M.S. Olney’s takedown of “Show, Don’t Tell” is exactly the kind of examination of writing advice we need. It’s funny, it’s sharp, and its actual proposal is basically unimpeachable — show when showing serves the story, tell when telling does. Hard to argue with.
I kept pondering it after I finished, though, because “show when it serves, tell when it serves” is true but not quite a tool. It tells you the destination without giving you a way to get there. So here’s the way I actually think about it when I’m at the keyboard.
How to Know When to Show Or Tell
Show and tell aren’t two boxes. They’re one dial.
The dial controls emotional distance. Turn it toward showing — scene, action, dialogue, the character’s hand tightening on the doorknob — and the reader gets closer to the moment. They feel it happening to them, in something close to real time. Turn it toward telling — “John was furious,” “three years passed,” “she never forgave him for it” — and the reader steps back. They get the shape of the thing instead of the thing itself.
Neither position is more sophisticated than the other. They do different jobs. You show when you want the reader’s pulse to change. You tell when you want them to breathe, to hold the whole arc of something in view at once, or to hear you, the person telling the story, instead of just watching it happen. A book that only shows is exhausting, all sustained held breath. A book that only tells is a summary, not a story. The skill isn’t picking a side; it’s knowing which distance a given moment needs and dialing to it on purpose.
Showing why we’re here
So why does the rule exist at all, phrased as a rule?
“Show, don’t tell” isn’t bad advice invented from nowhere. It’s good advice for a different medium.
Think about where it actually comes from cleanly: screenwriting, and by extension acting. A screenplay has no interiority track. There’s no narrator’s voice to lean on, no sentence that can just say “she was furious” and have that land the way prose-furious lands. The camera can’t tell you anything. An actor can’t tell you anything, not directly. They can only do something you infer a feeling from. Show, don’t tell isn’t a stylistic preference in that medium. It’s the actual physics of the form. You show because there is no telling apparatus available to you.
Well, that’s not quite right. You can do the voice over thing. Any number of projects from the Dukes of Hazzard to The Lord of the Rings has that. And the narration is an intrusion. And it still manages not to have interiority. If a narrator tells you that Luke is upset, you’re seeing that from outside. You still have to watch him to see if his jaw clinches or if he starts running the other way. And if the voice from outside starts recounting the history of the First Age, that’s telling for sure. And explaining. Now you know what the rapid-fire sequence of images means.
Prose has a way to be interior . That’s the whole difference. A sentence can enter a character’s head and simply state what’s there, with all the compression and control that implies, and nothing about that is a failure of craft. it’s a capability screenwriting doesn’t have and would kill for. You can show the external actions or you can tell the interiority directly. It’s a stylistic choice sometimes. At other times, it’s doing different work.
How to Tell What Medium Is Yours
I’ve noticed this pattern more broadly in writing advice: how much of it reaches for movie and TV examples to make its point. Beat sheets, three-act structure, “show don’t tell,” even a lot of pacing advice, arrives already dressed in film’s vocabulary. And that’s not automatically wrong. there’s real craft wisdom in there. But it’s advice built for a medium that solves problems prose doesn’t have, using tools prose has that it doesn’t.
Because a different medium isn’t just a different delivery pipe for the same content. It’s a different set of constraints, which means a different set of workarounds, which means the “rules” that emerge are answers to that medium’s specific problem. Importing the answer without the problem is where things go sideways. Translation isn’t a one-to-one map between two sets of instructions. It’s not “do the film version of the writing thing.” It’s asking what the film advice was actually for, in film’s terms, and then asking what prose’s version of that same underlying need looks like, using the tools prose actually has.
Which, for show vs. tell, brings us back to the dial. Prose isn’t a camera with a narration problem to route around. It has a telling apparatus built in. The question was never whether to use it. It’s when.