Writing & Narrative
The Lie at the Heart of 'Show Don't Tell'
The most repeated rule in creative writing is also, in the hands of most people who repeat it, profoundly misunderstood.
The Idea
Every writing workshop eventually produces someone who circles a sentence in red and writes 'show, don't tell' in the margin — as if the rule were self-evident, universal, and always correct. It isn't any of those things. The instruction originates with writers like Chekhov and was later codified by craft teachers, but what it actually means is far more precise than its popular use suggests. The real target isn't telling per se. It's lazy telling — summary that substitutes for experience, abstraction that does the reader's emotional work for them. 'She was sad' is a placeholder. 'She kept refilling her glass without drinking from it' is an action that lets the reader arrive at sadness themselves. That arrival is the point. When a reader discovers an emotion rather than receiving it as a label, they feel it as their own. The writing disappears and the experience remains. But here's where the rule gets abused: some of the greatest prose in existence tells rather than shows. Tolstoy tells. Baldwin tells. Didion tells. They do it with such precision, authority, and earned confidence that the telling becomes its own form of revelation. The question, then, is never 'am I showing or telling?' The question is 'am I giving the reader something real to experience, or am I summarising my way past the difficult work of making them feel it?'
In the World
In 1899, Chekhov wrote a letter to his brother Alexander that contains what is probably the earliest version of the principle: 'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.' It's a gorgeous formulation, but notice what Chekhov is actually asking for — not pure visual description for its own sake, but an image that does more emotional and sensory work than the thing it replaces. The moon is a fact. The glint on broken glass is a mood, a moment, a world. Raymond Carver's editor Gordon Lish understood this so viscerally that he famously stripped Carver's drafts down to almost nothing — cutting explanation, backstory, interior monologue — forcing the reader to read the silences between the sentences. Some scholars argue this created a different writer than Carver actually was. The published Carver is austere and devastating. The unedited Carver is warmer, more discursive — and also extraordinary. Neither version violates the spirit of the principle. What they demonstrate is that 'show don't tell' is really a question about trust: do you trust your reader to feel what you've planted, without you standing beside them pointing at it?
Why It Matters
This principle extends well beyond fiction. Think about any time you've tried to convince someone of something — a friend, a colleague, an audience. The impulse is to state your conclusion first, then justify it. But the people you find most persuasive rarely do this. They give you the detail, the image, the story, and let you reach the conclusion yourself. When you arrive there independently, it feels like your own thought, not something imposed on you. That's showing. It works in arguments, in conversation, in how you write an email that actually gets a response. More personally: writers who default to telling — 'she was kind', 'the situation was tense' — are often writers who haven't yet fully inhabited their own scene. Asking yourself 'what would I literally see, hear, or notice if I were there?' is a technique, yes, but it's also a discipline of attention. The habit of asking that question changes how you notice things in real life — which is perhaps the most unexpected gift a craft rule can give.
A Question to Ponder
When you explain something to someone today — a feeling, an idea, a situation — notice whether you're handing them a label or giving them the thing itself: what would it take to do the latter?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable