The problem with "show, don't tell"

When I hear the phrase “Show, Don’t Tell,” I honestly want to scream. I’ve seen more people get their books off track by following this advice than any other.

To know how misguided this advice is, all you have to do is open up any award-winning novel or memoir. What will you find in there? A whole lot of telling.

In fact, telling information in your book is often richer and more emotionally affecting than showing. Let me give you a very short sample from the memoir Honestly, She Doesn't Live Here Anymore, written by Pamela Wick, a former student of mine. (This memoir comes out next year.) Here are just two paragraphs of good writing that do no showing: 


Though I remain calm on the exterior for the most part, inside I am a hurricane. I am turbulent and unsteady. At times when I am unable to remain calm on the exterior, my polite, agreeable persona gets invaded by physical manifestations of fear, and I have a panic attack. Right in the middle of my day. I break out in a sweat, my heart beats like a jazz drum, and thoughts of ‘what if people notice me’ race through my mind. I want to escape, but it’s impossible.


Now that Robin and I are divorcing, panic attacks are normal. I am fear-filled. It feels as though my sadness has morphed into a kind of despair. An emotional changing of the guard. I’ve never lived alone before. Will I meet someone else? Should I get a dog? With my fear, there remains, though, a residue of sorrow, so it gives it an extra dimension, as if plain old fear weren’t enough. 

In this sample, Pamela does lots of telling. And what is the end result? A chunk of emotionally affecting prose that is a pleasure to read.



I strongly suggest you start looking at the prose of literary novelists and memoirists. They are not following the advice “Show, don’t tell” the way it is explained in so many articles and blogs. Writing “experts” are so often giving suggestions that simply don’t hold up in the real world. They are repeating what they’ve heard without any question or analysis and are completely misinterpreting what “Show, don’t tell” really means.


Almost everyone takes this advice out of context and applies it to all aspects of writing, to the extent that this incredibly misunderstood tip is now applied to make otherwise good writing much worse.



In the event that you want to understand the very specific circumstance in which this advice holds true, it is this: “Don’t tell your events. Show them in the form of a scene.”



Here is a sample of text in which this advice should be applied because the writer is describing a lot of things happening:


I went out for a jog and near the lake, I ran into my ex, which stirred up a lot of old feelings. Two days later, he called me but it was a bad time because I was on a call with my boss. We met up three days later at a restaurant where he confessed that he was married. I was devastated and decided I’d block him from all my social media accounts. A week later, I ran into another friend from high school who told me that his mother died from lung cancer.


Did you get a sense of the story being rushed? You might have even felt like you were left out of what was going on. What was the writer doing there? Basically telling me a bunch of stuff that happened. 



Instead, whenever something happens in your book, you want your reader to live through the event fully. In other words, show your events. Create a scene whenever something is happening in your book. 



However, it’s fine to tell me your ideas or come right out and give me information. Take a look at this short text, taken from the forthcoming memoir What Would Philip Roth Do? by Matthew Check, another former student of mine, and feel how it affects you differently than the previous one:


When they are done fine-tuning the mapping of the human genome, I hope they take the time to look into the banjo gene — there has to be one. Who takes the time to play something over and over and over again that makes no sense initially and that sounds awful? There was an exhausting despair in playing the banjo in the beginning when my rolls would descend into failure (like a child attempting to ride his bike without training wheels who crashes into some bush only to create scrapes and abrasions). And yet, I kept dusting myself off and getting back to work because there were also moments (and in the beginning it really was momentary) when the index finger followed the thumb, which followed the middle finger, and vice versa, and forward and backward and in and out, and it would miraculously form into something rhythmic and sequential that was for me nothing short of spotting a unicorn. 


There is a rabbinic parable that rang true for me in moments like those. When we are born our souls are split in two and our life’s mission is to always find our other half: the beshert.  In the moments that I was able to play the roll patterns, I felt as if I had been cosmically reunited with something that I had been separated from at birth, and now that I had found it, I was never going to let it go. 

Here the author basically is telling us how much the banjo means to him. What many writing guides would suggest he do instead would be to get this information across by showing us this information, by describing the smile on his face after playing his first few notes, by having him race outside with a joyous leap in the wake of this early success. However, would that really be more effective than the telling that the writer is doing here? 


Don’t feel the need to show if telling will do a much better job of getting your point across. Oh, and never bring up this phrase in my presence unless you want to see me get riled up. 🤣




Happy writing!