Writer’s Craft
#07
What Does “Show Don’t Tell” Actually Mean?
How Breaking down the craft behind the advice and how to apply it across your story.
“Show don’t tell” is probably the most repeated piece of writing advice. It’s in every craft book, every workshop, every editorial letter (probably).
The advice works, but it’s a bit incomplete. I’m splitting this into two parts. This post covers what showing actually means and how to apply it across different types of content. The next one covers when you should tell, why your telling sometimes isn’t working, and how to figure out which problem you actually have.
So. What is showing?
The Core Idea
Showing means putting the reader inside an experience rather than reporting on it from the outside. Instead of telling the reader what to feel or think, you create the conditions for them to feel and think it themselves.
The reader does the work of naming the emotion, drawing the conclusion, understanding the world. And because they did the work, it lands deeper.
That’s it. That’s the whole idea. The complication is in the application, because showing looks different depending on what you’re trying to convey.
Showing Emotion
This is the most common application, and the one most writers think of first.
Telling emotion means labelling it. Showing emotion means rendering the physical, behavioural, or psychological texture of it.
Telling:
She was nervous.Showing:
Her hands wouldn’t stop moving. She pressed them flat against her thighs and they started up again, picking at the hem of her jacket, smoothing it down, picking at it again.
The nerves aren’t named in the second version. They don’t need to be. The reader names it, and because they did the work, it lands as theirs.
The key is specificity. Not just she was nervous replaced with her heart raced (that’s just a cliché swap), but the specific physical reality of this character’s nerves. What does her particular nervousness look like, in this moment, in this body? The more specific, the more real.
Showing Setting
This is where “show don’t tell” gets applied most bluntly and most incorrectly. Writers pile on adjectives and sensory detail, and the setting still feels flat because the problem usually isn’t the lack of description. It’s that the description isn’t being filtered through anyone’s consciousness.
A setting described by a narrator is a list of facts. A setting experienced by a character is alive.
Telling:
The manor was old and decaying. The wallpaper was peeling and the air smelled of mildew. It felt oppressive and unwelcoming.Showing:
The wallpaper had come away from the wall in long strips, curling at the edges like dead skin. Mara touched one without meaning to and pulled her hand back. The smell was in everything—damp and sweet and faintly wrong, the way fruit smells the day before it turns.
The second version isn’t just more sensory. It’s filtered through Mara—her involuntary touch, her recoil, her specific comparison. The setting tells us something about where she is and something about who she is, at the same time. That’s what showing setting actually does at its best, revealing character through environment.
Showing Backstory
Backstory told directly stops the story. You’ve been moving forward and now you’ve paused to explain the past, and the reader has to sit there while you explain things. There is still a place for this sometimes.
Showing backstory means letting history surface through the present through what a character notices, how they react, what they already know.
Telling:
Marcus had grown up with a father who drank too much. As a child, he never knew what kind of mood he would come home in. That was why he hated loud noises and avoided confrontation whenever possible.Showing:
The bottle tipped on the counter, and Marcus’s shoulders tightened before he could stop them. It was only soda. He knew that. Still, he moved quietly when he crossed the kitchen. Set the glass down gently. Didn’t slam the cabinet door. When the argument started in the other room, he stepped outside.
The second version tells you everything the first one tells you. Marcus grew up in a volatile home and learned to brace for impact. But it tells you through the texture of how he moves through the world right now. The past is present in his behaviour. You don’t need to be shown the past. You’re being shown its consequences.
Showing Worldbuilding Through Dialogue
The classic failure mode here is what’s sometimes called “as you know, Bob,” where characters explain the world to each other in ways they would never actually speak, purely for the reader’s benefit.
Telling:
“As you know,” Davan said, “the Conclave has ruled the five territories for three hundred years. Their law forbids any magic not sanctioned by the High Priests, which is why practitioners like us are hunted.”
Nobody talks like this. Davan and whoever he’s speaking to already know all of this. The information is for the reader, and it shows.
Showing: “They’re two streets over,” Davan said. Mira was already moving. “Conclave?” “Who else sends six men for one practitioner.” She didn’t answer that. There wasn’t anything to say.
You don’t know everything about the Conclave from this exchange. You know they’re feared, they’re powerful, they hunt practitioners, and they’re close. That’s enough for right now. The world reveals itself through how characters move inside it—what they take for granted, what they don’t bother explaining to each other, what makes them go quiet.
P.S. It’s still “as you know, Bob”ing even if you don’t actually say “as you know.”
Showing Worldbuilding Through Interaction With Surroundings
This is the subtler version. Not dialogue but behaviour. How does your character move through their world? What do they notice? What do they ignore? What’s so familiar it doesn’t register, and what’s strange enough to catch their attention?
Telling:
In this city, the dead were everywhere. Ghosts walked the streets alongside the living, visible only to those with the sight. Most people had learned to ignore them.Showing:
The ghost on the corner had been there so long someone had put a small stone at her feet, the way you would for a shrine. Nessa stepped around it without looking. On the next block a man was arguing with something she couldn’t see, his voice low and embarrassed, and the people passing him left a little extra space the way you do around grief.
The second version trusts you to understand the world through the details. The small stone. The extra space. The low, embarrassed voice. The rules of this world (ghosts are real, most people can’t see them, there’s a whole social grammar around them) emerge through behaviour rather than exposition.
Concluding
In every case, the shift from telling to showing is the same move: from the narrator reporting on the outside of something, to a consciousness experiencing it from the inside.
Emotion reported vs. emotion felt in the body.
Setting described vs. setting filtered through a specific pair of eyes.
History explained vs. history surfaced through present behaviour.
World laid out vs. world revealed through how people move inside it.
The reader isn’t being told what the story contains. They’re being put inside it.
That’s what showing means. And it’s mostly the right instinct because most writers, especially early on, tell too much. If you’re getting “show don’t tell” notes, start here.
But sometimes telling is the right way to go for a scene. And sometimes you apply this advice and something still isn’t working. Not because you haven’t shown enough, but because the problem was never a showing problem. That’s what we’ll talk about in the next post.
Happy writing!
