Show,
don't tell.
who already shows more than she knows.
Telling names it. Showing proves it.
Here are two sentences about the same person. She was nervous. That is telling — it names the feeling and moves on, the way a label names a tin. Now the second: She kept folding and unfolding the same corner of her sleeve. Nobody has said the word "nervous" — and yet you know. That is showing: the writer hands you the evidence and lets you feel the conclusion arrive in your own head.
Readers trust what they work out for themselves far more than what they are told. When a story says the house was creepy, you nod politely. When it says the door was ajar, and somewhere upstairs a tap was running, though the family had been gone for a year — you lean in. The second version made you do a tiny bit of detective work, and the conclusion you reached feels like yours.
Three ways to show a feeling.
When you want to show rather than tell, you are really choosing from three kinds of evidence. Each one puts the reader somewhere different — watching, sensing, or noticing.
The three tools
- A physical sign — what the body does when nobody is watching it: gripped straps, a chewed thumbnail, shoulders up around the ears.
- A sense detail — what the moment sounds, smells or feels like: a silent phone, a hallway loud with strangers, cold air through a cracked window.
- A small action — a restless, repeated movement: glancing at the clock and looking away, folding the same corner of a sleeve.
What each one does
- A physical sign lets the reader see the feeling from the outside, like a camera.
- A sense detail puts the reader inside the person's ears and skin.
- A small action gives the feeling a rhythm — nerves repeat, boredom drags, panic accelerates.
Read the showing version once more. The poster is a small action (re-reading it), the slow tick is a sense detail, and the fiddling with magazines is the restless repeated movement that gives impatience its rhythm. Three tools, one feeling — and the word "impatient" never appears.
Your brain treats vivid sense details in fiction a little like the real thing. Brain-imaging studies have found that words for textures and smells — "leathery", "cinnamon" — wake up some of the same sensory regions that real textures and smells do. Showing works because the reader's brain briefly lives the detail.
Slide it from telling to showing.
The same small moment, written three ways. Slide from telling to showing and watch the flat line bloom — the notes underneath point to exactly what changed, and why. Then try the rewrite box at the bottom: no marking, only play.
Your turn
Here is a flat line to play with — no marking, nothing to hand in. Try giving us one thing we can see, hear or feel instead of being told:
Telling names a feeling and moves on. Showing hands the reader the evidence — the sights, sounds and small physical signs — and lets them feel it for themselves. Craft then shapes the rhythm: a short sentence to slow a moment, one sharp detail rather than ten soft ones.
Craft: one sharp detail, and a short sentence.
Once you are showing, two small craft moves lift the writing again. The first: choose one sharp detail instead of three soft ones. A reader holds one image perfectly; give them five and they hold none. The second: let a short sentence do the heavy lifting. After a long, flowing line, a sentence of two or three words lands like a held breath.
The writer you are reading at the moment is a master of both. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe never writes "the narrator felt guilty and afraid". He gives you one sound, one exact, homely comparison — and lets it grow:
A watch wrapped in cotton: tiny, muffled, relentless. Poe picked an object from an ordinary pocket to carry the most dreadful sound in the story — and because you can hear a muffled watch, you hear the heart too. Notice also what his narrator does throughout the story: he keeps insisting how calm and sensible he is, while his actions show you the opposite. The gap between what a character says and what they show is one of the oldest tricks in fiction — and one of the best.
A painter shows you "cold and tired".
Painters solved show-don't-tell four hundred years before writing guides existed — a picture cannot "tell" at all. Look at how much this one shows you without a caption's worth of help.
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How do you know the hunt went badly? One thin fox slung over a shoulder — for three men and a whole pack of dogs. How do you know it is bitterly cold? The dogs' tails are down, every one; the hunters' backs are bent; the sky and the ice are the same colour. How do you know life goes on anyway? Far below, tiny figures are skating on the frozen ponds. Every conclusion is yours — Bruegel only laid out the evidence. That is exactly the job of a showing sentence.
Bruegel painted this in 1565, during one of the harshest stretches of what historians now call the Little Ice Age — a run of decades when European winters froze rivers solid. The skaters, the snowed-under village, the white sky: he was showing his audience the winter they were actually living through.
Spot the showing.
Name the tool.
What is the short sentence for?
Poe's everyday object.
Fresh one. In Bruegel's painting, how do you know the hunt went badly — what single animal are the hunters carrying home?
Turn the dial yourself.
Rewrite the flat paragraph.
Here is a paragraph that tells everything and shows nothing:
Keep the same situation — Mia, the storm, the empty house, no sleep — but hand us the evidence instead of the labels. Aim for 4–6 sentences. Try all three tools: a physical sign, a sense detail, a small repeated action. And somewhere, let one short sentence land. 80–120 words is plenty.
On your rewrite, Florence
strong Where you swapped a feeling-word for something we can see or hear, the paragraph comes alive — that is the whole craft, and you are doing it.
try this Read your draft aloud and listen for any feeling-labels that survived — "scared", "creepy", "worried". Each one you can replace with evidence will make the reader do the feeling for you.
to add One sentence of three words or fewer, somewhere after your longest line. Listen to what it does to the pace.
The words from today.
- Telling
- Naming a feeling or judgement directly — "she was nervous" — so the reader is informed but not involved.
- Showing
- Giving the reader evidence — sights, sounds, actions — and letting them reach the feeling themselves.
- Sense detail
- A detail aimed at one of the senses — what a moment sounds, smells, tastes or feels like from inside it.
- Image
- One concrete, picturable thing standing in for a bigger idea — Poe's watch wrapped in cotton; Bruegel's single thin fox.
- Rhythm
- The pace your sentence lengths create. Long lines flow; a short one lands. A restless rhythm can be the feeling.
- Draft
- A version of a piece of writing. Showing usually arrives in the second draft — the first one tells, and that is how drafts work.
Hand them the evidence.
You can now tell telling from showing, you know the three tools — a physical sign, a sense detail, a small action — and you know the two craft moves that sharpen them: one vivid image, and a short sentence that lands. Tonight, when you pick up the Poe, watch him do it. Then watch yourself do it next time you write. The glint on the broken glass is yours now.
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