions | Angry, nervous, ashamed: a state announced | Search for emotion words, then decide which to change |
| Over-describing | Every movement of a hand on a door handle | Show only the significant actions |
| Purple prose | Ornate language that draws attention to itself | Use precise, specific detail |
| Info dump | Backstory delivered in one block | Weave the information into the story |
| Weak verb plus adverb | A modifier explaining what the verb should convey | Replace the verb; cut or replace the five weakest |
| Telling in dialogue | Characters announce feelings or explain what others know | Treat finding it and showing through dialogue as separate skills |
My take
Show, don’t tell is good advice delivered badly, and I resented it for years because nobody explained it. With a draft, I’d start on the weak verbs propped up by adverbs. Replace them and the modifiers fall away on their own. Then cut any opening chapter that exists to unload your world’s history. You’re protecting your research at the reader’s expense, and the reader shuts the book.
Does show, don’t tell work the same in every genre?
The principle does. The application doesn’t.
In thrillers and mysteries everything a reader notices has to feel like potential evidence. The job is showing enough that the reader builds theories and not so much that the answer becomes obvious. That makes every detail a calibration problem.
Other genres have their own traps and their own priorities about what a reader most needs to experience. The chapter works through five of them.
Handing a writer one universal rule and no genre guidance is another version of the problem this book exists to fix, and I’m proud that it refuses to do that. Writers deserve an explanation of the rules they’re judged by, and I’m tired of watching good ones quit because a critique group told them they were telling too much and never told them what to do about it.
Workshops told me I was telling too much and never said what to do instead. Show Don’t Tell explains the advice with more than a hundred before and after examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Purple prose, Wikipedia
- Purple Patch: Meaning and Origin Of The Phrase, The Phrase Finder
