Welcome to Stupid Advice Saturday! Last week we talked about how “Write what you know” is often badly misinterpreted, and taken to an unhealthy extreme. This week, we’ve got another unfortunate directive that often gets the same treatment: show, don’t tell.

Like “Write what you know,” this isn’t bad advice until you take into account the way it’s typically framed. Which is to say, “Always show; never tell.” But you can’t make a hard and fast rule about how writers are supposed to deliver information to the reader. If you could, every book in the world would sound exactly the same. In reality, context really matters with this advice. There are things that should be told, things that should be shown, and times when you could do either one, with wildly different results. Yet this advice is always tragically left to stand on its own – treated as self-explanatory.

To understand what needs to be told and what needs to be shown, you need to understand what each of these techniques actually does.

When you show a piece of information, the reader is forced to interpret that information for themselves. That does these things:

• It slows the pacing slightly, forcing the reader to linger on that piece of information for a beat longer.
• It amplifies or intensifies the emotion of that moment, because now the reader has to sit with it for longer.
• The reader is subconsciously prompted to think deeper about the information. They might read into it more, or interpret it in a unique way.
• It makes the reader feel like they figured something out independently, without necessarily expressing that the narrator also notices or understands it.

When you tell a piece of information, on the other hand, this happens:

• Pacing is relatively unaffected, because the reader doesn’t have to slow down to interpret anything.
• The emotion of the moment is dampened or numbed; already-emotionless pieces of information have no added emotion.
• The reader is not prompted to read into what you are telling them.
• You make it explicitly clear that the narrator is aware of the information. The POV character has noticed something, and they are pointing it out to the reader.

You can see how these two techniques are ideal for two entirely different classes of information. Sometimes you want the reader to linger on a big emotional beat, or prompt them to read into something, or slow the pacing slightly. Other times, you just want to tell the reader it was cloudy or that someone felt sad without slowing down the pacing or weighing down the moment with unnecessary and overblown emotion.

Choosing whether to show or tell is about deciding how you want your reader to feel when they read this piece of information. It’s about tone, which is an artistic decision that you, the writer, get to make. And the only person who can say whether showing or telling is right for this particular moment of your particular story … is you.

Stories are big places, too. In the span of a single paragraph, you’ll need to address this problem with several different pieces of information. Then you’ll need to do that for hundreds more paragraphs and thousands more pieces of information until it turns into a whole book. You can’t build a story with only half your toolbox available to you. Show when something needs showing. Tell when something needs telling. And if anyone says you’re doing something bad, tell them (unless, of course, you think they might be better served by lingering on the emotional impact of the moment in a beat of slightly slowed pacing, with undercurrents of meaning that are open to interpretation) to shut up.

Happy writing!