Dave could see that Jim was hurt.
When I read a sentence like that, my thought is: what does that mean?
How does Dave know that Jim was hurt? And what does hurt mean anyway? Is Jim bleeding? Or is he crying because somebody hurt his feelings? Sentences like that are sloppy writing. The writer knew exactly what happened to Jim and kept it, and the reader gets handed a label where the scene should be.
Why is the standard show-don’t-tell advice so useless?
Because show don’t tell gets repeated as a rule and almost never as a method. Every writing group says it and every editor writes it in the margin, and almost nobody explains what the writer is supposed to do differently on the next line. I think that’s lazy teaching, and writers pay for it. They either ignore the advice or apply it to everything until their prose reads like a series of camera directions.
The version that helps is a question about who draws the conclusion. Telling means the author has already reached the conclusion and handed it over. Showing means the reader gets the evidence and reaches it themselves.
That’s why showing feels more vivid, and it has little to do with description. The reader had to do some of the work.
What do telling sentences look like?
Ordinary. That’s the difficulty. Here’s a set of them:
I get annoyed at the adverb witch hunts in writing groups, because they send writers after the wrong target while the telling sentences sit there untouched.
Dinner was delicious but smelled bad. He was terrified. My stepson was a spoiled brat. The hotel was romantic. She was happy. I was jealous of what Pete got for Christmas. Dave was uncomfortable. It was raining outside. Every one of those is telling. In each, the author is making an evaluation, a conclusion, or an observation about something instead of putting the something on the page. None of them is badly written in the sense of grammar or clarity. That’s exactly why they survive drafts, and it’s why they make me crazy. They read fine and they do no work, and a book full of them feels like a summary of a novel somebody forgot to write.
How do you test whether a line is showing or telling?
Ask what the sentence means, and see whether you can answer.
Jim was hurt. Hurt how? Bleeding, or crying? Those are entirely different scenes and the sentence covers both. That means the reader has been given a word instead of an event.
She was happy. Happy how? Relieved, triumphant, quietly content, manic? Each of those would look completely different on a face and the sentence has flattened all of it into a category. Concrete detail can’t produce this ambiguity. If you write what Jim’s hand was doing, the reader knows which kind of hurt it was without being told, and they won’t have to take your word for it.
The book on this: Show Don’t Tell is 21 chapters and over a hundred before-and-after examples on the one piece of advice everybody repeats and nobody explains.
How do you fix a telling sentence?
Work out what you saw when you wrote it.
The practical step works almost every time. When you wrote she was happy, there was something in your head. A person doing something you could see. You compressed it into an evaluation because the evaluation was faster.
Go back for the thing you compressed. Put that on the page. The evaluation then happens where it belongs, which is in the reader, and it’ll be stronger for not having been asserted. If nothing was in your head, that’s worth knowing too. It usually means you haven’t imagined the moment yet, and no amount of rewording will fix a scene you haven’t thought through.
The test and the fix in order: question the label, recover the image behind it, and let the reader draw the conclusion.
When is an adverb acceptable in fiction?
The adverb is less of a villain than the internet suggests, and it’s worth being precise about.
There are instances where adverbs make sense. Donna utterly rejected his advances. David completely understood the problem. I was so angry I nearly quit. In each of those the adverb intensifies or amplifies, a real job.
Still, a stronger verb is usually better than propping up a weak one. (More on 1,000 Strong Verbs for Fiction Writers) Donna shunned his advances. David mastered the problem. I was so angry I almost quit, where almost is doing something the others aren’t, because it qualifies the degree of the action. The larger problem is redundancy. A great many adverbs state something the verb already contains, and those come out with nothing lost. I get annoyed at the adverb witch hunts in writing groups, because they send writers after the wrong target while the telling sentences sit there untouched.
My take
Hunt the telling sentences and leave most adverbs alone. A line like Dave could see that Jim was hurt gives the reader your conclusion and no evidence. Go back to what you pictured and put that on the page. If you didn’t picture anything, you haven’t imagined the scene yet. Cut adverbs that repeat the verb and keep the ones doing a job. The adverb witch hunts in writing groups aim at the wrong target.
When should you tell instead of show?
When the material doesn’t deserve the space. Three days passed is telling and it’s correct. Showing it would be a chapter nobody wants.
When you need pace. Showing is slow by design. A book that shows everything has no gears.
When the conclusion isn’t the point. Not every evaluation needs to be earned. Some are scaffolding.
Never at the moment that matters most. This is the only one I’d defend as close to a rule. Whatever the scene exists for gets shown, because the reader came for it.
| Situation | Tell or show | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The material doesn’t deserve the space | Tell | Three days passed is correct. Showing it would be a chapter nobody wants. |
| You need pace | Tell | Showing is slow by design. A book that shows everything has no gears. |
| The conclusion isn’t the point | Tell | Not every evaluation needs to be earned. Some are scaffolding. |
| The moment that matters most | Show | The reader came for it. This is close to a rule. |
Show don’t tell gets passed around as a slogan by people who couldn’t explain it if you asked. The advice is only half finished, and the writers who get hurt are the beginners who hear it a hundred times and never once get told how to do it.
Show Don’t Tell is the book where I finally explain that advice. It explains that telling gives readers your conclusions and showing gives them the evidence, with more than a hundred before and after examples.
