Don't Show, Period? When Telling Is the Right Choice

Few pieces of writing advice are repeated as often as show, don't tell. It is good advice for a specific problem: scenes that report feelings instead of letting the reader experience them. Applied to everything, it produces bloated books in which every walk across a room is dramatised and every piece of background arrives through awkward dialogue. This article looks at what the rule actually protects and when breaking it is the better choice.

What showing and telling actually are

Showing renders a moment through action, sensory detail and dialogue, so the reader draws the conclusion. Telling states the conclusion or summarises events. Neither is good or bad in itself. They are tools with different costs: showing is vivid but slow, telling is fast but distant.

Here is a short example written for this article. Telling: The captain was afraid of the signal. Showing: The captain played the signal a third time, then turned the speaker off and sat with her hand flat on the console, as if it might start again on its own. The second version takes three times as many words and gives the reader something to feel. If the captain's fear drives the next chapter, those words are well spent.

When telling is the right choice

• Passing time: Three weeks of repairs went by without incident. Dramatising each week would bore the reader and delay the story.
• Routine actions: She docked, cleared customs and found the hostel. Unless something happens during these steps, summarise them.
• Background the reader needs once: a short paragraph explaining how the colony's water rationing works is often clearer than six lines of characters explaining it to each other.
• Distance on purpose: some moments are more powerful when stated flatly, especially after a long build-up.
• Voice: a first-person narrator or an opinionated narrative voice tells constantly, and that is part of the pleasure.

Summary and scene: the real distinction

Many writing teachers find it more useful to talk about scene and summary rather than showing and telling. Scenes happen in something close to real time; summaries compress time. A novel alternates between them, and the rhythm of that alternation is a large part of pacing. A book made only of scenes feels exhausting; a book made only of summary feels like a synopsis.

Telling at the start and end of chapters

Chapter openings and endings are natural places for telling. An opening line that summarises where we are and how much time has passed orients the reader before the next scene begins. Original example: By the time the second harvest failed, the council had stopped meeting in public. One sentence covers months of change and raises a question the chapter can answer in scene.

Endings work in a similar way. After a long, dramatised confrontation, a short stated consequence can land harder than another round of action: Nobody spoke to her for the rest of the voyage. The reader fills that silence with everything the scene has already shown. Here telling does not replace showing; it completes it.

Science fiction has a special telling problem

Speculative fiction has to transfer more information than most genres: rules of physics, history, politics, technology. Writers who follow show, don't tell too strictly often push all of this into dialogue, which produces the familiar scene where two experts explain to each other something both already know. That is not showing; it is telling disguised as a scene, and readers notice.

A brief, confident passage of narration is usually more honest. Another original example: The relay stations had been silent for eleven years, and most people on the station had stopped thinking of Earth as a place that answered. Two sentences of telling, but they set the stakes and the mood of an entire community. Showing the same thing would take pages.

The real target: naming emotions you have already shown

The habit that show, don't tell really aims at is redundancy. Look at this example: He slammed the hatch hard enough to rattle the tools on the wall. He was furious. The second sentence adds nothing; the first already did the work. Worse, it tells the reader that the writer did not trust them to understand. Deleting such sentences is one of the fastest improvements in revision.

1. Search your draft for emotion words: angry, sad, afraid, relieved, nervous.
2. For each one, check whether the surrounding action already conveys the feeling.
3. If it does, delete the emotion word.
4. If it does not, decide whether the moment matters enough to show. If yes, write the action; if no, keep the telling and move on.

The question is never whether to show or tell. It is how much of the reader's attention this moment deserves.

A simple test for any passage

Ask what the reader should take away from the passage and how much it matters to the story. High importance and emotional weight favour showing. Low importance, large spans of time, or pure information favour telling. If you cannot decide, try writing the passage both ways and read them in context. The right version is usually obvious once it sits between the paragraphs around it.

It also helps to look at your draft from a distance. Mark scenes in one colour and summary in another, either on paper or with highlighting in your editor. Long stretches of one colour are a warning sign. Ten pages of uninterrupted scene may need a summary bridge to let the reader breathe; ten pages of summary may hide a moment that deserves to be dramatised. The balance will differ between a fast thriller and a reflective novel of ideas, but it should always be a choice rather than an accident.

Beta readers can confirm the result. If they skim a passage, it probably needs compressing. If they say they did not understand why a character changed, a summarised moment probably needed to become a scene.

Good writers tell all the time. They simply do it on purpose, in the places where speed and clarity serve the story better than immersion.

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Massimo Marino Author Editorial Team

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