‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass,’ Anton Chekhov is said to have advised.

The rise of the “show, don’t tell” advice coincides, or maybe not entirely coincidentally, with the rise of the movies. It can be dated to the 1920s and Percy Lubock’s book, The Craft of Fiction. Perhaps readers, glutted on the new moving pictures, demanded to see the story rather than hear it.

You can, of course, find examples of “showing” before this time. But, in general, stories were told rather than shown. Narration tended to be in the “omniscient” mode, as if by a god who saw all and who could peer into character’s souls. Take a look at some of the classics. The legend of Gilgamesh: telling. Beowulf: telling. The Icelandic sagas: telling. The Iliad and the Odyssey: telling. Characters had no interiority because what they felt was of no importance. It was what they did that mattered. This only began slowly to change in the 12^th century.

Two things flow from this. Firstly, telling has a venerable history and is NOT wrong. Secondly, audiences today want immersion in the lives of their protagonists, and, therefore, some showing is now normal. If there is a rule, it is not “show, don’t tell” it is “show, when appropriate, and tell, when appropriate.”

Knowing when to use the one and when to use the other is a matter of practice and experience. There are no simple algorithms to determine this, but here are some likely instances (though there will be counter-examples for all of them) where you’d want to tell, not show:

• Dialogue (because most dialogue is unembellished reportage)
• Backstory
• Where you want to convey necessary information without making it slow the flow
• In the transition between settings
• When you want to highlight something significant
• When you want to balance other passages of showing

Narrative distance

The idea of narrative distance provides a more fine-grained distinction than the all-or-nothing “show, don’t tell.” Narrative distance refers to what  it sounds like: how close we are to the character’s thoughts and feelings. In first person, we are almost always right inside the character’s head. But in third person, the distance can be subtly varied by word choice and by what is focused on and what is omitted.

Consider these examples:

• A tall man stepped out from the shadows. (Straight telling).
• The rain lashed down on the tall man as he stepped from the shadows. (Telling but with a bit of atmospheric detail).
• Henry pulled his collar up against the rain as he stepped from the shadows. (We know his name and we’re much closer to the character now, getting  a sense of his discomfort).
• Bloody hell, would this weather never stop? Drenched to the skin, Henry stepped from the shadows, morosely pulling up his collar against the lashing rain. (Lots of showing, We’re right in the character’s sensations and mood now, though still imbedded in third person narration. This is known as “free indirect discourse”, where the character’s mentality appears within the narration without the use of speech or thought tags—there is no “he thought” or “he said”).

Note that moving down the scale from telling to showing, decreasing the “narrative distance”, tends to elongate things. This is obvious, because we’re adding more detail and emotion.