"Show, don't tell" is a writing guideline that asks you to let readers experience a story through action, dialogue, senses and detail, instead of being handed the author's summary or conclusions.
Where the term comes from
The Wikipedia article on show, don't tell calls it a narrative technique that lets the reader experience the story through actions, words, subtext, thoughts, senses and feelings rather than through exposition and summary. The idea is often credited to Anton Chekhov, but the article reports that the popular quote is a paraphrase. In a letter to his brother, Chekhov wrote that in describing nature one should seize on small details, and gave the example of a bit of broken bottle glass glittering on a mill dam to suggest a moonlit night. The article also traces the motto in English to playwrights and critics of the early twentieth century, and to Ernest Hemingway's iceberg idea in Death in the Afternoon (1932), about omitting what you know.
An example
Telling: "Renata was nervous about the interview." Showing: "Renata read the same line of her notes four times, then peeled the label off her water bottle until the paper came away in one long curl." The second version gives the reader something to see and lets them draw the conclusion. Now the opposite case. "Three years passed before Renata saw her father again" is perfectly good telling. It moves the story across a gap that nobody needs to watch.
Common mistakes
- Treating it as a rule with no exceptions. The article quotes James Scott Bell arguing that telling is sometimes a useful shortcut, and that showing everything leaves no scene to stand out.
- Replacing a plain emotion word with a long, stagey description, such as a paragraph of blushing, trembling and sweating.
- Showing the unimportant at length while telling the moments that deserve a scene.
- Using stock gestures, such as clenched jaws and held breaths, so that every character reacts the same way.
How to check your manuscript
Look for sentences that name a feeling or a trait: she was angry, he was kind, the house was old. For each, ask whether the moment is important. If it is, find a specific action, line of dialogue or sensory detail that gives the same impression, and write the scene. If it is a bridge, keep the telling and keep it short. Then read your key scenes and check that they are the ones with the most detail. The dialogue guide is useful here, since a lot of showing happens in what characters say and avoid saying.
Readers can also tell you where a scene felt flat. Musael's beta reader links let you send chosen chapters and see how far each reader got, which is a good start for finding the stretches that lost them.