One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to “show, don’t tell.” It’s true that many new writers struggle with their balance of showing and telling, usually telling what they ought to show. But the advice to “show, don’t tell” is far too simplistic. If you want to become a skilled writer, you’ll need to know when to show and when to tell. Here is how I would rephrase this common writing wisdom: “Tell what the reader needs to know, but show what the reader needs to experience for themselves.” My version may not be as pithy, but I find it more helpful.

To learn when to show and when to tell, you first need to have a firm grasp on the difference between showing and telling.

What Is Showing and Telling?

Showing and telling are two different methods for depicting plot events. Showing is when you directly depict the action with revealing descriptions, character actions, and direct dialogue and thoughts. Telling is when you summarize or describe the action from a distance. The difference between telling and showing is easier to recognize with some examples:

• Telling: I was sad to see him go.
  • Showing: Tears welled in my eyes as I watched Jeffery board the plane.
• Telling: I told her to meet me in the library and that I’d tell her everything.
  • Showing: “Meet me in the library at two o-clock,” I whispered into the receiver. “I’ll tell you everything. I just can’t do it here.”
• Telling: The crew were called on deck to fight the storm.
  • Showing: I awoke to the clang of a frantic iron bell and someone yelling “all hands on deck!” A wall of thick drops hit me as I emerged from below. Someone whose face I couldn’t recognize through the downpour handed me a soaked lifeline. I moved quickly to tie the rope around my middle as I strained to make out the captain’s orders.

Showing is the most immersive way to depict a scene, but telling is a lot faster. As a writer, you should be able to recognize when you are showing and when you are telling. To be a skilled writer, you should be able to experiment and determine whether showing or telling serves a scene better.

How to Practice

To hone that skill, take a sample of your writing. Highlight each sentence with one colour for showing and another for telling. Now, some sentences, especially complex sentences, aren’t distinctly telling or showing. Sometimes it’s a mix of both and other times the distinction is unclear. Don’t freak out if you can’t fit every sentence into a neat category. For this exercise, just focus on the sentences that are clearly one or the other.

Once you’ve marked your sentences as showing or telling, take a couple clear examples of each and rewrite them to the opposite form. Don’t be judgemental just yet about whether telling or showing is better. Simply compare the telling and showing version of each sentence and identify how the two forms change the reader’s experience. You can even write down the effects of showing and telling in a list, as I find that writing ideas down helps me process them at a deeper level. This exercise can help you strengthen your awareness of the specific effects of showing and telling so that you can consciously wield them as intentional writing tools. Just like the reader, me telling you how showing and telling works won’t be enough. To sharpen your skills, you’ll need to experience the difference between showing and telling in your own writing.

Of course, you will eventually need to judge whether a sentence is better told or shown. As I’ve already mentioned, the key benefit of showing is immersion and the key benefit of telling is speed. Immersion is often more important than brevity. There are some situations, though, where it’s beneficial to prioritize speed. Let’s cover showing first.

When You Should Show a Scene

Again, here’s how I rephrase the common writing advice: “Tell what the reader needs to know, but show what the reader needs to experience for themselves.” Readers read books to experience a story, not to be told facts like a history textbook.

The scenes that are central to the story’s plot or the main character’s development should primarily be shown, not told. To figure out whether a scene is central to the plot, you can use your story’s driving narrative question as a guide.

Using the Driving Narrative Question as a Guide

Your story’s beginning should pose a question that the middle explores and the ending answers. We call that question the driving narrative question. Will Harry Potter survive and defeat Lord Voldemort? Or what about Alice – will she find her way through Wonderland and make it safely home? Will Frodo destroy the One Ring and save Middle Earth? These are the driving narrative questions that give stories shape and motivate readers to keep reading.

Most of your scenes should serve to progress the driving narrative question, as deviating too far from that question can bore readers, making them forget why they want to keep reading (you can learn more about the broader importance of the driving narrative question in this post).

When it comes to showing and telling, all of the key moments that serve to progress the driving narrative question should primarily be shown, not told. The reader is here to experience the story, not to be told facts at an arm’s length. Showing the reader key scenes of plot development is how you immerse the reader in the story.

Using Character Development as a Guide

You may also come across scenes that progress character development more than plot. Usually, the character development intimately ties in to the plot. For example, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo must learn how to become the leader of his own quest to succeed in his mission and keep the ring safe from those who would be tempted by it. He needs to grow as a person (or as a hobbit, I suppose) to make progress toward answering the driving narrative question.

That being said, there are some scenes that serve to develop the characters rather than the plot. It is very important that you show those moments of character development as well, particularly when it will influence the protagonist’s choices and affect the plot down the road.

So, as you are editing your work, ask yourself if the scene is central to the plot or character development. If it is, make sure you show, not tell, the key actions and moments in the scene.

Keep in mind, though, that every scene will have a mix of some showing and telling sentences. That’s normal. In fact, it would be jarring to switch from only telling sentences in one chapter to only showing in another. But the sentences that depict key moments of plot and character development should mostly show, not tell, so that readers can experience the important moment for themselves.

When You Should Tell a Scene

Telling Peripheral Events to Quickly Get Back to Showing the Good Stuff

The reader will inevitably need to know about events that aren’t central to the plot. Again, if you deviate too far from the driving narrative question, you will bore the reader, even if the events seem exciting on the surface. (Again, check out this blog post to learn why.) When a reader needs to know about an event, but the event doesn’t significantly progress the plot, you should tell the scene, not show it. Quickly telling these extraneous events allows you to get back to showing the good stuff as soon as possible.

Patrick Rothfuss has a short scene in his novel The Wise Man’s Fear that brilliantly demonstrates how to quickly tell extraneous events to get back to showing the main action.

My curiosity was also glad to take the sea route. I had never been on any water larger than a river. My only real concern was that I might become bored with nothing but wind, waves, and sailors for company.

Several unfortunate complications arose during the trip. In brief, there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck, although not in that order. It also goes without saying that I did a great many things, some heroic, some ill-advised, some clever and audacious.

Over the course of my trip I was robbed, drowned, and left penniless on the streets of Junpui. In order to survive I begged for crusts, stole a man’s shoes, and recited poetry. . . . However, as these events have little to do with the heart of the story, I must pass them over in favor of more important things. Simply said, it took me sixteen days to reach Severen. A bit longer than I had planned, but at no point in my journey was I ever bored.

Chapter Fifty-Three: The Sheer

I limped through the gates of Severen ragged, penniless, and hungry.

The scene before chapter fifty-three is entirely telling. If Rothfuss had shown all these events, they would have filled chapters upon chapters. Those chapters would have been full of adventure and excitement. They would have also been boring scenes because they wouldn’t have been relevant to the plot. Instead, Rothfuss brilliantly chose to quickly tell the reader what happened so that he could get back to showing plot-relevant action right away in chapter fifty-three. I love this scene because the narrator goes out of his way to explain why he is skimming over these exciting events. It’s a little lesson on storytelling within a story.

Deciding Whether to Show or Tell Sentence by Sentence

So far, we’ve been looking at showing and telling from a wide, scene-level lens. I mentioned above that, even in primarily showing scenes, there will inevitably be some telling sentences. In this last section, we’ll quickly cover how to make the call to show or tell sentence by sentence.

Again, the decision comes down to asking yourself whether it would be better for the reader to quickly know or slowly experience the content of the sentence. The answer to that question is entirely situational, so we’ll look at a couple common cases.

Introducing Characters and Setting

Scenes that introduce new characters and settings will contain more telling than other scenes. There is a degree to which telling is necessary in these introductions, but the telling sentences should be incorporated with shown action to keep the scene engaging. Take this example from Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. I’ve underlined the showing sentences and left the telling sentences blank.

The boy is the son of the fortune-teller. He has reached an age that brings an uncertainty as to whether this is something to be proud of, or even a detail to be divulged, but it remains true.

He walks home from school toward an apartment situated above a shop strewn with crystal balls and tarot cards, incense and statues of animal-headed deities and dried sage. (The scent of sage permeates everything, from his bedsheets to his shoelaces.)

Today, as he does every school day, the boy takes a shortcut through an alleyway that loops behind the store, a narrow passage between tall brick walls that are often covered with graffiti and then whitewashed and then graffitied again.

Today, instead of the creatively spelled tags and bubble-lettered profanities, there is a single piece of artwork on the otherwise white bricks.

It is a door.

The boy stops. He adjusts his spectacles to focus his eyes better, to be certain he is seeing what his sometimes unreliable vision suggests he is seeing.

The haziness around the edge sharpens, and it is still a door. Larger and fancier and more impressive than he’d thought at first fuzzy glance.

He is uncertain what to make of it.

In this passage, the reader is told that the boy (whose name, we learn later, is Zachary) is the son of a fortune teller, that he attends school, and that he’s grown enough to start being aware of complex social dynamics. The narrative then switches to showing the boy’s route home through alleyways on this particular day. We’ve switched from knowing at a distance to seeing in the moment.

Since Zachary’s interactions with these mystical doors is a key element of the plot, Morgenstern is introducing the character Zachary through a key plot event. Seeing how the boy responds to the door reveals a lot about his character that the narrator never directly states. We learn that Zachary is observant, curious, and has an excitable imagination. These are Zachary’s most defining characteristics, yet the author doesn’t spoon-feed them to the reader. She simply lets the reader observe them on their own.

On the other hand, showing the audience that Zachary’s mother is a fortune teller and that he attends school would require adding scenes that aren’t relevant to the plot. That is why those facts, as important as they are, were better told, not shown.

Depicting Action

Action scenes will (or, at least, should) contain a higher ratio of showing than telling. Still, even within intense moments, the reader will sometimes benefit from being told what the setting is and other relevant tidbits that add flavour to the action. Here’s another example from Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. Again, I’ve underlined the showing sentences and left the telling sentences unmarked.

Mirabel pulls the door open and instead of the far wall and the cardboard boxes there is a cavern lined with lanterns. This in between has no stairs; the elevator door waits opposite, farther away than should be possible.

Zachary steps around to the back of the door. From behind it is a standing frame. He can see Mirabel through it, but when he comes back to the front there is the cavern and the elevator again, clear as day.

“Magic,” he mutters under his breath.

“Ezra, I’m going to ask you to believe in a lot of impossible things but I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from using the m-word.”

“Sure,” Zachary says, thinking that the m-word doesn’t explain everything that’s happening right now anyway.

“Help me with him, would you?” Mirabel asks, moving toward Dorian. “He’s heavy.”

Together they lift Dorian, each taking an arm. Zachary has played this game with many an overly intoxicated companion but this is different, the sheer dead weight of a completely unconscious rather tall man. He still smells good. Mirabel has the superior upper-body strength but together they manage to keep Dorian upright, his scuffed wingtip shoes dragging along the floor.

[. . .]

They carry Dorian across the cavern to the elevator.

Behind them there is a noise and Zachary belatedly thinks he should have closed the door.

“Do you trust me, Ezra?” she asks.

“Yes,” Zachary answers without taking the time to consider the question.

“Someday I’m going to remind you that you said that,” Mirabel says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a small metal object and it takes Zachary a moment to realize it’s a handgun. The small fancy sort that a femme fatale might tuck into a garter belt in a different sort of story.

Mirabel lifts the gun and points it back through the open door and shoots the lantern where it sits on its stack of cardboard boxes.

Zachary watches as the lantern explodes in a shower of glass and oil and the flames catch and grow, feasting on cardboard and wallpaper and paintings and then his view is obscured by the elevator doors as they close and then they are descending.

This scene has much more showing than the scene where we first met Zachary. The passage’s main telling interlude reveals Zachary’s thoughts through free indirect style. It contextualizes the reader’s experience of the events as if they were seeing it through Zachary’s perspective, even though the narrative is in third person.

Morgenstern could have shown us Zachary carrying his drunken friends in a flashback. But that flashback would have completely derailed the scene’s building tension and added a lot of irrelevant information. While action scenes should mostly be showing, it’s still necessary for there to be some tasteful telling details.

Using Telling for Effect: Creating Intentional Distance

Occasionally, you can use the distance that telling evokes to make a scene more immersive. I know, I know. That sounds counter-intuitive. But compare these two passages:

• Showing: As the sun crested the hill and spilled in through the crack in the curtains, mama’s shaking stilled and she released her final breath.
• Telling: By the time the sun rose, mama was dead.

Witnessing someone’s death can cause emotional shock. In moments of shock, people often feel detached from the events happening around them. Using sparse details and telling the events in a distant way can help better simulate the protagonist’s shock. Sometimes telling can better reflect the protagonist’s emotional state and the weight of events than drawn-out showing would.

Summing Up

Instead of just telling you to “show, don’t tell,” I hope this post has shown you how to use showing and telling effectively. Showing brings the reader closer to the events, which usually makes the text more immersive. But telling is much faster. It can let the audience know necessary things without slowing down the action. In some situations, creating emotional distance can actually make the scene more impactful. Just remember to tell what the reader needs to know, but show what the reader needs to experience for themselves.