“Show, don’t tell.”

It’s the rule hammered into writers from the internet, their critique partners, their agents and editors; it’s so commonly repeated and shouted, written in red pen and scrawled in manuscript margins, that the phrase itself has started to lose meaning. And perhaps the most frustrating thing for most new or beginning writers, is that the rule is never clearly explained.

Show Don’t Tell has become a stone-chiseled commandment that is supposed to be understood by all who put pen to paper, but ultimately, it’s not quite so self-explanatory as one would hope. In this post, I’ll simply and easily break down Show Don’t Tell and show you how to apply it in your work.

It’s All About Feeling

At its most basic, Show Don’t Tell is a ‘Golden Rule’ of writing that is meant to encourage writers to alter their style of prose to feature more of what I call ’empathic description’. This is my own personal way of breaking down Show Don’t Tell, and I’ll explain it through some examples below:

Shaun stepped outside. It was a hot day, and a scorching wind tumbled down the dry street.

This sentence probably sounds just fine. It’s describing a hot day, it’s describing the wind and the fact that the street is dry. But it’s not really doing anything. In order to get the full effect of the sentence, the reader is forced to draw on their own experiences of ‘hot days’ to trigger their own response.

Show Don’t Tell is a way of altering this ‘static description’ and turning it into something that the reader can associate with more easily. This what I call ’empathic description’, because it creates empathy between the character and the reader, allowing the reader to feel what the character is going through. Let me explain:

Shaun stepped outside, sweat beading along his forehead. Harsh sunlight beat down on his cracked lips, and the dry wind tugged at his clothes, sucking every drop of moisture from the cotton.

This sentence is probably going the other way, towards too much description, but it aptly proves my point. Rather than simply telling the reader that the day is hot, I’ve utilized some more personal descriptions and am effectively showing them the scene. Now, the reader can feel their own lips chapping with the heat, they can feel the sweat along their forehead, and the wind drying out their clothes.

This is showing the reader something, painting a more complete picture, and in the same instance, triggering their own empathic response.

Let’s try another, more action-oriented scene:

She threw herself into a dive, pulsing the trigger on her handgun, the bullets smashing through the glass window.

That sounds fairly nice. There’s things happening, guns firing. But it feels a little too ordinary – nothing distinctive is going on here. We could probably do better:

She threw herself into a dive, her bones jarring as she slammed into the hard ground. The handgun rocked her shoulder back, each shot smashing through the window, jagged shards of glass raining down onto the city street below.

Now, even if our reader has never been in a high-octane fight in their life, we can feel the character’s body reacting with the fight. Expanding the description of the glass window to encompass the street also allows us to inject further scene-building information that wasn’t clear before.

Some Caveats

Like almost everything in writing, use Show Don’t Tell in moderation. If every scene is described like an intricate painting, then you’ll eventually bog your reader down with far too much description.

You want to show important things; this is most often done in showing a scene, where you might show or feel the wind, temperature, street noise etc. Show and feel are interchangeable here – don’t assume that merely painting a scene is the right way to go. Personally, I opt for ’empathic description’ more often, because it draws the reader into the story, rather than placing them as an outsider viewing a piece of artwork.

Use the technique in moderation, keeping some areas of your book more fluid than others. Varying your prose is important to keep the readers interested.

That’s all for now.

If you have anything to say about Show Don’t Tell, please feel free to comment below. Thanks for reading!