Portrayal means conveying emotion, character, and information through specific sensory detail, movement, and dialogue rather than direct expression. Instead of “he was nervous”, you write “he pressed his seat against the flesh of his palm”. The principle comes from Chekhov, but was popularized by creative writing instruction in the 20th century. This is a useful default, but not an absolute rule—summary and explanation have legitimate uses in fiction.
Many of the show’s unexplained explanations are abstract. This guide links each principle to a specific published example so you can see exactly how the technique looks on the page and why it works.
What Shows Really Means
The “show, don’t tell” guideline is often misunderstood. This does not mean: never use the verb “to be”, avoid all adjectives, or describe everything in visual detail. This means: when you have the opportunity to become a reader feel it prefer the former to understanding something only mentally.
The difference is between knowledge and experience. Talking gives information. Showing creates experience. Both are necessary; the question is which one serves the stage.
Show examples: Emotion
Saying: “He was angry.”
Scene from “The Cathedral” by Raymond Carver
In The Cathedral, Carver never tells us that the narrator is jealous or hostile. He shows this through the narrator’s behavior: the blind man’s clipped, indifferent descriptions, his refusal to engage, his drinking. Finally, when the narrator says, “I don’t have any blind friends,” the line is funny and devastating because Carver showed us what it costs to even admit this man. Emotion is not in expression, but in action.
A scene from Flannery O’Connor’s Hard to Find a Good Man
O’Connor shows the grandmother’s vanity and self-deception through her clothing: she is carefully dressed for the trip, because if an accident occurs, anyone who sees her dead will know she is a lady. This single detail tells us everything about O’Connor’s values without writing: “Grandma was vain and concerned with manners.”
Show examples: Character
Featured from Toni Morrison’s Lover
Morrison doesn’t tell us that Sethe is defined by her past trauma. He shows this through the way Sethe moves through space – her constant awareness of where the scar on the back of her neck is, the way the other characters react to her. The haunting is literal and metaphorical. The psychology of the character is more embedded in the physical world of the novel than is mentioned.
Screened from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
Stevens, the narrator of The Butler, never suggests that he suppresses his feelings in order to serve an ideal that turns out to be empty. Ishiguro shows this in Stevens’s prose style: overly formal syntax, a habit of self-correcting mid-sentence, every attempt at personal reflection giving way to professional assessment. The character damage is in the grammar.
A scene from Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”
Hemingway’s story never mentions what the pair discussed. He shows the conflict entirely through dialogue and objects depicted between lines of conversation: hills, drinks, a beaded curtain, train tracks. The reader understands the risks before they are stated, and in fact they are never disclosed. This shows that it has gone to extremes: the whole situation is conveyed through innuendo and indifference.
Demonstration Examples: Creating Mood
Screened from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
McCarthy never tells us that the world is hopeless. It shows this through the landscape of ash, the dead trees, the silence, and what the man and the boy find. Prose style – free of apostrophes, sparse, declarative – realizes the exhaustion of characters. The world has lost something; there is also in prose. Form and content reinforce each other without authorial commentary.
Scene from Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery
Jackson begins with a detailed, cheerful description of a pleasant June day. The ordinary surface – children playing, flowers blooming – and the contrast that the story reveals is itself a technique. It shows us that horror wears familiar clothes. If he had opened with “something terrible was going to happen,” the story wouldn’t have worked.
Speaking up is the right choice
The “don’t show don’t tell” rule is a heuristic, not a law. Experienced writers speak deliberately and often. It is appropriate to explain in the following cases:
- Compression time: “It’s been three years,” he says. It will take three years to show three years.
- Movement between scenes: Wraps up summary scenes efficiently. You don’t need to dramatize every transition.
- To provide the necessary context: Basic information that the reader needs but cannot be dramatized should be briefly explained.
- When the emotion is too big to show: Some experiences—grief, transcendence, uncanniness—resist direct dramatization. A brief explanation can work where an extended demonstration rings false.
I am talking about “To the Lighthouses” by Virginia Woolf
In “Time Passes,” Woolf compresses ten years into a lyrical summary of a few pages. He does not show those ten years on stage. He says—and as the rhythm of the prose evokes the passage of time and the weight of loss, the phrase in his hand becomes a display of its own. Speaking skillfully is not the lack of art; It is a craft that is applied in a different way.
How to Apply Show Don’t Say in Your Writing
1. Define abstract statements about symbols
In your project, find sentences that describe what the character is like (“John was generous”, “Maria was suspicious by nature”). For each, ask: what action, object, or piece of dialogue could convey it instead? Replace the statement with a scene or detail that wins it.
2. Find the physical correlative of the part
TS Eliot called it an “objective correlative”—a set of objects, events, or situations that evoke a particular emotion. When you need to convey grief, find a specific physical fact of grief for that character in the moment: an unwashed cup, an unanswered phone, a habit of reaching out to someone who is no longer there.
3. Let the dialogue do the work
What characters say – and what they don’t say – reveals character more effectively than description. People do not announce their emotional state in conversation. They talk around them, direct them, change the subject. Write dialogue that behaves like a real conversation.
Frequently asked questions
What is an example of a simple show?
Saying: “He was nervous before the interview.” It shows: “He sat in the waiting room and read the same paragraph over and over again four times, each time forgetting what he had read.” The second version puts the reader inside the experience rather than reporting from the outside.
Is the show not telling you a rule to follow?
No. This is a useful standard for beginners who tend to overexplain rather than trust their scenes. Expert writers deliberately break it. The real principle is this: trust your reader. Whether that means showing or telling depends on what the particular moment calls for.
Who first said don’t say show?
Chekhov expressed a version of it: “Don’t tell me the moon shines; show me the shine of light on broken glass.” Henry James wrote about summary versus dramatization. In the mid-20th century, the phrase “don’t show, don’t tell” became standard in American creative writing pedagogy, mostly through university MFA programs.
