Show, don't tell , but don't turn your prose into an instruction manual

There's a piece of advice that every writing course repeats like a mantra, and that I myself repeated for years without stopping to think how incomplete it actually was: show, don't tell. It sounds like a simple rule. Instead of writing that a character is sad, describe their hands trembling as they pour the coffee, their eyes fixed on an empty spot on the wall. Beautiful in theory. The problem comes when this rule is applied blindly, everywhere, always — turning every page into a sort of catalog of minute gestures that ultimately says less, not more, than a single direct sentence.

When "showing" becomes exhausting

I've read manuscripts, including my own, ruined by this excess. Entire pages dedicated to describing how a character fixes their hair, lights a cigarette, stares out the window — all to avoid the forbidden phrase "he was nervous." The result isn't more immersive. It's exhausting. The reader starts wondering when we'll get to the point, and that point keeps slipping further away under the weight of too many sensory details that don't add anything to the emotion — they only dilute it.

Telling is not always a sin

The truth nobody had told me, and that I had to discover on my own after rewriting the same paragraph twelve times, is that telling isn't always a sin. Sometimes the direct sentence — the one that simply says "she had been exhausted for weeks" — is the only right thing to write in that moment, because the reader needs to move quickly toward the next scene, not stop to contemplate every emotional nuance of a minor character we'll never see again.

The right question to ask yourself

The question I now ask myself, before deciding whether to show or tell, is far more practical than it sounds: does this moment deserve the reader's time? If the answer is yes — if it's a turning point, a revelation, a breaking point in the story — then it's worth slowing down, showing, letting the reader build the emotion themselves through the details. If instead it's a transitional moment, something that only exists to take us somewhere else, then telling becomes an act of respect toward the reader, not a lazy shortcut.

Writing well, in the end, doesn't mean following a rule to the letter. It means knowing when to break it deliberately — feeling the rhythm of your own story instead of chasing a principle you memorized on a writing blog. Including this one, if we want to be truly honest.

Marghi