Alexa Wilkerson

Writer and Editor

“Show Don’t Tell” and the Better Advice for Prose Writers

An open book with handwritten notes and a sprig of herbs lying in the middle.

“Show don’t tell” is good advice for specific situations, but it’s been taken to mean “always show, never tell”, and that’s not helpful. If you really want to paint with broad brushstrokes, then the better advice would be: Show more than tell. 

Showing and telling should both be tools in your writer’s toolbox. 

But why should we show more than tell? Because showing is the key to the reader’s emotional experience with your story. There are many posts and books out there that go over how to turn your telling into showing (like using active verbs instead of passive, for example, or eliminating “thought” verbs, or using concrete, specific details in your descriptions), but I think it’s important to fully digest why we’re making those changes and why the reasoning will push us to become better writers. 

It all comes down to emotion. 

Writing For Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias encourages writers to start thinking to themselves: “I’m in the emotion-delivery business, and my job is to evoke emotions in a reader.” 

Dialogue, theme, setting, pacing, character development, word choice, structure, POV, showing and telling. These are all tools a writer uses in varying proportions to best manipulate a reader’s emotions. The good news is that when a reader picks up a book, they’re willing to be manipulated. In fact, they hope to be. The tough news is that you have to deliver on a sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter basis. But that’s okay, because you’re a writer, dammit, and this struggle is where the art of the craft is. 

Showing is where the emotional complexities of our characters, theme, and plot can be revealed gradually without giving too much away too early and robbing engagement from the reader. It’s what makes the resolution and the journey satisfying. So you can see how much weight it carries and why we want more of that than telling. We’re trying to evoke emotion from the reader, not talk at them like we’re recounting a dream we had last night (yawn). And it’s easier to evoke emotion if we keep them curious. Engaged.

Part of revealing the story gradually through showing is planting evidence for a conclusion that you leave the reader to make themselves, or a conclusion that you will reveal later. 

Donald Maas in The Emotional Craft of Fiction writes, “The ingredient behind effective showing can be summed up in this word: subtext. When there’s a feeling we’re not being told, but it is evident anyway, that underlying feeling is the subtext. It’s the unspoken emotional truth.” And then a fandom is born and continues to thrive for decades after the show ended! Really, though. Subtext is an ingredient in showing, which fosters engagement, which makes the reader feel something. Sometimes passionately. Every story I love and keep coming back to in one form or another has that special place in my heart because of how it made me feel. 

Example

I’ll try to give a simple example here to illustrate subtext and reader engagement at work. Using setting and a couple action beats as an opportunity for subtext, let’s say a character and her sister arrive at their grandmother’s house. 

Character A remains standing in the corner when invited in, hugging herself, frowning at the green knitted blanket hanging over the couch that looks like the color of nausea. Character B walks easily into the living room, running her hand over the green blanket that reminds her of nature and wellness. 

In Character B’s perspective, she admires her grandmother’s craftiness. But it’s only in Character’s A perspective that we notice the store tag on the blanket. 

Who do we think has the better relationship with their grandmother, given the evidence? Which one seems more naïve or eager to see her grandmother in a certain light? What assumptions can we make about the grandmother? Might she be putting on a performance of being grandmotherly? 

The mental work the reader does here would be completely thwarted if the scene had started with “Hannah didn’t like her grandmother because she valued material wealth and appearances over forming a genuine connection with her family.” We can show that instead, over time, by filtering the world through the perspectives of our characters.

But I had mentioned that contrary to what “show don’t tell” asks us to do, telling isn’t something we should throw away. It can be a tool in its own right. 

Telling As a Tool

Telling is explaining, and explaining keeps people distant from what’s happening in the story. How many times has an “I love you” felt kinda meh in a story because that character hasn’t earned that confession by showing their love through their actions or making some sort of sacrifice? How many times have your eyes glazed over while reading the third or even second paragraph of an info dump? How many times, when talking about a book you just read, have you said “well, the first 80 pages were slow…” because it was all backstory? Or maybe a story is entirely forgettable because the telling leaves nothing to the imagination. 

Donald Maas writes, “Put on a page what a character feels and there’s a pretty good chance that, paradoxically, what the reader feels is nothing.”

However, telling has one thing on showing: efficiency. 

If a book only showed, then it could go on forever and ever. So a writer has to learn how to weave both showing and telling into the story to control the pacing and delivery of information. If you want subtext or you want something to be vague on purpose, then you’ll probably want to show. If you want to deliver information quickly and with clarity, then you might want to try telling. Does it need to make logical sense to understand the upcoming scene? Maybe tell. Is this transition unimportant to the story and you don’t want to linger? Try telling and see how it works! Ask your beta readers how it worked for them. 

Exercise

Still doubt that telling has its use? Go through a chapter of a book and highlight instances of telling in one color, and instances of showing in another. Do this with a few books in different genres and narrative styles. 

In a horror story, you might find that the color you chose for showing dominates by a major factor. Certainly, stating “Timothy is scared” would be ineffective in evoking fear in the reader. 

However, in literary fiction, you might be surprised by how much the color you chose for telling takes over the pages. Here, what propels the reader to the next page and the next chapter is the form, the artful prose, and the sheer depth of the exploration of flawed characters. 

This exercise is also helpful in taking away some of the intimidation of “show vs tell”. When you’re looking at it on a page, it seems really quite simple.

It’s all about balance. And practice. 

Next time you read a book and you find yourself moved, try to figure out how the author just evoked that feeling from you. Was it stated plainly, or was it shown through action? Was it stated plainly after a whole book’s worth of setup through subtext? Was it unexpected? What was the balance of showing and telling that led to it? Or, if you find your focus trailing off, try to figure out why. Then, when you’re editing your own work, you’ll have the tools you need to identify the weak points and make revisions. 

It’s okay (even expected) if the perfect balance of showing and telling doesn’t occur in the first draft. The Artful Edit by Susan Bell (highly recommended) talks a lot about the revisions that went into The Great Gatsby. You’ll find that his writing struggles are comfortingly familiar. Luckily, he certainly had a wonderful editor 🙂

Resources

For further reading/watching: 

References mentioned in the text: 

(All recommendations are unaffiliated. This post was reformatted and edited from my original post on Tumblr.)

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