The Stage Manager's Invisible Hand: A Critique of the 'Show, Don't Tell' Commandment
Every writer, from the trembling novice to the jaded veteran, has had the mantra 'Show, don’t tell' drilled into their skull. It is the foundational rule of creative writing workshops, the go-to note in manuscript margins, the single piece of advice deemed so universally applicable it’s often offered as a complete critique. It advises us to render experience through sensory details and actions rather than through summary and exposition. Don’t tell us a character is sad; show us the trembling lip, the single tear tracing a path through the dust on their cheek. It’s a good rule. Until it becomes a tyrant.
The problem with turning this sound piece of advice into an inviolable commandment is that it ignores the craft of narrative itself, which is a dance between scene and summary, between showing and telling. To insist only on ‘showing’ is to demand that a play consist of nothing but actors on a stage, with no stage manager, no curtain, no program notes, no set changes. The story becomes a relentless, inefficient series of moments, often bogged down in the minutiae of action while losing sight of the broader movement. It privileges the immediate over the meaningful, and it can be exhausting for both the writer and the reader.
Consider the simple necessity of pacing. A novel that only ‘shows’ would take a thousand pages to cover a single year. Telling—summary, exposition, narration—is the tool that allows us to collapse time, to move characters across continents, to convey the passage of seasons in a paragraph. It is the stage manager who efficiently shifts the scenery while the audience sips their drink, allowing the next crucial scene to begin without a tedious wait. To deny yourself this tool is to shackle your story to a real-time crawl.
Furthermore, 'telling' is not inherently inferior; it is simply different. It is the voice of the storyteller, the guiding intelligence that lends perspective and context. George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy were master ‘tellers’. Their narrative voices, rich with wisdom and irony, are often the most memorable characters in their books. They don’t just show us Dorothea Brooke’s misguided idealism; they tell us about it, dissecting it with a psychological and philosophical depth that pure action could never achieve. To remove that narrative voice in slavish obedience to ‘show, don’t tell’ is to strip away a powerful dimension of the written word.
The tyranny of this rule also leads to a peculiar kind of overwriting. We get characters who are constantly ‘sighing,’ ‘gazing,’ and ‘smiling wryly’ in an attempt to physicalize every internal state. This can feel less like immersive realism and more like a desperate pantomime. Sometimes, the most elegant and powerful thing a writer can do is to simply state the truth: 'He was heartbroken.' The emotional weight of that clear, unadorned statement can hit with a force that a paragraph of described sighs cannot.
The real craft, then, lies not in blindly following a rule but in learning the rhythm of its application. It’s knowing when to put the characters on the stage to act out a pivotal moment, and when to have the stage manager step forward and simply tell us what we need to know to proceed. The magic is in the transition, the seamless flow from the intimate close-up of a ‘shown’ scene to the wide-angle lens of a ‘told’ summary. The wisdom isn't in 'showing, don’t telling.' It's in learning what to show, and what, with the steady hand of a narrator, to simply tell.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: