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Show Don't Tell: Examples, Patterns and When to Tell
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"Show, don't tell" means giving the reader the evidence and letting them reach the conclusion. Telling hands over the conclusion directly: "she was nervous." Showing gives the reader what a person in the scene would notice: the hands, the voice, the thing she does instead of answering.
It is advice about where emotion and judgement live in a scene, not a ban on summary. Most good novels tell constantly, in transitions, time jumps and backstory. The skill is choosing which moments to dramatize and which to move past quickly.
StoryWith AI is our own product, so weigh what we say about it accordingly.
Key takeaways
- Telling states the conclusion. Showing supplies the evidence: action, dialogue, sensory detail, a choice the character makes.
- Five patterns cause most telling: named emotions, "she felt" constructions, verdicts about a character, filtered perception, and adverbs on dialogue tags.
- Telling is often right. Use it for summary, transitions, time jumps, minor characters and a line of backstory.
- Show the moments that matter. Turning points, emotional peaks and first impressions of important characters usually earn the room.
- No tool can detect telling reliably. Pattern checks, ours included, point at likely places. The judgement is yours.
What does "show, don't tell" actually mean?
Telling gives the reader an interpretation. Showing gives them the material and trusts them to interpret it.
Mary Kole, then a literary agent, writing for Writer's Digest, describes the effect of a shown version: "The reader had to work in the second example to figure out what's going on with both Katie and Karl" (Mary Kole, "What 'Show, Don't Tell' Really Means," Writer's Digest, dated 9 September 2010). That small amount of work is the point. A reader who works out that a character is hungry, or stalling, feels it more than one who is told.
Novelist Reavis Wortham puts the cost of the alternative plainly: "Telling words, and phrases pushes the reader out of the story" (Reavis Wortham, "Show, Don't Tell," The Kill Zone, dated 13 May 2023).
Did Chekhov really say "Don't tell me the moon is shining"?
Not in those words. The line "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass" is a compression. Quote Investigator traced it to a letter Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander in May 1886. In Avrahm Yarmolinsky's translation, the letter says "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."
The same post concludes: "QI believes that Anton Chekhov probably did not say or write the statement under investigation," and "QI does not know who crafted the short form." The earliest citation it gives for the compressed wording is The Quotable Book Lover (2002) (Quote Investigator, "Don't Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass", dated 30 July 2013, updated 21 November 2024).
The real letter is more useful than the slogan. It is advice about description: pick one small, concrete detail and let it produce the whole picture.
What are the most common telling patterns?
Most telling in a draft falls into five patterns. Each has a typical replacement.
| Telling pattern | Hypothetical telling | What showing replaces it with | Hypothetical showing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Named emotion | "Marcus was furious." | The body, the action, the words he chooses | "Marcus set the mug down so hard the handle snapped off." |
| "She felt" construction | "She felt a wave of relief." | The physical sensation or the next action, without the frame | "Her shoulders dropped. She laughed, too loudly, at nothing." |
| Verdict about a character | "Dana was a generous person." | A choice that costs the character something | "Dana slid her last twenty under the tip jar when the barista turned away." |
| Filtered perception | "He noticed that the door was open." | The perceived thing, directly | "The door stood open." |
| Adverb on a dialogue tag | "'Get out,' she said angrily." | The line itself, or a beat of action | "'Get out.' She held the door and did not look at him." |
Filtered perception is the subtlest of the five. Words like "saw", "heard", "noticed" and "realized" put a camera between the reader and the event. There is a fuller list in our guide to filter words.
Adverbs on tags are a cousin of the fancy tag problem, where "she hissed" or "he growled" does the work the line should do. See said bookisms for that one.
How do you turn telling into showing?
Ask what the reader would see, hear or watch the character do if they were standing in the room. Then write that, and cut the label.
Four questions do most of the work:
- What does the body do? Not a catalogue of symptoms. One gesture that fits this character.
- What does the character say, or refuse to say? Evasion often shows more than confession.
- What does the character choose? A decision under pressure is the strongest evidence of who someone is.
- What one detail would a person in this state notice? Grief notices different things than boredom.
Show don't tell examples: before and after
All three pairs below are hypothetical, written for this guide.
Named emotion and verdict, before:
Elena was nervous about the interview. She was a perfectionist, and she was afraid she would say something stupid.
After:
Elena had ironed the blouse twice. In the lobby she read her own CV again, mouthing the dates, and when the receptionist said her name she stood up too fast and knocked her coffee into the umbrella stand.
The reader now concludes "nervous" and "perfectionist" without being told. Nothing in the after version names either.
"She felt" and filtered perception, before:
Tom heard the car pull into the drive. He felt a surge of dread as he realized his father was home early.
After:
Tyres on gravel. Tom killed the music and shoved the bottle under the bed. It was only four o'clock.
The dread is in the speed of his hands and in the time. The reader does the realizing.
Dialogue tag adverb, before:
"I'm fine," she said sadly. "Really. I'm happy for you both."
After:
"I'm fine." She was folding the napkin into smaller and smaller squares. "Really. I'm happy for you both."
The words claim one thing and the hands claim another. That gap is what the adverb was trying to explain.
When is telling better than showing?
Often. The rule is a default for important moments, not a law for every sentence. Jeff Somers says it directly in Writer's Digest: "Sometimes telling is better" (Jeff Somers, "Bad Advice Boogie: Show, Don't Tell," Writer's Digest, dated 7 May 2018).
Ali Luke at Aliventures agrees: "It's perfectly normal to tell the reader things, particularly if you need to save time" (Ali Luke, "Understanding the 'Show Don't Tell' Rule (With Examples … And Exceptions)," Aliventures, dated 26 April 2024).
Editor Tiffany Yates Martin, in a guest post on Jane Friedman's site, makes the strongest case for telling: "Tell, to borrow a phrase from Elmore Leonard, helps you leave out the parts people tend to skip." She adds that it "helps you build tension, suspense, and momentum rather than defusing it" (Tiffany Yates Martin, "Showing or Telling? How to Decide Based on Line Level, Scene Level, and Story Level," Jane Friedman, dated 18 May 2026, updated 1 June 2026).
| Situation | Tell or show? | Hypothetical example | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summary of routine events | Tell | "For the next three weeks she worked double shifts and slept in the car." | Dramatizing every shift would stall the story. |
| Transition between scenes | Tell | "By the time they reached Leeds, the rain had stopped." | Gets the reader to the next scene without a dead stretch. |
| Time jump | Tell | "Two years passed before he wrote back." | The gap is the information. |
| Backstory in a line | Tell | "She had not driven since the accident." | One line carries weight; a flashback might not be needed. |
| Minor or functional character | Tell | "The landlord was a tired man who wanted no trouble." | The reader does not need to work for him. |
| Turning point or emotional peak | Show | The moment she reads the letter. | This is what the reader came for. |
| First real look at a major character | Show | The protagonist's first scene. | Readers form judgements from evidence, not labels. |
Telling and showing also work together. A line of summary can set up a shown moment, and a shown moment can end with one line of telling that names what changed. Telling only becomes a problem when it replaces the scene the reader needed. If it piles up into paragraphs of explanation, that is a different problem: see info dumping.
Is "show, don't tell" bad advice?
It is incomplete advice. Essayist Sonya Huber, writing in Literary Hub, says it helped her early on, "in the way training wheels help in learning to ride a bike," and then caused damage once she depended on it. Her objection is to the framing: "It's the binary and the dualism that's the problem, as if 'showing' and 'telling' were our only options" (Sonya Huber, "The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: 'Show, Don't Tell,'" Literary Hub, dated 27 September 2019).
Reflection, a narrator's judgement, and an essayist's argument are not failures to show. They are other tools. In close point of view, a character's own conclusion ("He was going to lose this job") can be voice rather than telling, because it tells us how this person thinks.
How should you revise for show and tell?
A method that works at the scene level, not just the sentence level:
- Mark the scene's turn. Find the one moment where something changes. That moment should be shown.
- Search for labels in and around it. Emotion words, "felt", "realized", "noticed", "seemed", and adverbs after "said".
- Ask what each label is replacing. If the label names something the reader could see, write the evidence and cut the label.
- Look the other way too. Find stretches that dramatize nothing important: travel, routine, waiting. Compress those into summary.
- Read the scene aloud. Shown passages that run long can slow a scene. Trim where the beat has already landed. Our guide to pacing in writing covers this balance in more detail.
- Keep a few tells on purpose. A crisp line of telling after a long shown moment can land harder than more detail.
Where StoryWith AI fits
No software can reliably tell showing from telling. Whether "she was angry" is a weak label or a deliberate, flat line in a character's voice depends on context a pattern cannot see. StoryWith AI does not claim to detect telling.
What it does offer, on the Write page, is a set of local checks that run in your browser with no AI model, so they use no AI actions. Two of them point at places where telling often lives:
- Hedges and weak verbs. It flags "very", "really", "quite", "just", "kind of" and "sort of" followed by a word, "got" or "get" plus a word, and a be-verb followed by an "-ing" word, with a suggestion to try a stronger construction.
- Adverb-heavy passages. When words ending in "-ly" make up more than 5% of the scene's words, it highlights them as "Adverb-heavy passage" with a "show, don't tell" hint. The count is a suffix match, so it includes words like "family" and misses "fast".
The same panel flags possible passive voice, sentences over 35 words, three sentences in a row with the same opening word, and monotonous sentence length, and clicking a flag jumps to it in the text. The passive, weak-verb, adverb and repeated-opening checks are built for English, and for a book in another language the panel says they are unavailable. There is no check for named emotions, "she felt" constructions or filtered perception.
Separately, the AI scene purpose analysis, which uses AI actions, can tag a scene as exposition-heavy or an info dump and suggest options for strengthening it. That is a scene-level read, not a sentence-level verdict on telling.
When it is the wrong tool: if you want someone to judge whether a specific moment should be dramatized, a human reader or editor will do that better than any check. It is also the wrong tool for a book not written in English. StoryWith AI runs in the browser and as an Android app (the site lists no iOS app), and manuscripts are not used to train AI models. Plan details are on the pricing page.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is a simple example of show don't tell?
Telling: "Sam was scared of the dog." Showing: "Sam crossed the street when he saw the dog, and kept his hand on the gate latch until it had gone." The second gives the reader evidence and lets them conclude "scared" on their own. Both examples are hypothetical.
When should you tell instead of show?
Tell when the moment is not important enough to dramatize: routine events, travel, transitions between scenes, time jumps, a minor character's description, or one line of backstory. Show the turning points, emotional peaks and first impressions of major characters. Most novels mix both on every page.
Did Chekhov say "show me the glint of light on broken glass"?
Probably not in that form. Quote Investigator traces the idea to a May 1886 letter from Chekhov to his brother Alexander, which describes suggesting a moonlit night with a piece of broken bottle glittering on a mill dam. The compressed quotation's author is unknown; its earliest citation there is from 2002.
Can a grammar checker find telling in my manuscript?
Not reliably. Checkers can flag patterns that often go with telling, such as adverbs and hedges, but they cannot tell whether a line is weak telling or a deliberate choice. Treat each flag as a question about the sentence and decide yourself.
