What does "show, don't tell" actually mean?

(And when can you ignore it?)

If you’ve read any books on the craft of writing, taken a creative writing class, or even just generally existed in the presence of other writers, you’ve almost certainly come across the concept of “show, don’t tell.” It’s held up as a kind of gold standard of good writing. And it’s certainly true that “show, don’t tell” lends itself to a more immersive kind of storytelling, in which the author treats the reader as a kind of partner in the journey — an agreement of sorts, in which the creator trusts the consumer to pick up on subtextual cues and clues and infer narrative, characterological, or world-building information without having it directly spelled out in so many words.

But it’s at least as likely that you’ve encountered the flip side of the concept — “telling, not showing” — as a kind of shorthand for bad writing. And to be honest, when an accusation of “telling, not showing” is levied, it often forms part of a critique that’s… uh… not particularly flattering to the author in question. So it’s natural enough that, as writers, we’d get fairly hung up on the idea that “telling, not showing” is something to be avoided at all costs.

But… that’s not completely true. At least, not in every circumstance. So, let’s take a look at what it means to “show, don’t tell” — and when you might not want to do that in your writing.

The core idea behind “show, don’t tell”

Basically, “show, don’t tell” means that a writer allows information to emerge organically through techniques such as action, dialogue, and sensory or settings information, instead of explaining it directly to the reader. In practice, that looks a bit like this.

Jane let the door fall shut behind her, leaning her head back against the cold, hard wood. She sucked in a breath, her chest tight, and closed her eyes against the stinging tears that threatened to spill.

Nowhere in those two sentences are Jane’s emotions explicitly stated, but it’s pretty clear from context that Jane is sad, frustrated, disheartened, or some combination of the three. Additional context cues would go on to solidify that for us — maybe she sinks to the floor and buries her head in her hands, sobbing a lover’s name; maybe she hisses, “I hate that place, I hate it — there’s got to be an easier way to earn a living!”; maybe the authorial “eye” pulls back slightly to see that she’s clutching a crumpled rejection letter from a literary agent in her hands. The point is that the author shows the reader what Jane is experiencing and lets them piece together their understanding from the information they’re presented with.

If the author was “telling, not showing,” the scene would probably look a bit more like this:

Jane let the door fall shut behind her, feeling frustrated and disheartened. She’d just received her fifteenth rejection letter for her novel and was wondering if there was any point in continuing to query.

Straightforward and to the point — but, critically, because we’re telling the reader what Jane is experiencing, we’ve introduced a sense of distance that wasn’t there before. It’s as though we’ve pulled back from the intimacy of a close-up shot of Jane’s despondent face to a wide-angle shot from outside the window of her apartment.

Showing puts the reader in the character’s shoes, prompts them to experience a sympathetic emotional response in line with what the character is feeling, and helps them connect more deeply.

It works with world-building, too. Look at this:

The old house was dark and creepy.

Job done, message received. But is your spine tingling? Are you getting any kind of real sense of what it’s like to be inside this house? Are you feeling any kind of creeping dread? Not really, right?

But how about this instead:

Ancient curtains reached floor to ceiling, thick with dust and cobwebs, trapping whatever light could wriggle through the mouldy window panes behind. The scent of decay hung in the air. Silence blanketed the dark rooms; the kind of silence that felt as though something unseen was hiding in the shadows.

Because “show, don’t tell” doesn’t explicitly lay out what or how the reader should feel about the space, the reader is obliged to fill in the gaps themselves… by feeling their way into the space. This is because of a neuroscientific phenomenon known as neural coupling.

“Show, don’t tell” and neural coupling

This is how our brains work: when we read a factual statement, neuroscience tells us we activate Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area — parts of the brain involved in language-processing. Our brains process the text on the page like, well, text on a page. It’s functional. Utilitarian. And that’s not a bad thing, by the way — but I’ll come back to that.

But when a writer “shows” an action, this activates the reader’s mirror neurons. Critically, these fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else doing it. So, when Jane’s chest feels tight and her eyes sting with tears, the reader’s brain isn’t registering the words as “this means she’s feeling sad.” Their motor cortex and emotional centres are busy simulating that exact physiological response — creating instant, involuntary, empathy.

Add to that the dopamine reward we get for “figuring it out” and you can see straight away why “show, don’t tell” is such a powerful technique.

“When a writer ‘shows’ an action, this activates the reader’s mirror neurons. Critically, these fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else doing it.”

When can you ignore “show, don’t tell”?

None of which, though, means that “show, don’t tell” is an inviolable rule that must be applied universally. I know what I just said. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the best way to communicate information to your reader.

For a start, “show, don’t tell” takes up a lot of textual real estate. By which I mean, look at Exhibit B, the creepy old house above. Look at how many more words you need in the “show, don’t tell” version versus the “telling, not showing” version. In this instance, I’d argue that the extra words it takes to “show, don’t tell” are worth it, because we need the mirror neurons firing to get the full effect.

But that’s not always the case.

Say you have a character, Mary, who’s about to set off for, I don’t know, a court appearance in which she’s the star witness against somebody who’s wronged her. We meet her as she’s getting ready to leave the house: her hands shake as she pours milk into her coffee, she frets over a stain on the cuff of her shirt, she can’t find her car keys as she’s about to leave and bursts into tears of stress and overwhelm. We’ve shown the reader a whole lot of information about Mary’s state of mind as she contemplates the task ahead — we have a bit of leeway now to lean on telling to actually get her to that task. For example:

The drive to the courthouse was fraught with tension. Mary’s brain cycled over and over her testimony as she gripped the steering wheel, her focus anywhere but on the early-morning commuter traffic. It was a miracle, she thought, as she pulled into the parking lot, that she hadn’t crashed her car.

We are absolutely defaulting back to telling here, leaning on good old Wernicke’s and Broca’s to get the job done as efficiently as possible. Sure, we could show the journey, but it’s not adding any new information to the reader’s understanding of Mary’s state of mind, and it would be actively holding up the narrative at this point. The reader has the establishing information they need now they want to see the courtroom drama unfold. Telling, not showing, is actually better for the story here.

“Show, don’t tell” is a guideline, not a rule

The key is flexibility, awareness, and strategic technique. To be fair, that’s usually the case with writing, but it sometimes seems like “show, don’t tell” has achieved a kind of inviolable, mythic status — as though it’s an unalterable commandment that defines and delimits the concept of good prose. Neuroscience underlines the importance of leaning into “show, don’t tell” as a general touchpoint, but it would be exhausting to read a work of fiction that communicated exclusively through showing. It would be long, meandering, impossible to parse the important information from background detail, and that’s without even considering how emotionally draining it would be to spend 100,000 words in active neural mirroring. The key emotional beats would get lost in the noise.

So, just as “show, don’t tell” is a good general benchmark, there will always be a need for “tell, don’t show.” Different writers will afford different prominence to both at different times, and different genres will rely more heavily on one or the other, but it’s a mistake to think of either as inherently “good” or “bad.” They’re necessary parts of a coherent whole. The trick is to discover what works best for the way you tell stories — and lean into that.