Tell Me the Truth—Should Writers Always Show Instead of Tell?
By: Laura Dame
One of the golden rules of good writing is “show, don’t tell.” This idiom is meant to encourage writers to reveal meaning and themes through action and dialogue and precise attention to detail rather than through summary or exposition. Although it is in my nature to remain skeptical of such dictatorial instructions, I have generally found as both writer and reader that showing does result in more compelling writing. However, I recently read a Substack post from writer Brandon Taylor about exposition, interiority, and backstory that pushed me to think farther about showing and telling (“the underdark: a modified craftalk”). Taylor shares the realization he had that many of his favorite novels do not shy away from telling and, further, those favorites are classics like the novels of Jane Austen. I had never thought about this myself, but when I read Taylor’s piece I thought “Hey! That’s so true!”. Many of the beloved literary classics do not closely adhere to the contemporary advice to show rather than tell and yet they are beloved nonetheless.
The opening of one of my favorite and most re-read books—Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—is comprised solely of telling from the omniscient narrator. Even the first sentence, which I especially adore, is a no-frills statement: “Marley was dead: to begin with” (Dickens 1). This opening is rich in voice and I want to know who Marley is, how he died, and why we must begin there. Indeed, the narrator continues on for the first 3 or so pages primarily telling readers exposition and backstory, but it is engaging and hilarious. So why must us modern-day writers show instead of tell?
The prominence of the “show, don’t tell” idiom seems to come down the writerly struggle to engage reader’s and convey a meaningful truth. My research on this craft tenet led me to essays and books that repeatedly engage with the idea of truth in writing without ever actually robustly exploring the ways in which telling can or cannot contribute to the conveyance of truth. Here, I would like to directly consider truth as the underlying problem that showing vs. telling tries to grapple with and argue for a shift towards craft talk that confronts the art of telling well head on rather than avoiding it all together. That way, growing writers can be free from a limitation founded upon avoidance and find themselves at liberty to engage readers in a more varied manner.
Philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky argues that “Telling of the problematic kind involves an airless explicitness; it does not just connect the dots, it obliterates them with a felt marker…Telling the reader ‘what happened’ induces mental passivity” (898). So, perhaps the concern with telling comes down to reader engagement and the way telling can discourage that engagement because it is boring and doesn’t require readers to infer meaning. In support of showing, Zwicky highlights truth as being conveyed in writing via “a constellation of verbally unadorned but precisely chosen details” (898). This constellation asks readers to figure out the meaning of a piece by understanding the combined impact of the shown details. This demand upon readers is engaging and steers clear of bland telling. The discovery of truth in a piece of writing then is reliant upon showing rather than telling. Telling is boring and does not allow readers to realize truths for themselves. This points towards whether or not readers will be able to recognize and believe truth if it is told to them rather than shown.
The argument seems to be that telling severs reader interaction and loses the nuance of showing that builds a sense of realness and truth. On the idea of telling being un-engaging, Darrel N. Caulley wrote an essay titled “Making Qualitative Research Reports Less Boring: The Techniques of Writing Creative Nonfiction,” discussing how research reports are generally dry, dense reading and employing creative skills like showing rather than telling can push researchers towards writing more engaging reports. Caulley also highlights the importance of realism when it comes to showing readers: “Giving realistic concrete details and details of real life will conjure emotions and images in the reader” (430). Again, showing seems to come down to being superior to telling in regards to engaging readers so that the “result is a research report that creates emotion in the reader and has a sense of realism, truth, authenticity, and authority” (432). There’s that word truth again. Showing leads to readers recognizing truth because writers who show via concrete details are providing evidence for their claims, therefore increasing the believability of their writing. Pulling from an example, Caulley says “If the writer had instead written a summary paragraph…it would have lacked the vividness, the real, and would not have involved the reader” (436).
Returning to that opening line of A Christmas Carol, I quickly find exception to Caulley and Zwicky’s ideas. “Marley was dead: to begin with” (Dickens 1). This summary is authoritative and intriguing in the summarized details it choses to disclose and therefore does engage me as a reader. The narrator thrusts readers into the story with a richly-developed voice. And Marley is—especially to modern readers—a somewhat unusual name so that’s of interest. And why does the narrator contradict himself by ironically adding “to begin with” to the end of the sentence (Dickens 1)? If telling can, in fact, be engaging then perhaps it can also convey truth.
David Musgrave’s piece “‘Show Don’t Tell’: What Creative Writing Has to Teach Philosophy” introduces a pivot towards the idea that truth and telling can coincide. He writes “The ‘trueness’ of a poem is a matter of its being well made, and the indication of a poem being well made is the effect it has on us, our experience of it, which we may then attempt to put into words…” (Musgrave 7). This suggests that writing rings true not specifically because of showing vs. telling, but because of the overall quality of the piece and the impact it has upon the reader. Now, perhaps showing is what results in this quality and impact, but it doesn’t need to be the only means to that end as seen in Dickens and in the examples Brandon Taylor mentions in his Substack article. Taylor says “what I’ve come around to is that exposition is indispensable. Critical to the mission of telling a story and telling it well. Indeed, I think that exposition, interiority, and backstory are absolutely essential to getting at that human resonance that makes the characters of James, Wharton, Austen, and Zola so utterly unforgettable” (“the underdark: a modified craftalk”). If telling works so well for conveying truths about human experience for these heralded authors, why can’t it work well still today? Maybe it can and the writing community has simply pushed the “show, don’t tell” rhetoric onto itself to a degree that we no longer practice how to tell well.
And I do think that practice is required in order to successfully employ telling, just as practice is required for all writerly craft. Understanding the differences between showing and telling is an important step in that process. Shannon Brick’s philosophical take on “show, don’t tell” in “Show, Don’t Tell: Emotion, Acquaintance and Moral understanding Through Fiction” also elucidates the differences between showing and telling without glorifying the former over the latter. Brick writes “Telling thus is only successful when the speaker is manifestly trustworthy. Showing, however, can be successful even if the communicating agent is manifestly untrustworthy” (507-508). In other words, telling works best when readers feel they can trust who is doing the telling. I’m not certain I agree with such a strict delineation but I do think Brick introduces a useful way of considering the differing nature of telling and showing. If you’re going to tell your readers the truth, you’d better seem like you have the credibility to do so. In showing, there is more grey area in which you can get away with having less immediate authority because readers are discovering the truth for themselves via the evidence you show them. Gregory Currie’s book The Nature of Fiction further emphasizes this connection between truth and the trustworthiness of the teller: “I am going to argue that our strategies for working out what is true in the story are closely connected with the idea that there is a reliable teller who is our access to these events” (73).
Brick pushes into a more open-minded direction by introducing a concept of showing and telling in which the two work in conjunction. Brick says that “by telling their readers what is fictionally true—by inviting readers to trust their authorial credibility when it comes to the explicit content of their story—authors are capable of showing readers that circumstances in the fiction instantiate certain normative properties” (512). This ties back to Brandon’s argument that telling via exposition or backstory or interiority is actually inextricable from good writing (“the underdark: a modified craftalk”). It does not have to be one or the other as “show, don’t tell” implies and if a writer successfully creates authorial or narratorial credibility, truth can be told as effectively as it can be shown.
Indeed, Peter Griffiths in “On Showing and Telling” brings this up when he says “Perhaps, then, the question of readerly engagement is what we should be addressing, and not the simplistic idea of show and tell” and explores the idea of telling by showing (28). Showing is a type of telling that is less forthright with readers. And Griffiths points back to the concern of reader engagement that Zwicky and Caulley are concerned with, suggesting it is getting obfuscated by the idea of “show, don’t tell.” It’s not that showing is inherently better than telling, but that telling requires a different finesse than showing. Perhaps it is time to stop encouraging writers to avoid telling at all costs when telling can actually be just as effective as showing.
As a testament to this efficacy, one can consider the limitations of certain genres of writing and how those limitations might demand telling rather than showing. For instance, Shady Cosgrove mentions how “Brevity affects the scope of what an author can tackle (how much can happen) as well as how the story is told, specifically showing and telling operate on the line-by-line level. That is, an author must choose which events are summarised (told) and which ones are dramatised (shown)” (102). This is an excerpt from Cosgrove’s essay “Controlling the clock — how showing and telling impact time in short-short fiction.” When writing microfiction or something similarly compact, showing is impossible in most instances. But to Cosgrove, this is not a failure for short fiction: “it is the job of the micro fiction writer to suggest possibilities in their work, to imply larger potentialities that may exist beyond the page. The reader is then complicit in the reading/writing of the text because there is space for their imagining of events” (102). This seems in stark contrast to the ideas about reader engagement that Zwicky and Caulley argue require showing. Cosgrove is suggesting that it is the very lack of detail, of showing that enables readers to engage with microfiction because the telling requires them to fill in the details for themselves—to determine the truth based on what is told. Certainly this is a different kind of engagement than that which comes from showing, but it still results in a robust relationship between reader and text, evincing the faulty nature of the black-and-white “show, don’t tell” mindset.
The collaborative aspect of telling in writing that Cosgrove discusses is a reasonable explanation for my experience with that opening line of A Christmas Carol. My engagement and excitement as a reader is produced because of what I am told vs. not told or told and not shown. That first line of the novel sets my mind into motion, theorizing who Marley could be, why he might be dead, and so forth. Of course, Dickens does employ showing in A Christmas Carol as well. Readers can see through Scrooge’s dialogue the progression of his character arch from greedy to generous. But the fact that Dickens opens with telling—telling that engages readers in the search for the truth about Marley—is a testament to the power of telling. Writers need not worship showing as the only path towards successful writing.
In the‘The making of a story’: a Norton guide to creative writing. by Alice LaPlante, there is an entire chapter on “Why You Need to Show and Tell.” Although LaPlante recognizes “Readers have a natural desire to be present when the drama heats up—they tend not to be satisfied by having key scenes summarized for them” (213), she also asserts that “The point is to recognize that both [showing and telling] are important, both make up what we call creative writing, and to universally declare that more of one is good, and less of the other is better, is to impose rigid thinking on our own creative process as well as that of others” (222). So yes, engage readers with on-page experiences that show readers the truth you want to convey. But don’t shy away from telling readers what you want to tell them either. Trust that they will trust you enough to engage, to fill in the gaps and recognize the truth in what you tell them.
Works Cited
Brick, Shannon. “Show, Don’t Tell: Emotion, Acquaintance and Moral Understanding Through Fiction.” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 63, no. 4, 2023, pp. 501-522.
Caulley, Darrel N. “Making Qualitative Research Reports Less Boring: The Techniques of Writing Creative Nonfiction.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 3, 2008, pp. 424-449.
Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. 1843. Bantam Books, 2009.
Griffiths, Peter. “On Showing and Telling.” New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, 2014, pp. 25-35.
LaPlante, Alice. ‘The making of a story’: a Norton guide to creative writing. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
Musgrave, David. “‘Show Don’t Tell’: What Creative Writing Has to Teach Philosophy.” Philosophies, vol. 9, no. 150, 2024, pp. 1-9.
Taylor, Brandon. “the underdark: a modified craftalk.” Substack. Accessed 9 October 2025.
Zwicky, Jan. “Show, Don’t Tell.” THEORIA, vol. 87, 2021, pp. 897-912.
