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?
The rest of the book is worked examples.
Why is the standard advice so useless?
Because show don’t tell gets repeated as a rule and almost never as a method.
Every writing group says it. Every editor writes it in the margin. Almost nobody explains what the writer is supposed to do differently on the next line, which leaves people either ignoring it or applying it indiscriminately until their prose is a series of camera directions.
The version that helps is not a rule. It is a question about who is doing the work. 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 is why showing feels more vivid. Not because it is more descriptive, but because the reader had to do something.
What do the failing sentences look like?
Ordinary. That is the difficulty. Here is a set of them:
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 is exactly why they survive drafts. They read fine and they do no work.
What is the test?
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, which 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 cannot 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 will not 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 one?
Work out what you saw when you wrote it.
This is the practical step and it works almost every time. When you wrote she was happy, there was something in your head. A specific person doing a specific thing. 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 will be stronger for not having been asserted.
If nothing was in your head, that is worth knowing too. It usually means the moment has not been imagined yet, and no amount of rewording will fix a scene that has not been thought through.
What about adverbs?
Less of a villain than the internet suggests, and 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, which is a real job.
Still, a stronger verb is usually better than propping up a weak one. Donna shunned his advances. David mastered the problem. I was so angry I almost quit, where almost is doing something the others are not, 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.
When should you tell?
When the material does not deserve the space. Three days passed is telling and it is 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 is not the point. Not every evaluation needs to be earned. Some are scaffolding.
Never at the moment that carries the weight. This is the only one I would defend as close to a rule. Whatever the scene exists for, that part gets shown, because that is the part the reader came for.
Show don’t tell is not bad advice. It is unfinished advice, and the unfinished half is the useful one.
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