Show vs. Tell
When to dramatize and when to summarize
When Telling Is the Right Choice
Not every moment in a novel deserves full dramatization. Trying to show everything produces bloated prose that exhausts readers and flattens the moments that actually matter. Strategic telling is one of the most undervalued tools in a fiction writer's kit.
Telling works best in these situations:
A useful test: if you removed the passage entirely and the reader would not miss it, you are probably over-dramatizing a moment that deserves a sentence of summary instead.
- Transitions between scenes: "Three weeks passed before she heard from him again" moves the clock forward without wasting a page on uneventful days.
- Low-stakes moments that serve logistics: getting a character from one location to another, establishing routine, or conveying background information the reader needs but the scene does not hinge on.
- Time compression: when you need to cover days, weeks, or years in a paragraph, summary is the natural mode.
- Pacing control: a stretch of pure dramatization can slow the narrative to a crawl. A well-placed summary paragraph picks up the tempo and carries the reader toward the next high-stakes scene.
- Emotional cool-down after intense scenes: a brief narrative summary after a climactic confrontation gives the reader breathing room before the next dramatic beat.
How to Revise Flagged Passages
When you identify a passage that tells where it should show, resist the urge to simply add more words. The goal is not to make the passage longer but to replace the abstraction with something concrete. Here are four revision techniques that work reliably.
A strong revision does not just convert every tell into a show. It asks whether the passage needs dramatization at all. Sometimes the best fix is to cut the telling entirely because the scene already demonstrates what the summary restates.
- Replace emotion labels with physical sensation: instead of "she felt afraid," describe what fear does to her body, her breathing, her field of vision. Readers recognize fear from its symptoms.
- Convert exposition into dialogue or action: if a character needs to learn backstory, let another character reveal it in conversation or let the protagonist discover it through exploration rather than narrating it in a summary block.
- Anchor abstract descriptions in sensory detail: trade adjectives like "beautiful" or "disgusting" for the specific sights, sounds, textures, or smells that produce those reactions in the reader.
- Break description dumps into motion: instead of pausing to describe a room, let the character move through it. Each detail attaches to an action, keeping the scene alive.