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Show, don’t tell. It’s one of the most common pieces of writing and storytelling advice. You see it in notes on manuscripts, in reviews, given as feedback on films, even as advice for how a marketing campaign should work – “Don’t tell them it’s the best thing at removing grease. Show them that it’s the best thing at removing grease!’ All good. It’s useful advice. But it’s also wrong.
Show, don’t tell. It’s one of the most common pieces of writing and storytelling advice. You see it in notes on manuscripts, in reviews, given as feedback on films, even as advice for how a marketing campaign should work – “Don’t tell them it’s the best thing at removing grease. Show them that it’s the best thing at removing grease!’ All good. It’s useful advice. But it’s also wrong.
Or rather it is massively misunderstood and, like a lot of aphorisms, can lead you astray.
What does ‘show, don’t tell’ mean?
The phrase, apparently, originated with Anton Chekhov (of guns above the narrative mantelpiece fame), and as he reputedly put it: ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.’
The point being that you ‘seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.’ You provide details and let the audience or readers reach their own conclusions and build their own ideas of what is going on.
This applies not just for description, but also for exposition – where background information in inserted into a narrative so that the reader knows what is going on – and for character qualities, such as whether a character is cruel or kind.
How do you show the audience rather than tell them?
Simply, you show the audience by giving them the observable features and their results in the narrative.
In Chekhov’s more extended example, ‘you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.’ The glitter of the glass is the observable feature. It is the result of moonlight.
If you have a character who is impatient, rather than saying that they are impatient, you show the consequence of that impatience in their tapping their fingers on the desk. Those fingers and their tap-tap rhythm are the observable feature of the character’s impatience.
Observable results – that’s the essence of showing not telling.
Why show rather than tell?
Showing lets the audience build their own image, impression and understanding of what is happening. It engages their imagination, their reason and judgement. The image of the land under the light of the moon becomes a vivid collaboration between the reader and the words they are reading. The question of whether a character is cruel or kind rests with their own judgement.
It is a much richer way of communicating, one that rests on the author knowing and communicating not just something’s nature, but how people perceive and form images and judgements. It is also collaborative, in that the story is not given to the reader but built by them from the material provided by the author. This also means that different readers can have very different experiences of the same story. Just as different people have different experiences of the real world, and different opinions of other people’s behaviour and character, so they do with the events and characters in a story.
And all this is good. For the most part.
Nothing can just be itself
Because you are revealing the world through observable features, everything is held one step removed from what it is. You can’t just say that something is a certain way, you have to say that something else is a certain way, or doing a certain thing, in order to infer that the original thing is the way it is… And yes, this leads to all that richness and vividness, but can’t it just be what it is? If we say that the light glimmers on the glass, can’t we describe the light of the moon shining silver as it rolls through the ink dark sky? Similarly, you can’t just say that Lady Chrysanthemum swept into the room, fuming impatience, you have to go into the details of her expression, the way she is walking. Why might that be a bad thing? Well…
It can lead to endless gumph*
Showing means you have to unpack what could be a word or two into a multiple of words, or sentences, or paragraphs. Done well, this can be rich, and wonderful… or it can be smothering, leaving the audience desperate for a scene to be brief, direct, and clear. Just say that the room is dark already!
The problem of decompressed story telling
Showing decompresses a story. A story is a sequence of events. Decompressing a story shifts the story telling from that the events happened to how those events happened.
What does that mean? Well, lets look at a story and see:
A knight is given a quest to find a lost sword to slay a half-dead god by a spirit that speaks from a tree. The knight sets out, meeting the shade of a previous knight who went on the same quest who becomes their travelling companion. They travel across the land in search of the shade-knight’s squire who continued the quest. They reach the ruins of a castle on the edge of dreams, where they believe the sword is and the squire is trapped. But it turns out that the squire is not trapped but waiting, and the shade companion of the knight has been leading them here so that the knight can be sacrificed to restore the half dead god. What will happen next?
This is a story which exists only for the purpose of this example. Here it is told in a barebones format, similar to a synopsis or outline that you might read about a film or book, but it is still a story. The sequence of events is set out. You could turn it from a paragraph into a short story of ten pages. You would expand the story in places. Perhaps the moment the knight receives his quest would be given dialogue, description of the speaking tree and so on. As it it still a short story, the knight setting out and travelling until meeting the shade of the other knight is still just a sentence or two: ‘he set out, crossing the land as summer faded to autumn and then chilled to winter’. That encounter is unpacked into dialogue and description and so on. This is the process of decompression, where elements of the story are expanded with detail and specificity. If the same story were to be made into a ninety-thousand world novel it would be decompressed again. But..
You cannot and should not show everything
You need to get on with the story. Your audience want you to. They might be entranced with your prose, but at some point they will want the story to move at a pace. Both they and the story are going to demand that you do not decompress all events, that you do not show everything. They want to get to the ruined shrine on the island. That’s the part they have been waiting for, not the boat journey to the island. They might well want to know how the knight got there, and will be more than happy to be told ‘he came by boat to the island’. Tell me what I need to know and then show me what is important – that’s the key to story telling, knowing what to show and what to tell.
It is a rule that goes against how stories are told
‘A crow, having stolen a bit of meat, perched in a tree and held it in her beak. A Fox, seeing this, longed to possess the meat himself, and by a wily stratagem succeeded. “How handsome is the Crow,” he exclaimed, in the beauty of her shape and in the fairness of her complexion! Oh, if her voice were only equal to her beauty, she would deservedly be considered the Queen of Birds!” This he said deceitfully; but the Crow, anxious to refute the reflection cast upon her voice, set up a loud caw and dropped the flesh. The Fox quickly picked it up, and thus addressed the Crow: “My good Crow, your voice is right enough, but your wit is wanting.’
That’s Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow (https://www.aesopfables.com/), an example of both ancient storytelling, and what is considered the most elemental type of story. There is barely anything that could be called showing in there. It’s all telling. You could embellish, it of course, but you don’t need to. It’s all there. Aesop and much of human story telling seem to have no need to show, and they have done just fine. That tells us something – that ‘show, don’t tell’ is not a rule. It’s a stylistic preference – it’s how a section of people think writing should be.
Ah… goes the counter argument, but how much better would those stories be, how much more engaging and vivid if they showed rather than just told? Isn’t it just better? In some cases, maybe, but doesn’t unpacking all of the related details of Aesop’s fables take something from it? Doesn’t detailing all of the knight’s quest make the whole story indigestible?
Showing undoubtedly often is the best way of approaching writing, but not always. It is a tool, one that you have to use and understand and – more importantly – know when not to use, or it will cause you as much trouble as it solves.
Last thing…
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Edited by Greg Smith
Written without AI
