New writers are inundated with advice. Whether you’re in a workshop, discussing ideas with a friend, or watching an interview with a famous author, everyone wants to tell you how to write well. Even I, your friendly neighborhood hobbyist, am sitting here tapping away on my keyboard to put my writing opinions into the world. As a new writer, it’s difficult to decide what advice to take and which to discard. What ends up sticking are the things that are repeated over and over again. These persistent pieces of advice are good for burgeoning writers as they help people new to creative writing find their stride. But eventually, advice taken from a mentor or a famous author and then repeated ad nauseum in Buzzfeed Listicles stops sounding like advice- they start sounding like Rules. 

Googling “How To Write” brings up millions of results, most of which are slight rewordings of the same information. Outline Your Plot. Study Up on Grammar. Vary Your Word Choice. Kill Your Darlings and Said is Dead. They’re not all wrong but they are reductive, spouting the same things a Creative Writing 101 teacher might write on a student’s rough draft. For the self-taught, these become “Rules”, “Rules” that can stop an intermediate writer from improving their craft. I’d like to dissect these Rules- why they’re taught and repeated so often as well as why they need to be kicked from their pedestals. The first may catch me some flack; it’s a popular one, one so pervasive that I’m still unlearning it. Let’s talk about the writer’s “Golden Rule”: Show, Don’t Tell. 

Before the pitchforks come out, Show, Don’t Tell has a lot of value. It wouldn’t be taught in every Creative Writing 101 class and plastered on every inch of the writer’s internet if it wasn’t good advice. For those unfamiliar, Show, Don’t Tell, invokes two methods of conveying information through text. The latter, Telling, is similar to how we tell stories when speaking with friends:

Telling: 
It was really cold. Joey’s car didn’t start, so he called into work. He was so mad.

That kind of storytelling works for casual conversations but doesn’t work so well when writing. An entire story like this ends up feeling like a list of actions and descriptors, “Character did X. Other Character felt Y. It was Z.” Not exactly engaging, right? 

To get new writers out of this habit, teachers ask them to Show instead. Instead of writing, “It was really cold,” the writer describes how the cold felt or drops context clues to give the idea of cold. For example:

Telling: 
It was really cold. 

Showing: 
A stiff wind blew, wisps of snow glittering in the early morning air. Joey pulled down his hat to cover his reddening ears. Shoving his hands back under his armpits, he walked around the half-buried car, boots crunching against the thin layer of ice that covered the unplowed driveway.

By giving the reader context clues- Joey’s red ears, the crunching of his boots- the writer has conveyed the idea of cold without explicitly saying it. Those clues also pulled double duty; while letting the reader know it’s cold, they’ve also fleshed out a setting that didn’t exist in the first iteration. The same concept can apply to the rest of the story, with Showing clues creating action, character, and emotion:

Telling:
Joey’s car didn’t start, so he called into work. He was so mad. 

Showing:
Joey slumped into the driver’s seat once more. He turned the key in the ignition and listened. The engine turned once. Twice. Three times. He let it go a fourth and fifth in desperation before pulling the key back and cursing.

The clock on the dashboard blinked. 6:04. Even if the car jumped back to life, there was no way he was getting anywhere in this weather. Sighing, Joey pulled his phone out of his coat and dialed. 

“Joey?”

“Hey, Trish.”

“Everything okay?”

He shifted in his seat. “Erm. No. Car won’t start.”

“Huh. Alright, I’ll let the rest of the team know.”

“Wait, hey, Trish, uh-”

There was a beat of silence.

“Uh- can it be a sick day? Not PTO?” he asked, jaw tensing.

“Joey, you know you’re out of sick days. It’s either unexcused or PTO.”

The sound of his teeth grinding reverberated through his skull.

“I’ll see you later, Joe.”

The phone’s screen darkened. Joey’s knuckles were white as he slammed the phone into the passenger seat.

With all the details and context spread around the action taking place, not once did the writer have to mention that Joey was mad or that he was calling into work. His grinding teeth and white knuckles are enough for us to know he’s mad, and the discussion about sick days versus PTO tells us he’s talking to an employer. Showing allows the reader to feel more like a hovering ghost, watching Joey’s day in real-time and picking up important information along the way. It’s immersive, it’s engaging- no wonder Show, Don’t Tell became a Writing “Rule”!

The problem is, once a novice writer discovers the power of Show, Don’t Tell, they carve that Rule into stone and vow never to Tell again. In theory, this should make the most immersive novel in the world. In reality, there can be too much of a good thing. Taken to its extreme, Showing can become every reader’s worst nightmare. Take this example: 

Showing: 
The afternoon sun dappled the sidewalk, its warmth dispersed by the full oak leaves overhead. Bird song flitted between the trees that marched along the sidewalk like so many well-meaning soldiers singing as they guarded the subdivision's sidewalks and lawns against overheating with their tall hats of green. Maria skipped along the sidewalk beside ants, worms, and rolly-pollies who were making their way back into the ground after the early morning rain. The air was humid with lingering wet grass and promise.

A car passed by and Maria watched it from her periphery. Red, flashy, its logo too big, and its frame too small for common sense. She smirked at the thought of it, sitting in the garage and gathering dust all winter only for it to bask in the sun for a few months of the year. Much like her and her brand new summer shoes.

A shadow bounced along the sidewalk below her, the caster somewhere above. Leaves shook and fell and Maria jumped back, mouth open. A set of dirty sneakers bounced their soft plastic against the sidewalk as their owner landed the jump. Maria’s eyes shot to meet the sneaker-owner’s face. Addy, sticks in her hair and dirt on her cheek grinned at her, her lips pulled back to the gums. 

In this case, too much Showing has led to “Purple Prose”, or imagery and wordplay that is too complicated for the situation it’s trying to describe. These purple paragraphs obscure the point the author was trying to make, and the reader isn’t sure what to focus on- was it the fancy car? The morning rain? Addy, jumping out of the tree? The reader can’t tell because the author Showed them everything, and it was too much! It leads writers stuck with bloated manuscripts, extensive cuts, and full rewrites to trim the story down to its essentials.

Relying on Showing can also make it hard to follow actions or emotions. Showing deals with the context or consequences of an action or emotion, not the action or emotion itself. For example, “Maria jumped back, mouth open,” doesn’t emote surprise, it only shows that her mouth is open- whether in fear, surprise, or shock, we don’t know. With no further context given, we are left to guess what Maria is feeling. These types of emotional cues (clenched fists, tensed shoulders, quivering lips) often feed into cliches and can disconnect the reader from how the character feels. Showing is supposed to close the distance between reality and the imagined. Too much of it can do the opposite, making it hard to see the forest through the trees.

So how do you fix Show, Don’t Tell? It does have benefits; we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A change in phrasing, one that eliminates the binary, might help. Instead of Show, Don’t Tell, call it Show And Tell. While either extreme has the potential for literary failure, Show And Tell mixes the two, letting them balance each other out. Take a look at the Purple Prose from above rewritten to have a little less Show and a little more Tell: 

Show And Tell:
The afternoon sun dappled the sidewalk. It was a beautiful, sunny day and Maria walked along the sidewalk, avoiding the still-damp grass. A storm had passed through earlier that morning, and she worried about smudging her new white shoes. 

The shadow of the tree in front of her shifted in a way that made her pause. A leaf fell, then two, and the shaking of the branch grew wilder. She squinted up into the dark overhang just as a shadow leaped towards her. Maria yelped and jumped back, narrowly avoiding the figure slamming down onto the sidewalk where she’d stood. 

It was Abby. She stood there, grinning like a wild woman, sticks and leaves in her hair and dirt on her cheek. Maria looked down to see she’d landed in Mrs. Abernathy’s flower bed. A speck of mud graced the top of her left sneaker. 

“Ugh! Abby! Look what you made me do!”

Now the point of the original is clear: Maria doesn’t like getting messy and Abby, her clear opposite, is there to make trouble. We still learn a lot of these things by Showing, in the case of Abby’s appearance and Maria’s overreaction to a speck of mud, but we’re Told background information, like that it rained that morning. Is the fact that it rained important to the story? Yes! Is it worth an entire descriptive paragraph? No! The focus of the story is on the characters and their conflicting personalities, so the Showing should be utilized there instead of on the setting.

Balancing Showing and Telling is about balancing what is important and what is not. The same can be said for writing and writing advice. What’s important about the “Rule” of Show, Don’t Tell, is that you learn to write a story through immersive description. Making it a “Rule”, though? Throw that notion out the window. There are no “Rules” in creative ventures, only advice and ideas. Don’t let your writing become unbalanced- be a good artist and break some “Rules”.