I’ve heard “show, don’t tell” more times than I can count. Most of the time I heard it without fully understanding it. And for a long time, I followed it wrong, cutting every narrative summary I could find and replacing it with scene, which made my drafts slower and longer without making them better.

The real principle is more nuanced than the phrase suggests. And there’s a version of following it too literally that’s just as damaging as ignoring it.

Let me try to explain what it actually means.

What “Telling” Actually Is

Telling is when the writer steps in and delivers a conclusion to the reader directly.

She was nervous. The room felt threatening. He was the kind of man who couldn’t be trusted.

These lines aren’t wrong, they can be used effectively. But they hand the reader a finished interpretation rather than an experience. The reader receives the conclusion without going through the process of reaching it.

Telling has its place. Transitional sentences. Time compression. Background information that would take too long to dramatise. When a scene has done its emotional work and the writer needs to move forward, telling is often the right tool.

The problem is when telling replaces showing in moments that matter, when the writer summarises an emotion that should be felt, or states a character trait that should be demonstrated.

What “Showing” Actually Is

Showing is when the writer creates the conditions for the reader to reach the conclusion themselves, through action, dialogue, sensory detail, and observed behaviour.

Instead of: She was nervous. Try: She checked her phone twice before she reached the door, then again on the step.

Instead of: He was the kind of man who couldn’t be trusted. Try: He smiled at the waiter. Asked him his name. And then, not five minutes later, snapped at him in front of the table.

The reader draws the conclusion: nervous, untrustworthy. But they draw it themselves, from evidence. That’s a fundamentally different reading experience. It feels real in a way that told information doesn’t.

The Three Things That Show

Action. What your character does is more revealing than what you tell us about them. A character who locks the door every time they enter a room is telling us something. A character who can’t make eye contact during a conversation about money is telling us something. You don’t have to name the feeling, the action names it.

Dialogue. What characters say and how they say it reveals character without the author stepping in to interpret. The character who deflects every personal question with a joke. The character who can’t stop interrupting. These aren’t told to us, we observe them.

Sensory detail. The specific physical details of a scene anchor the reader in a felt experience. Not “the room felt threatening”, but the overhead light buzzed, the window was painted shut, and the chair across the desk was positioned so the sun was directly in her eyes. The reader assembles the atmosphere from the particulars.

The Most Common Telling Mistake: Emotion

The place I see telling misused most often, and where I still catch myself doing it, is emotion.

She felt devastated. He was overcome with joy. A wave of guilt washed over her.

These are telling statements about emotional states. They’re also some of the weakest sentences in fiction, because emotion is the thing readers most want to feel directly, not have reported to them.

The alternative isn’t to describe the emotion more elaborately, it’s to render the physical, behavioural, and situational experience of it:

She sat in the car for forty minutes after she got home. Didn’t take off her coat.

He laughed too loudly at something she said, and then looked quickly away.

She kept starting sentences and stopping them.

The reader knows what these people are feeling. More importantly, they feel it with them.

There’s a separate issue that often gets conflated with show-don’t-tell: stative constructions. Sentences like He was tall or She seemed tired or The building looked old aren’t exactly telling, they’re just weak. They describe states rather than events. They drain energy from the prose.

The fix isn’t always to show more. Sometimes it’s to choose more active, specific language:

He had to duck through the doorframe. She’d been awake since two. The building had been a factory once. You could tell from the high windows, the loading bay doors someone had long since bricked over.

The information is the same. The prose is alive.

When to Tell

This is the part “show, don’t tell” usually leaves out.

Telling is the right choice when:

  • You need to move time forward quickly. “Three weeks passed” is more elegant than three weeks of dramatised scenes.
  • The information is background, not story. The reader needs context, not experience.
  • Showing would be slower and less clear than telling. If it takes you ten pages to show something you could say in a sentence, the reader isn’t getting more from the scene, they’re just waiting longer.

The skill is knowing which moments deserve to be shown, the emotionally significant ones, the character-defining ones, the ones where the reader should be in the room, and which can be handled economically.

A Quick Test

For any sentence where you’re telling an emotion or a character trait: ask whether a reader who didn’t have that sentence would miss the information, or just miss the shortcut.

If removing it means the reader loses something essential that you haven’t shown elsewhere: show it somewhere else.

If removing it means the reader has to actually watch the character behave and draw their own conclusion: remove it and trust them.

Writing Desk tip: The AI Editor’s chapter review mode flags filter words and stative constructions alongside other prose-level issues, not to make every decision for you, but to point you at the sentences worth reconsidering. It’s a first pass, not a verdict.

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