I was on a call with an editing client this week, walking her through my feedback on the latest draft of her novel â a psychological thriller about a woman who returns to her coastal hometown after her estranged sister goes missing.
There was one pivotal scene in the middle of the book where the protagonist confronts her mother for the first time in a decade. This was supposed to be a huge emotional turning point, and the entire novel had been leading up to it.
But on the page, it fell flat.
The scene was nearly all dialogue, and while the characters were articulating their emotions, we didnât feel the weight of them.
I told my client that she needed to incorporate more of the narratorâs interiority throughout that scene. How do her motherâs comments strike her? What memories pass through her mind as sheâs face-to-face with her again?
The author paused, then said hesitantly, âBut wouldnât that be telling the reader stuff instead of showing it to them? I was trying to avoid thatâŠâ
I hear some version of this from clients all the time. Because âshow, donât tellâ has been drilled so deeply into every writerâs head that they fear any line of narrative interiority will be flagged as âtellingâ and therefore read as amateurish.
But hereâs whatâs fundamentally misunderstood about this common advice:
Showing isnât always better than telling. In fact, sometimes telling is exactly what your story needs.
So Iâm on a mission to reframe âshow donât tellâ as âshow and tell.â Your story needs both, and your job is to figure out how to balance the two effectively.
Letâs talk about how to do just that.
Where âshow, donât tellâ comes from
The principle is often attributed to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who famously said:
âDonât tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.â
Boiled down, the advice is meant to encourage writers to use sensory detail and action to convey elements of the story, rather than relying on bland, straightforward descriptions.
Showing immerses us in the characterâs environment and experience, allowing us to infer things for ourselves. Telling, by contrast, is where the narrator informs us about something rather than putting us inside of it.
For example, we can be told a character is angry. Or, you can show us how that anger manifests: what it actually looks and feels like in their body.
But hereâs where writers get tripped up: the advice has been so aggressively drummed into us that itâs often misapplied or taken to extremes. It does not mean you can never tell the reader something.
In fact, without any telling, your story will likely be missing key contextual details, character intent, and emotional depth, like in my clientâs manuscript.
But how do you know when to show and when to tell?
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