Show, Don't Tell: What it Is and Isn't

[Stuart Dren]

For starters, it might be the most notorious piece of writing advice. Apologies in advance for starting a semantic discussion. For old-timers who've tread this all before, I at least have a new controversial opinion at the end when I go off the rails.

What it is
It's originally a playwright's term. It got worked backwards into a summary of something Anton Chekov wrote.

Chekov never wrote this:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

He wrote this:

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

Back to the playwright. Take it away, Mark Swan:

The American playwright and scriptwriter Mark Swan (1871-1942) "could talk of little else" than the motto he'd placed on the wall above his writing desk "Show–not tell". Swan elaborated on it in his 1927 primer, You Can Write Plays. Among numerous examples:

Events that have happened in the past, which cannot possibly be acted in the present, must be 'told about.' The telling of them is the only narrative or description that should be in a play. Make the 'telling' as brief and crisp as possible, without being too obvious. See if the facts can be told in a scene, or scenes, which give the actors a chance for emotional work, thus getting an emotional response from the audience while it is absorbing facts - in other words sugar-coat the pill." [...] "In the planting of characterization, motivation and relationship: don't 'talk it,' ' show it.' Express these things in acted scenes, not in narrative or description.

"The novelist can fire the imagination of the reader with a scene. The dramatist must show the scene. All that the novelist gets by suggestion, by implication, the playwright must get by literal presentation." Show, don't tell - Wikipedia

Interesting that this advice is given as if it's for a multimedia experience (a play) as opposed to a novel. "All that the novelist gets by suggestion, by implication, the playwright must get by literal presentation." This says so much.

In Chapter VIII of The Craft of Fiction (1921), British essayist Percy Lubbock (1879–1965) wrote:

Picture and drama—this is an antithesis which continually appears in a novel[.... ...]Henry James used them in discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years; but I use them, I must add, in a rather more extended sense than he did. [...W]hen the subject of criticism is fiction generally, not his alone, picture will take a wider meaning, as opposed to drama. [...] It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel. The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with 'stage-directions' and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel." Show, don't tell - Wikipedia

Once again emphasised is that distinction between the written story and written play: "Picture and drama—this is an antithesis which continually appears in a novel" and "...in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding."

Why it's misleading
Language is the primary culprit, caused partly by the origin of the term arguably being intended for a different medium. Telling and showing can be taken literally as narrative summary always being telling, and direct events or description in prose always showing. This is sneaky, because it can be correct if followed, but it's nowhere near completely correct or useful.

For a fairly common example, the aspiring author writes:

Tom was angry.

The work gets critiqued. Show don't tell get's tossed around. The line becomes:

Tom clenched his fists.

This is... better, right? Isn't it? It is at least now a form of showing, by any level of understanding, but that's not the upper limit of what showing is. More importantly, the original line is not necessarily telling in the first place.

This is a particular stage for writers. I'm confident we all get past it eventually, but it can be quite the hurdle. For a time our works are full of white knuckles, set jaws, steam pouring out of ears etc. When the reader takes the time to actually imagine it, it gets silly. Then when you take the advice back to something more visual like a play or movie, it doesn't work there either! It's got all the subtlety of ASL.

As an aside, another example of the term being intrinsically misleading is I've encountered one author who insisted that because dialogue is characters telling each other things, that dialogue is always 'telling.' That was more of a unique take, though.

What it really means
In the context of a story conveyed only with text, as evidently granted by the likes of Mark Swan, it means to imply rather than state something. This makes a lot of sense, and frees the advice from the pink fuzzy handcuffs of strictly visual or action or dialogue cues and into the realm what I think good fiction does, which is string the reader along on implications in whichever is the best way to present them.

The most acutely enjoyable aspect of reading fiction is making inferences about things that matter. A story would have too much showing if it's asking inferences of things unimportant to the overall story.

Now to highlight why a summary statement can be showing:

Marlene had an overbearing mother.

We can agree this is either telling or direct statement. Whatever you want to call it, it will have little impact on the reader. This could be intended, because there are other things to focus on in the narrative, or perhaps the author didn't know how else to express it. But what if I add more?

Marlene had an overbearing mother. She routinely pestered Marlene about staying out a bit late, as if vampires would come out as soon as the sun went down. All drugs were bad, too. She was to believe the woman had never snorted or smoked anything in her time! That wasn't even counting the prescription rogue's gallery that hid out in the medicine cabinet, which Marlene knew by direct experience could lead to some nifty trips so long as you knew how to go about it. It didn't stop there. Her mother hovered about the little things, too, insisting that she attend every single little school day even though the whole point was just getting a piece of paper and it didn't teach you anything about the real world, or that she at least try piano lessons. At least try it, you might like it. At least try, at least try. At least try shutting up, mother.

Okay, the added sentences are doing the heavy lifting of implication, but they have changed the first sentence from a direct narrative statement requiring no inference, to a perspective statement that requires inference. Implication. Showing.

The perspective isn't necessary, of course, but the most illustrative. A list of events, for example, can just be a direct list of events:

Tom went to the store. He got some mayonnaise. He went home. The End.

Let's make it more interesting:

Tom went to the supermarket. The few survivors of the nuclear blasts had already picked the shelves clean, but he was able to find three cans of beans that had rolled under one of the shelves. A scavenger saw his full bag and tried to take it by force, but Tom beat him off with a spanner. The scavenger eventually fell, but was still breathing when Tom left.

There were stakes and a dangerous situation, but that was still telling or stating. Now, for implication, even though these are summary statements still not "showing" the events as they play out:

Tom went to the supermarket. He managed to find three cans of baked beans, and he only had to beat—not kill—one person to retrieve them.

That is implying, showing, demonstrating, whatever you want to call it. I didn't express the tension of a stripped post-apocalyptic supermarket or the fight scene that followed. It might be more impactful to feature it as a full scene, but whether it's featured or not is not the distinction between telling and showing, or implying and stating. The distinction is whether an inference is expected or not.

Tom clenching his fists is still technically showing/implying, it's just not limited to that.

My new controversial take: dialogue
Here's where it gets unconventional. I've always considered dialogue to be 100% showing, or implication, since it's always a direct moment report of something in the story. It would have to be inferred to be understood at all, wouldn't it?

But no. I think bad dialogue can be lacking implication at important times, just like prose can. "As you know, Bob..." I've come to the conclusion that dialogue can either be implying or directly stating as well. I've not fully made up my mind on this, but I think it makes sense.

Telling writers to show or tell
When giving this advice, I think it's a lot more useful to be specific about what parts would be best "shown" and what parts would be best "told." If one says, "This needs more showing and less telling" without referring to anything, even one thing as a particular example, then it implies that showing more elements is always better to infinity, which is certainly not the case.


That's all I got for now. Feel free to disagree or share your thoughts on the matter, or perhaps escape before this becomes even more of a semantic hell hole than it already is.

 

[Naomasa298]

My new controversial take: dialogue
Here's where it gets unconventional. I've always considered dialogue to be 100% showing, or implication, since it's always a direct moment report of something in the story. It would have to be inferred to be understood at all, wouldn't it?

But no. I think bad dialogue can be lacking implication at important times, just like prose can. "As you know, Bob..." I've come to the conclusion that dialogue can either be implying or directly stating as well. I've not fully made up my mind on this, but I think it makes sense.

I don't see anything controversial about this. We've probably all seen flat dialogue that doesn't add to the story, substituting for exposition or acting outright as narration.

I'd say dialogue *can* be showing, but convention doesn't always treat it like that. It rather depends what you are doing with it. I have some stories where almost all showing is done through dialogue, with the narration being mostly tell. But dialogue as telling can work as well, if that's how you design it to work.