Tell, Don't Show

This post was pulled from the old NRW archive and may be out of date.

We all know the famous saying “show, don’t tell,” but is that really good writing advice? Today, we’re going to figure it out and explore the assumptions most people make when they’re told this.

So let’s get into it!

Let’s first establish what exactly this saying means. Show, don’t tell is a piece of advice writers give each other often, intending to mean don’t tell your readers the character is sad, show them it. Take these two different examples:

“The lighting outside scared the boy.”

“Lightning struck again, and the boy threw back the covers, his heart racing as he ran to the door.”

Quite the difference, huh? Writers use show, don’t tell in order to evoke emotions in their readers. There’s nothing poetic in the first example, it’s just a simple fact that he is scared. But the thing is, I’m telling in the second example as well. Because that is exactly what prose is. It’s telling your readers things.

Did you know the saying of show, don’t tell is more commonly used as advice for screenwriters? (LaurieWritesStuff). That’s because, in a visual medium, writers can actually show the audience that emotion instead of a character just telling the audience what they mean. You can’t show in novel writing because the prose is all telling. LaurieWritersStuff posted on Reddit a very compelling discussion of this very topic, saying they prefer to use “Illustrate, don’t explain.”

It’s the same principle but takes out the need to think of your book as “showing” because we cannot do that as novel writers. We tell our stories.

Andrzej Sapkowski, author of The Witcher, said this about writing his books, “I just write words, put the letters in the right order. But when I write I don’t see anything, I don’t imagine anything.” This is because when it comes down to it, novels are not a visual medium. We’re telling our stories, not showing them.

Which is why the saying show, don’t tell is incorrect when it comes to writing. You should not be afraid to tell in your stories. Because that is exactly how we write our stories.

However, the principle of the idea in show, don’t tell, is a good lesson. Which is why I like what LaurieWritersStuff says about it, “Illustrate, don’t explain.” It fits better with the written medium. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also bring up the issues a lot of new writers face when given this advice…

Not knowing when to tell.

Let’s say that you’re given the advice to show, don’t tell when you first start writing your book. You believe that everything in your book needs to be shown then…right?

Wrong!

This couldn’t be more wrong. There’s such a thing as purple prose for a reason. Not everything needs to have some drawn-out prose attached to it. The main issue is that you don’t have to show every single little detail. For example…

“Jak woke up in the morning and got out of bed, made the bed, got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a jacket, brushed his teeth and his hair, then walked down the stairs and ate breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast.”

This just goes on and on and on. We don’t need all these little details muddling up the prose. Because they’re useless. If it’s not important to the story or drives the story forward in any way, you don’t need to focus so heavily on it.

“Jak got ready for the day.”

This is the same idea without every minor detail. Take this example for The Witcher:

“It was hot but the man had a black coat thrown over his shoulders” (Sapkowski 5).

We’re being told it’s hot outside. But…why can’t this be shown? Surely we can try!

“The man wore a black coat over his shoulders despite the sweat beading down his face and the flush of his skin.”

It’s fine, but it’s unnecessary. The point of the scene isn’t to showcase that it’s hot outside. The point of this scene is to introduce our main character and the conflict that arises from the people of the town he is in.

The downfall a lot of new writers make when given this advice is then thinking that they cannot outright tell the readers anything, they must use purple prose and over-the-top flowery language to spin circles around the idea without simply telling us what the idea is.

You don’t always need “sweat beading down his face and the flush of his skin” when “it was hot” conveys the same exact thing.

So it’s okay to simply explain what’s going on. Dancing around the issue every single time can be frustrating.

Works Cited

Gravemaster. “The Witcher Author on Netflix Adaptation: ‘I Don’t Care What Is Done to My Character.’” Redanian Intelligence, 5 May 2022, redanianintelligence.com/2019/11/02/the-witcher-author-on-the-netflix-adaptation-i-dont-care-what-is-done-to-my-character/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

LaurieWritesStuff. “R/Writing on Reddit: The Problem with ‘Show, Don’t Tell.’” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18gtrdp/the_problem_with_show_dont_tell/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

neotropic9. “R/Writing on Reddit: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Explained.” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/fs9a18/show_dont_tell_explained/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

Sapkowski, Andrzej. Witcher: The Last Wish. Translated by Danusia Stok, Illustrated Ed. ed., Orbit, 2021.