Show, don't tell is the writing advice to put a reader inside a moment, through action, detail, speech and the senses, instead of summarising it or naming the feeling for them. "Ana was furious" tells. "Ana put the cup down so hard the handle snapped off" shows, and the reader works out the fury on their own.
The slogan has no single author. It grew up in twentieth-century writing teaching, and the ideas behind it are older: Anton Chekhov's advice to his brother in 1886, and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921), which made "showing" and "telling" terms of criticism. Forty years later, Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) argued that telling had been treated unfairly. All three are quoted below from their own books.
What Does Show, Don't Tell Mean?
Telling gives the reader a conclusion. Showing gives them the evidence and lets them reach the conclusion themselves.
| Telling | Showing |
|---|---|
| He was nervous. | He read the address again, though he knew it by heart. |
| The house was old. | The stair rail came away in her hand. |
| She loved her brother. | She kept his letters in the tin with their mother's ring. |
Why it works: a reader who works something out believes it more than a reader who is told it. A named emotion ("sad", "angry", "scared") is a label. The reader agrees with it, and feels very little. An action or a detail asks them to take part. Speech works the same way: a character who talks about the roof while the real argument runs underneath is showing, which is the heart of writing dialogue with subtext.
What Did Chekhov Actually Say?
The most quoted line on the subject is "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." It is nearly always credited to Chekhov. Chekhov never wrote it. Quote Investigator traced the short form back only as far as The Quotable Book Lover (2002). It is a later summary of a letter Chekhov wrote to his elder brother Alexander on 10 May 1886.
What the letter does say, in Avrahm Yarmolinsky's translation (The Unknown Chekhov, 1954):
"In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, 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, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball."
The same letter turns from landscape to people, and this is the part closest to show, don't tell. In Louis S. Friedland's translation (Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics, 1924):
"In the sphere of psychology, details are also the thing. God preserve us from commonplaces. Best of all is it to avoid depicting the hero's state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero's actions."
Chekhov liked the broken bottle enough to use it three times. It was already in his story "Hydrophobia", published two months before the letter, where the neck of a broken bottle glitters like a star on a moonlit dam. Ten years later he gave it to Treplev in The Seagull (1896), who envies the trick in his rival Trigorin: "He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glittered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the mill-wheel. There you have a moonlight night before your eyes" (Marian Fell's translation).
Another favourite, "Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream", is printed everywhere under Mark Twain's name, almost always without a source. We could not trace it to anything Twain wrote, and you should treat it as unsourced.
Where Do "Showing" and "Telling" Come From?
Percy Lubbock gave the two words their critical meaning in The Craft of Fiction (1921), a study of the novel built largely on Henry James's methods. In chapter V he wrote:
"the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself."
Lubbock's own words for the two modes were "scenic" and "panoramic". Scenic presentation puts the reader at the level of the action. Panoramic presentation is the author's view over it: summary, months passing, a town described from above. He did not call one good and the other bad. He watched for how a novel moves between them, "how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought immediately to the level of the reader", and his rule in chapter XVII is short: "The subject dictates the method."
When Should You Tell Instead of Show?
Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) opens with a chapter called "Telling and Showing", and its first sentence takes the side of telling: "One of the most obviously artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of going beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of a character's mind and heart." Artificial, he goes on to argue, is not the same as bad. Every story is shaped by its author, and a novel that pretends otherwise is still being steered. His point is that an author can pick a disguise, a narrator or a viewpoint character, but can never leave the book.
In practice, tell when:
- Time needs to pass. "Three winters went by" beats three winters of scenes.
- The reader already knows. If they saw the argument, a later scene need not replay it. "She told him everything" is enough.
- The detail is minor. Not every coffee needs a cup, a steam and a smell. Save the showing for the moments that matter.
- A character's voice is the point. A first-person narrator who sums people up is telling, and it is often the pleasure of the book.
Dwight Swain's sequel, the quiet unit after a scene's disaster in scene and sequel, is partly a licence to tell: one of its jobs, in his words, is "To telescope reality."
A Worked Example
Maya is about to go into a job interview she cannot afford to fail.
Told:
Maya was very nervous about the interview. She really needed this job.
Two facts, both named. Nothing for the reader to do.
Shown:
Maya read the address on the letter again, though she knew it by heart. Her coffee had gone cold. When the receptionist said her name, she stood up too fast and knocked the cup over.
No feeling is named. The rereading, the forgotten coffee and the spilt cup do the work, and "she really needed this job" becomes something the reader senses from how badly she wants it to go well.
Told, on purpose:
She heard nothing for three weeks.
Here telling is right. Three weeks of waiting is not a scene; it is a bridge to the next one.
How Do You Revise for Show, Don't Tell in Deckle?
Deckle is a novel-writing app that keeps every scene as its own document, with snapshots of earlier versions, so you can rewrite a telling passage without losing it.
- Find the telling. Click the magnifying glass in the icon rail to open Search Project, and look across the whole book for words that name feelings: "felt", "nervous", "angry", "realised". Click a result to jump straight to it in the scene.
- Keep the told version. Before you change a scene, open the Inspector's Versions tab, click + for a new snapshot, and name it something like "Told".
- Rewrite the moment. Ask what a person feeling this would do, and put that on the page instead of the feeling's name.
- Compare and choose. If the shown version is heavier than the moment deserves, Restore the snapshot. Telling was right there.
- Give characters their own tells. Add a custom field to a character's Codex entry for their habits under pressure (she straightens things; he talks faster), so the same body language returns across the book, which also helps with keeping characters consistent.
Snapshots are covered step by step in saving a version before a big rewrite. Show, don't tell is usually a line-level pass, so it fits late in a sequence of revision passes, after the structure is settled.
Common Mistakes
- Showing everything. A book that dramatises every errand is slow. Summary is a tool, and Lubbock and Booth both say so.
- Swapping one label for a cliché. "Her heart pounded" and "a chill ran down his spine" are telling in disguise. Find the detail that belongs to this person in this room.
- Filtering the moment. "She saw the door open" and "he felt the cold come in" put a viewpoint between the reader and the event. "The door opened. Cold came in" is closer.
- Showing, then telling anyway. "She slammed the door. She was angry." The second sentence spoils the first. Trust the reader.
- Long description in the name of showing. Chekhov's advice was a few small details, grouped well, not a paragraph of adjectives.
- Hiding the important feeling. If the reader must know a character's state to follow the plot, make it clear. Showing should sharpen the meaning, not bury it.
FAQ
What is an example of show, don't tell?
Telling: "He was nervous." Showing: "He read the address again, though he knew it by heart." The reader sees the behaviour and supplies the feeling.
Did Chekhov say "Don't tell me the moon is shining"?
No. The earliest known appearance of that wording is in a 2002 quotation book. It summarises his letter of 10 May 1886 to his brother Alexander, which suggests a moonlit night through a piece of broken glass glittering on a mill dam.
Who came up with show, don't tell?
No one person. Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) made showing and telling critical terms; the slogan itself spread through writing courses and handbooks later in the century.
Is telling ever better than showing?
Yes. Telling is the right choice for passing time, for things the reader already knows, and for minor moments. Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) is the classic defence of it.
How do I stop telling emotions?
Search your draft for named feelings, then ask what a person feeling that would do or notice. Write the action or the detail, and cut the name.
Sources
Retrieved 25 October 2026.
- Anton Chekhov, letter to Alexander Chekhov, 10 May 1886, in Avrahm Yarmolinsky (ed. and trans.), The Unknown Chekhov (first published 1954; read in the Funk & Wagnalls printing of 1968 through Open Library's search inside) (archive.org).
- The same letter in Louis S. Friedland (ed.), Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics (first published 1924; Benjamin Blom reissue, 1964) (archive.org).
- Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull, Act IV, translated by Marian Fell (Project Gutenberg).
- Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921), chapters V and XVII (Project Gutenberg).
- Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), chapter 1, "Telling and Showing" (archive.org).
- Quote Investigator, Don't Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass, 30 July 2013.
- Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973; first published 1965), chapter 4 (archive.org).