Show, Don't Tell: A Writer's Guide With Real Examples

"Show, don't tell" is the first rule every new writer hears, and the hardest one to put into practice, because the advice names a result without naming a method. Telling states a feeling directly: she was nervous. Showing renders the feeling into something a reader can watch: a hand reaching for a doorknob, then stopping. The difference is easy to agree with and hard to apply mid-draft, when the direct sentence is sitting right there, four words long, doing the job well enough to tempt you into leaving it.

Rather than invent a tidy example to prove the point, which is easier to see on the page than to argue about in the abstract, here are two passages from stories published on BrightChapters, with the lines doing the real work picked out and explained.

A guarded character, built from one metaphor

Early in The Plant, a man is caught watering an office plant after hours by a woman who works on another floor. Neither of them says much about themselves directly. Here is most of what the story tells us about who he is:

"You talk like someone's writing it down."
"What do you mean?"
"You build sentences carefully. Then hand them over. Like folded clothes."

No line here states that the man is guarded, or careful with intimacy, or used to keeping people at a slight distance. The story doesn't need to say it, because the image does the work: sentences handed over like folded clothes, something made tidy before it's allowed to be seen. A reader doesn't arrive at the idea that he's careful with himself the way they'd arrive at a stated fact. They notice it the way you notice a habit in someone you've just met, before you could put a name to it.

The same restraint shows up a few lines earlier, in a small piece of deflection:

"I was watering it," he said.
"You were emotionally preparing."
"Important part of the process."

He's just been teased for talking to a plant, and instead of explaining himself, he plays along. That's the showing: not "he was embarrassed but covered it with humor," but the joke itself, which only works as a cover if there's something underneath worth covering.

A history rendered as a legend, not a confession

In Notes in the Margins, a character who maps private emotional landmarks instead of keeping a journal eventually hands one of those maps to someone else. It has streets with no names and a key in the corner:

★ (star) — where I would go if I weren't afraid
× (cross) — where I actually went
♦ (diamond) — new

"There were twelve stars. Nine crosses. And one diamond, placed at the center of the map, in an unmarked square that could have been a park, or a courtyard, or simply the place where two streets finally met."

Nothing in that passage states that she regretted the times she played it safe, or that she was proud of the one time she didn't. The legend carries it instead, a whole system built out of symbols for fear and its absence, tallied like a scorecard she never meant anyone else to read. When the other character finally asks about the single diamond:

"What is it?" he asked, though he already understood.
"Somewhere I went," she said, "because I wasn't afraid."

By the time she says it out loud, the reader already knows what the diamond means, because the map taught them the symbol system first. The line lands as confirmation, not information, which is a useful test for whether a moment is earning its emotion. If the dialogue is the first time the reader learns the feeling, it's probably being told. If the dialogue confirms something the reader already sensed, it was shown.

When telling is still the right call

None of this means every sentence should dramatize. Showing every moment would make a story exhausting to read, and telling is often the honest choice for a beat that doesn't carry much weight. The opening of The Plant does this cleanly:

"Thursday evening. Most people were gone. Arjun stood beside it with his steel bottle."

That's telling, plainly, and it's the right call. The story doesn't need the reader to feel the emptiness of the office or the texture of a Thursday evening; it needs them oriented in three sentences so the real scene can start. The skill isn't showing everything. It's recognizing which moments carry emotional weight and deserve the slower treatment, and which ones are scaffolding that should get out of the way.

Both passages above are showing because something is at stake in them: a man's guardedness, a woman's regret and the one time she didn't give in to it. The opening line isn't showing anything because nothing is at stake yet. Spotting the difference, in your own draft, usually comes down to asking what the scene is really about, and saving the showing for that.

Try it in your own draft

Pick a paragraph where you've told the reader how a character feels, and look for what they would be doing with their hands, their eyes, or their silence instead. Three ways in:

Find the deflection. If a character is uncomfortable, what do they joke about, change the subject to, or ask instead of answering? Guardedness tends to show up sideways rather than head-on.

Find the object. A map, a mug, a labeled spice jar: a small physical detail can carry a feeling the narration never has to name. Ask what object in the scene would change if the character's feelings changed.

Cut the adjective and see what's left. If a sentence says someone was nervous, delete "nervous" and write only what their body did. If nothing is left, the moment probably needs a real action, not a better adjective.

If you want to run this against a full draft rather than a single paragraph, BrightChapters' Write page is free to use and a reasonable place to try it.

Read the full stories

The passages above are excerpts. The Plant and Notes in the Margins are both free to read in full on BrightChapters, and worth reading end to end if you want to see this technique sustained across a whole story rather than one exchange at a time.

Want to see these ideas in a real story?

BrightChapters publishes original serialized fiction and non-fiction, free to read as you go.