Show, don't tell

Writers on "show, don't tell"

The American playwright and scriptwriter Mark Swan (1871–1942) kept the motto "Show–not tell" on the wall above his writing desk and could talk of little else. In his 1927 primer, You Can Write Plays, Swan elaborated with numerous examples. He noted that events from the past which cannot be acted in the present must be told about, but that telling should be as brief and crisp as possible without being too obvious. He advised writers to see if facts could be conveyed in scenes that give actors a chance for emotional work, thereby getting an emotional response from the audience while it absorbs facts—sugar-coating the pill.

For characterization, motivation, and relationship, Swan insisted: don't talk it, show it; express these things in acted scenes, not in narrative or description. He contrasted the novelist, who can fire the imagination with a scene, with the dramatist, who must show the scene. All that the novelist gets by suggestion or implication, the playwright must get by literal presentation.

In Chapter VIII of The Craft of Fiction (1921), British essayist Percy Lubbock (1879–1965) wrote about the antithesis of picture and drama that continually appears in a novel. He noted that Henry James used these terms in discussing his own novels, but Lubbock used them in a more extended sense. In the drama of the stage, the spectator has no direct concern with the author while the action proceeds; the author places parts in the mouths of players and leaves the audience to make what it can of the motion of life, with the recording mind of the author eliminated. Lubbock concluded that in the full sense of the word, there is no such thing as drama in a novel.

Did You Know?

• The storytelling performed by dungeon masters and players in tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons is based on the concept of "show don't tell."
• Good dungeon masters convey information by stressing intonation and imagery rather than merely telegraphing it.