Show, don't tell is a technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description. It avoids adjectives describing the author's analysis, but instead describes the scene in such a way that the reader can draw his or her own conclusions. The technique applies equally to nonfiction and all forms of fiction, literature including haiku and Imagism poetry in particular, speech, movie making, and playwriting. The concept is often attributed to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, reputed to have said "Don't tell methe moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." What Chekhov actually said, in a letter to his brother, was "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 distinction between telling and showing was popularized in Percy Lubbock's book The Craft of Fiction, and has been an important element in Anglo-Saxon narratological theoryever since.
Nobel Prize–winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was a notable proponent of the "show, don't tell" style. His Iceberg Theory, also known as the "theory of omission", developed from his background as a newspaper reporter. The term itself originates from his bullfighting treatise, Death in the Afternoon:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
Creative literature in general hinges on the artful use of a wide range of devices that reward the careful reader's appreciation of subtext and extrapolation of what the author chooses to leave unsaid, untold, and/or unshown. This suggests a form of respect for the reader, who should be trusted to develop a feeling for the meaning behind the action, without having the point painfully laid out for them.
In a 2013 article, Chuck Palahniuk goes as far as recommending a ban of what he calls "thought verbs" favoring instead the use of "specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling."
"Show, don't tell" should not be applied to all incidents in a story. According to James Scott Bell, "Sometimes a writer tells as a shortcut, to move quickly to the meaty part of the story or scene. Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid. If you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won't, and your readers will get exhausted." Showing requires more words; telling may cover a greater span of time more concisely. A novel that contains only showing would be incredibly long; therefore, a narrative can contain some legitimate telling.
that are important to the story should be dramatized with showing, but sometimes what happens between scenes can be told so the story can make progress. According to Orson Scott Card and others, "showing" is so terribly time-consuming that it is to be used only for dramatic scenes. The objective is to find the right balance of telling versus showing, summarization versus action. Factors like rhythm, pace, and tone come into play.
In his book Constructing a Story and his webseriesHats Off to the Screenwriters!, Yves Lavandier argues that one can show with dialogue. He takes the example of a scene from Prison Break in which pure dialogue between Michael Scofield and Tweener shows that Tweener is an expert pickpocket.
