We’ve been kicking around show vs. tell a lot lately, so I want to keep a list of all the reasonable-sounding theories on what’s good about showing or telling. I’m just trying to organize my thoughts here. I have no doubt that you, my alarmingly clever readers, will immediately poke them full of holes.

It’s traditional at this point to give a list of examples of badly-written tells vs. well-written shows, but that’s cheating. We need to consider real examples of both shows and tells, and figure out what circumstances makes one or the other better. And first we have to have some idea what “showing” and “telling” mean.

One definition is that “showing” means things that could be shown in a movie: bare facts such as setting and events, body language, and facial expressions. “Telling”, respectively, then means describing a character’s thoughts or feelings.

Another interpretation is that “showing” describes things as they happen, while “telling” summarizes them, whether they’re externally-visible events or internal thoughts and feelings. In this view, transitory, sensory feelings are “shows” (“The subway car was hot”), while moods (“Jill had never been so happy”) or attitudes (“The bar was unnaturally quiet. I didn’t like it.”) are tells. Consider this passage from Camus’ The Stranger:

A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.

Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.

Camus could have written this:

His knife glinted in the sun. Sweat blinded me. I pulled the trigger.

The first passage is all internal monologue and descriptions that are symbolic or impressionistic rather than literal. The sun makes no noise, the knife does not gouge into his eyeballs, there is no gust from the sea, the sky does not crack in two, and no sheet of flame pours from the sky. You couldn’t have shown any of that in a movie, so by the first definition above, it’s all telling. But it’s not summarizing anything; rather, it presents a series of sensory impressions that flash by, after which the narrator discovers the gun has fired, almost on its own. So by the second definition it’s all showing.

The first definition is easier to use, but I think the second is more useful.

A third definition, which several comments below mention, is that "showing" gives the reader clues that they must assemble, while "telling" spells out what the author wants the reader to know. Mystic writes about "implication outside the initial scope", quoting someone else:

There is a technique where you baldly state how a character feels or what a character thinks about something, and that statement can imply things far beyond the scope of what you wrote. If you've ever read Bubbles you might remember how the style is very simplistic, with Derpy telling the reader all sorts of things that other writers might try to show instead, like the things that makes her happy, or her favourite foods, or what might make her sad. The thing is, telling here is not an error, because what the writer was trying to portray subtly is not Derpy's emotions or her interests. The thing the writer was trying to infer here was Derpy's simplemindedness, and the relationship she has with her mother.

By this definition, that is "telling" us individual things about Derpy, but "showing" the big picture of Derpy that we put together from those things.

Showing

Catlett's voice said, "I like you to meet my associate, the Bear. Movie stuntman and champion weight lifter, as you might've noticed. Picks up and throws out things I don't want."

Chili looked at the thickness of the guy's body, at red and gold hibiscus blossoms and green leaves on a field of Hawaiian blue, but wouldn't look at his face now. He knew they were hibiscus, because Debbie used to grow them on Meridian Avenue before she flipped out and went back to Brooklyn.

Now the guy was saying, "I know Chili Palmer. I know all about him."

The Bear sucking in his stomach and acting tough, his crotch right there in Chili's face. This guy was as nuts as Debbie. You could tell he had his stomach sucked in, because the waistband was creased where the guy's gut ordinarily hung over and rolled it, the pants as out of shape as this guy trying to give him a hard time. But Chili didn't look up.

Catlett said, "We think you ought to turn around and go back to Miami."

Chili still didn't look up. Not yet.

The Bear said, "Take your ten grand with you, while you still have it."

And Chili almost looked up—this guy as much as telling him he had been in his hotel room, nothing to it, saw all that dough and left it—but he didn't. Chili kept his eyes on the guy's waist and saw the stomach move to press against the elastic band, the guy still putting on his show but giving his gut a breather. Chili looked at the guy's crotch one more time before moving his gaze up through the hibiscus till he was looking at the guy's bearded face.

Chili said, "So you're a stuntman," with the look he'd use on a slow pay. "Are you any good?"

What the Bear did in that next moment was grin and turn his head to the side, as if too modest to answer and would let Catlett speak for him. It made the next move easier, the guy not even looking as Chili grabbed a handful of his crotch, stepped aside and yanked him off the stairs. The Bear yelled out of pain and fear and caught Chili's head with an elbow going by, but it was worth it to see that beefy guy roll all the way down the stairs to land on the main floor. Chili kept watching till he saw the guy move, then looked up at Catlett.

"Not bad, for a guy his size."

          — Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.

He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose.

His head was still inclined to one side and his glance was oblique. He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation. And when they had paid for the rounds of beers and were ready to depart they did not suggest that he join them.

          — Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

A movie couldn’t show you that Singer “could think of nothing else to tell about himself”, so by the first definition above, it’s a little telly. But it describes what passes through Singer’s head, rather than summarizing it as “Singer was too depressed to say anything else,” so by the second definition it’s more showy.

On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of humankind. He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternity. Dahlmann was warmed by the rightness of the man’s hairband, the baize poncho he wore, his gaucho trousers, and the boots made out of the skin of a horse’s leg, and he said to himself… that only in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

Telling

Long after separating from Oki, she was shocked to read in A Girl of 16 that on his way to meet her he would be trying to decide how to make love to her, and that he usually did exactly as he had planned. She found it appalling that a man’s heart would “throb with joy as he walked along thinking about it.” To a spontaneous young girl like Otoko it had been inconceivable that a man would plan in advance his lovemaking techniques, their sequence, and the like. She accepted whatever he did, gave whatever he asked. Her youth made her all the more unquestioning. Oki had described her as an extraordinary girl, a woman among women. Thanks to her, he wrote, he had experienced all the ways of making love.

When she read that, Otoko burned with humiliation. But she could not suppress her lively memories of his lovemaking; her body tensed and began to quiver. Finally the tension was released, and delight and satisfaction spread through her whole body. Her past love had come back to life.

          — Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Nobel for literature, Beauty and Sadness

For the hours that Gogol is at nursery school, fingerpainting and learning the English alphabet, Ashima is despondent, unaccustomed, all over again, to being on her own. She misses her son’s habit of always holding on to the free end of her sorry as they walked together. She misses the sound of his sulky, high-pitched little boy voice, telling her that he is hungry, or tired, or needs to go to the bathroom. To avoid being alone at home she sits in the reading room of the public library, in a cracked leather armchair, writing letters to her mother, or reading magazines or one of her Bengali books from home.

...

From the beginning he feels useless. Moushumi makes all the decisions, does all the talking. He is mute in the brasseries where they eat their lunches, and in the shops where he gazes at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens; mute on the rainy afternoon they spend together at the d’Orsay. He is particularly mute when he and Moushumi get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute and arguing around paper covered tables. He struggled to grasp the topic of conversation — the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K — but everything else is a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices.

          — Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the Pulitzer for literature, The Namesake

When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist — somewhere in some hexagon.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, winner of the Pulitzer for international ilterature, “The Library of Babel”

They went outside, and while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they stuck the needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

The usual formula for showing is that a scene is shown, with some told embellishments (e.g., the first Borges quote). For telling, a passage’s purpose and critical information are told, and are rounded out by the details shown (e.g., Lahiri, Borges).

Here are some reasons proposed for why and when showing is better than telling:

Showing is more engaging

That’s the reason Ezn gives in his guide’s section on show vs. tell. But this begs the question: More engaging in what way? This is not a useful theory, because I don’t know what “engaging” means, and because it doesn’t tell us when telling is good. We need an explanation that gives us a test for when to show and when to tell.

Showing gives more specific images

Consider these pairs:

Jenny was happy. / Jenny skipped down the sidewalk.

Ben was embarrassed. / Ben’s face reddenned.

Rarity revelled in the joy of creation. / Rarity hummed a tune as she passed a long strip of red cloth through her sewing machine. (from Ezn’s guide)

Some say that the showing is more specific than telling. But is it? No; it paints a more specific image, but is more ambiguous about abstract emotion and thought. The examples on the right each give us a visual image, but Jenny may skip while bored or restless, Ben may be hot or angry, and Rarity may be looking forward to her hot date with your OC that evening.

Telling gives more specific thoughts & feelings

Telling is better when you need us to know exactly what a character is thinking. It’s essential when there’s no way to show what they’re thinking. How could Lahiri have shown that Ashima missed Gogol? How could Borges have shown that Dahlmann was thinking back to his time in the sanitarium?

Conversely, as GhostOfHeraclitus noted, showing is better if you want a character’s motives or feelings to be ambiguous, as for instance when describing the actions of a suspect in a mystery.

Showing vs. telling is a trade off of being specific about visual imagery (showing) versus internal thoughts and feelings (telling). These two approaches appeal to different types of people. The kind of person who goes to see movies because they have great special effects and doesn’t care about plot or character will prefer stories that show. The kind of person who prefers fiction about ideas and feelings should be more tolerant of stories with a lot of telling.

I don’t know if that’s the case. Harry Potter has more telling than the idea-laden writings of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. But certainly action scenes need showing, because action is kinetic and visual. And if Ezn’s statement that telling is more “engaging” means “has more action scenes” (e.g., “Peter Jackson made The Hobbit more engaging”), then showing is more engaging than telling. But I wouldn’t use the word “engaging” that way myself. I found Tolkien’s Hobbit more engaging.

Jhumpa Lahiri could have shown Gogol remaining mute while Moushumi and her friends talked, and failing to grasp the conversation. But we could have inferred many other things from those bare facts, and wandered down many digressing lines of thought. We might have thought the author meant for Monica Lewinsky or Y2K to be metaphors for something. Summarizing the conversation tells us that they signify nothing and we should ignore them.

Showing lets you communicate feelings that we don’t understand

That’s the claim I made in my annotation of that excerpt from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers, the author, shows us for three pages what John Singer does, without entering his head and describing his feelings, because Singer does not understand and could not describe his feelings at the time.

GhostOfHeraclitus responded that we can also use telling to express feelings that aren’t lexicalized, such as “the emotion of wanting something, being ashamed of wanting it, but being unable and to an extent unwilling to give up that want”, or “the admixture of melancholy and nostalgia which happens when you return to a place you haven't been for a very long time and see the fragments of your past life scattered and decontextualized, familiar yet foreign”.

If you understand what you’re trying to get across well enough to summarize it, then you could tell it, probably in many fewer words. But to do that, you need to analyze that feeling, and you risk getting it wrong, because:

Telling states an opinion; showing pretends to reserve judgement

That’s one of the points I made it in a blog post I wrote last year and haven’t posted yet called “Superman Taught me to Kill”, and again in a comment on that same annotation post: Good authors deal with things that they don’t entirely understand, and if they tried to summarize them, they’d probably get it wrong. A reader can rarely tell whether a long explanation makes sense or is possible in the real world, but can easily tell when characters act unrealistically. Showing keeps the author honest.

Jorges Luis Borges argues the opposite in his short stories “Funes the Memorious” (a man who remembers so many details about everything that he understands nothing) and “The Immortal”:

I reflected that Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes; I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos combined them differently than I, constructed them from different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives.… I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.

Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been 1100 years since last I wrote it.

… [several pages of detailed show-don’t-tell autobiography intervene]

A year has passed, and I reread these pages. I can attest that they do not stray beyond the bounds of truth, although… I believe I detect a certain falseness. That is due, perhaps, to an overemployment of circumstantial details, a way of writing that I learned from the poets; it is a procedure that infects everything with falseness, since there may be a wealth of details in the event, yet not in memory.

Borges seems to be saying that telling is less truthful because it presents too many distracting details (and says something similar in “Funes”). I am saying that summarizing—choosing which details to keep and which to throw out—is the main source of falseness. I could argue that the purpose of literature is to pursue arguments that are too complex for humans to reason about logically. Writers who summarize will inevitably get some of it wrong.

Telling invokes conscious reasoning; showing bypasses it

One might imagine that it would be more difficult to write propaganda using showy language, if it is more honest. This is not the case. Triumph of the Will is imagistic and therefore showy.        While showy language does not distort what it presents, the person who chooses what is shown can still control its message. Telling risks being false by making a logical mistake, but it states its opinions explicitly, putting the reader on alert. Showing risks being false by choosing a misrepresentative set of things to show, and can slip lies by the reader more easily because it never gives them a chance to argue.

Telling gives information; showing makes the reader work for it

Showing the reader pieces of information that they must piece together may be more satisfying to them. Have you read a mystery where the solution comes entirely from one critical piece of information? I hate that. The more different pieces of information that come together to form the solution, the better the mystery.

The theory is that this operates in all forms of fiction, and readers enjoy / are more engaged with stories when they have to work harder to understand them. I think, though, it may be more important that conclusions they draw for themselves are more convincing than ones they are told.

Showing is masculine / sociopathic; telling is feminine

Stereotypically, women like to talk about feelings, and men do not. Romance novels are overstuffed with long telly monologues. Pornography only shows.

Hemingway seldom talks about his heroes’ feelings. In Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, the narrator tells us that Chili (“chill”) Palmer, the hero, is a man to whom right action is instinctive. He doesn’t dwell on things. When a woman wants to sleep with him, he is neither surprised nor excited, and doesn’t wonder why. He acts in ways that would seem to require planning ahead, yet we never see him plan ahead. He is behaviorally conditioned by life on the streets so that he acts immediately and impulsively in the correct way, whether this is punching or shooting a man at the right time, or leaving the key to a locker full of drug money outside the airport before going in to examine it. A rich internal life would only trip him up. And Leonard uses Chili’s voice as the narrator’s voice regardless of which character’s point-of-view he’s in.

You can see something similar in Camus’ The Stranger, whose main character claims not to have strong feelings, and who is supposed to represent the human condition (but appears to me to deliberately misrepresent it). Camus wrote The Stranger in first person so that we could get inside the narrator’s head and verify that he is unaware of having normal feelings. The story shows the narrator’s actions throughout events that should be charged with emotion (his mother’s death, a sexual romance, a killing). Even with his interior monologue, he has only sensory impressions that he can never translate into the expected emotions.

Anthony Burgess’ narrator in A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, is a different kind of sociopath, one who feels intense emotions, but doesn’t care about the feelings of strangers. His life is ultra-”masculine”: He is a gang leader who thinks only of status, sex, and violence. So his narration is mostly showing, though he sometimes uses adverbs to tell us how much he enjoys “the old ultra-violence”.

I’ve included two quotes above from Borges’ “The South”. The old gaucho, who represents masculinity, is only shown, and takes the pivotal action yet says nothing. Dahlmann, who is aware of his unmanliness, tells and talks.

Showing is remote; telling is intimate

This is a generalization of “Showing is masculine”. Bradel suggests this as a reason for the showing in that same scene from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Showing Singer from the outside moves us further away from him, which might be appropriate because of spoilerish plot issues described in that comment. In the excerpt from The Stranger above, the narrator doesn’t “pull the trigger”; he watches his grip close on the revolver, as if from a distance, moving himself outside of his body. Telling, conversely, draws us in closer to a character’s point of view.

Showing is slow; telling is fast

Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse.

          — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, quoted in Titanium Dragon’s annotation

In many great novels, things are told mostly when they would be difficult or time-consuming to show. Here we’re learning backstory. Back story is, by definition, not the story, and can usually be summarized. (But see Titanium Dragon’s comment below.)