The Unsalted Broth: On the Poverty of 'Show, Don't Tell'

For decades, "Show, don't tell" has been the cardinal rule flung at writers from creative writing workshops to online forums. It’s presented as an unassailable truth, the secret ingredient that separates amateurish exposition from immersive storytelling. We are taught to dramatize emotions, to render scenes with cinematic clarity, to let the reader "see" the action. But when this rule hardens into dogma, it risks producing a different kind of failure: writing that is all gesture and no insight, a beautifully set table with nothing of substance to eat. The relentless pursuit of "showing" can, paradoxically, starve the narrative of its most vital nutrient: the authorial voice.

Consider the classic example. A novice writer might "tell" us that "John was sad." The workshop critique inevitably comes: "Show it!" So the sentence is laboriously expanded into a paragraph detailing the slump of John’s shoulders, the tremor in his hand, the single tear tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. This is often an improvement. But what happens when we apply this logic to more complex states? How do you "show" that a character is grappling with the philosophical implications of a forgotten treaty, or feeling a nameless nostalgia for a past they never lived? The insistence on pure showing can force the writer into a cul-de-sac of physical cliché, reducing the vast, internal landscape of human consciousness to a series of predictable, external tics.

The real craft lies not in choosing showing *over* telling, but in knowing what to render scenically and what to summarize authoritatively. Telling is the engine of pace and perspective. Jane Austen didn’t "show" us every nuance of Mr. Darcy’s pride through his haughty eyebrow raises; she told us, with devastating omniscience, that he was proud. That direct telling from a confident narrative voice establishes a contract with the reader, a guided tour of the characters’ souls. It is a form of intellectual shorthand that respects the reader’s intelligence, trusting them to understand a stated truth without needing it pantomimed. To banish telling is to strip the writer of their role as a guide, leaving only a cold, observational camera.

The Flavors of Narration

This is not to dismiss the power of showing. Its purpose, however, is not to replace telling but to amplify it at crucial moments. Showing is for the detail that reverberates, the specific action that reveals a universal truth. It’s the difference between saying a meal was bad and describing the greasy film left on the roof of your mouth. But a story cannot consist only of such moments. It needs the connective tissue of summary, the context provided by reflection, the salt of the storyteller’s own judgment. An unsalted broth, no matter how rich its ingredients, is bland and unsatisfying. A story without telling is a meal without seasoning—technically complete, but profoundly lacking in flavor.

The tyranny of "Show, don't tell" has, I suspect, less to do with narrative efficacy and more with a modern distrust of authority. We prize the "objective" camera lens over the "subjective" narrator. But writing is not film. Its unique power is the direct transmission of thought, of judgment, of a singular consciousness. To deny yourself the tool of telling is to build a house and refuse to live in it. So, the next time you hear that old mantra, take it not as a command but as a question. Ask yourself: does this moment need the slow-motion clarity of a scene, or the swift, sharp insight of a telling remark? The master writer knows that the richest stories are built not on one or the other, but on the sly and seamless dance between them.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: