Show Don’t Tell — What It Actually Means With Before and After Examples

Show don’t tell writing examples are everywhere online, and yet most of them are terrible. You get one weak pair — “She was sad” versus “Tears rolled down her cheeks” — and then a thousand words explaining the philosophy. That’s not useful. I’ve been teaching fiction workshops for years, and the single biggest gap I see between writers who improve fast and writers who stay stuck is concrete examples. Not principles. Examples. So that’s what this article is. Ten before/after pairs, a few specific techniques you can use today, and honest notes on when telling is actually the right call.

The Rule in One Sentence — Then 10 Examples

Here’s the rule: instead of naming an emotion, describe the physical and behavioral evidence of that emotion. Let the reader name it themselves. That act of recognition — when a reader thinks “oh, she’s terrified” — is what creates connection. When you just write “she was terrified,” you skip the reader’s brain entirely.

Now the examples. Ten emotions, each with a telling version and a showing version. Read them slowly.

Fear

Telling: Marcus was afraid to open the door.

Showing: Marcus put his hand on the doorknob and left it there. He could hear his own pulse. His feet stayed exactly where they were.

Anger

Telling: She was furious at what he said.

Showing: She set her glass down so carefully it didn’t make a sound. She picked up her keys. She didn’t look at him.

Joy

Telling: He was overjoyed when he got the news.

Showing: He read the email three times. Then he walked to the window for no reason. Then he walked back. He needed somewhere to put his hands.

Sadness

Telling: Grief hit her when she walked into his room.

Showing: His room still smelled like him. She didn’t go in. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame until her shoulder ached.

Nervousness

Telling: Tom was nervous before the interview.

Showing: Tom had checked his shirt for stains twice in the parking garage. Now he was checking again in the elevator mirror. Third floor. Fourth floor. He turned away from his own reflection.

Boredom

Telling: The meeting was boring and she couldn’t pay attention.

Showing: By slide eleven she was counting the ceiling tiles. Forty-two. She counted them again to be sure. Forty-two.

Exhaustion

Telling: After the double shift, she was completely exhausted.

Showing: She sat on the edge of the bed still wearing her jacket. She meant to take it off. She thought about that for a while. The ceiling was very white.

Love

Telling: He loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone.

Showing: He’d memorized the way she pronounced “particularly” — that tiny stumble on the third syllable. He never told her. He just waited for her to say it.

Disgust

Telling: The smell from the alley was disgusting.

Showing: She breathed through her mouth. That helped for about three seconds. She moved to the middle of the street and still felt the smell on the back of her tongue.

Surprise

Telling: He was shocked by the news.

Showing: He laughed. Not because it was funny — it just came out. “Wait,” he said. He needed her to say it again, slower this time.

Notice what all the showing versions have in common. Specific. Physical. Small. None of them are elaborate. The exhaustion example is four sentences. The love example is three. Small and specific beats long and general every single time.

When Telling Is Actually Better

Taught this wrong for years, honestly. I used to mark every “telling” sentence in student manuscripts like it was a mistake. It isn’t always. There are situations where telling is genuinely the right tool, and learning when to use it is part of mastering the technique.

Transitions between scenes. “Three weeks passed.” That’s telling. It’s also correct. You don’t need to show three weeks. You need to move the story forward. A showing version of time passage would be 800 words your reader doesn’t want.

Establishing basic facts. “The apartment was on the sixth floor.” Fine. Tell me. I need the geography. I don’t need to watch the character take the elevator six times to understand this.

Backstory in small doses. A single sentence of backstory dropped into the right moment — “She’d grown up in houses like this one, houses with hollow walls and parents who yelled through them” — is telling. But it’s doing real work. The rule is not “never tell.” The rule is “don’t tell me what I could feel myself.”

The emotions are where showing matters most. The logistics are where telling keeps the pace alive. Know the difference and your prose gets sharper fast.

The Sensory Detail Method

Here’s a diagnostic I give writers in every workshop I run. For any scene you’ve written, ask yourself five questions: What does the POV character see? Hear? Smell? Feel physically? Taste? If your answer to most of those is “nothing specific,” you’re telling. You’re floating above the scene instead of being inside it.

Frustrated by vague feedback on his drafts, one writer I worked with started using a simple rule — one specific sensory detail per paragraph, no exceptions, using whatever element felt most true to that moment. His revision pass took an extra forty minutes. His next workshop session, three different readers asked what changed. That’s the method working.

The details don’t need to be exotic. They need to be specific. “The coffee was hot” is telling. “The cup had been sitting there long enough to leave a ring on the napkin” is showing — and it also tells me something about pace, about how long they’ve been waiting, about whether this is a comfortable conversation or a strained one.

One note: don’t cycle through all five senses in every paragraph like you’re checking boxes. That becomes its own kind of mechanical writing. Lead with the sense that’s most alive in that moment. A tense conversation might be all sound and breath. A character returning home after years away might be almost entirely smell. Follow the scene’s logic.

Dialogue as a Showing Tool

What characters say — and especially what they don’t say — reveals more than almost any descriptive passage. Dialogue is showing by definition. It puts behavior on the page instead of summary.

Here’s the same argument written both ways.

Telling version: They argued about the money again. She was angry that he’d spent it without asking. He was defensive and said she was overreacting. It ended badly.

Showing version:

“You already spent it.” She wasn’t asking.

“Most of it.”

“How much is most.”

He looked at the window. “Eight hundred.”

“Out of a thousand.”

“It was a good deal, Claire.”

She nodded for a long time, the way she did when she was done talking. He hated that nod. He started to explain anyway.

The dialogue version is more compelling. Always. It drops the reader into the room. They can hear the pauses. They feel the temperature of the conversation. The telling version is a plot summary. The dialogue version is a scene.

Two techniques worth adding to your dialogue toolkit. First, use what characters avoid saying. In the example above, neither character says “I’m furious” or “I feel guilty.” The emotion lives entirely in what they choose to say and not say. Second, use the action beats between lines — the nod, the window, the starting to explain — to carry emotional weight that the words themselves don’t state.

Self-Editing Checklist for Telling

When you finish a draft, run these four searches before anything else. Not metaphorically — actually use the find function in your word processor.

• Emotion words. Search for: happy, sad, angry, scared, nervous, excited, bored, tired, disgusted, surprised. Every hit is a candidate for revision. Not every one will need it, but look at each one. Ask whether you can replace the label with evidence.
• Was/were + adjective constructions. “Was tired.” “Were angry.” “Was beautiful.” “Were afraid.” These are almost always telling. Spot them and rewrite. “She was beautiful” is nothing. “The room went quieter when she walked in” is something.
• Adverbs on dialogue tags. “He said nervously.” “She whispered sadly.” “He replied angrily.” The adverb is doing the work your dialogue should be doing. Delete the adverb, rewrite the line of dialogue so it earns the emotion without naming it.
• Felt/seemed/appeared. “She felt overwhelmed.” “He seemed nervous.” “It appeared to be broken.” These create a layer of glass between the reader and the experience. Cut the filter word and put the reader directly in the sensation.

Work through these in order. The emotion word search alone will flag more opportunities than most writers expect. My own early drafts used the word “anxious” eleven times in a 4,000-word story. I know because I ran the search and sat there counting. Eleven. Every single one was replaceable.

The goal isn’t to eliminate telling from your writing. The goal is to make sure telling is a deliberate choice, not a default one. When you reach for an emotion word, do it because a summary is the right move in that moment — not because you haven’t yet figured out what the emotion actually looks like in a body, in a room, in a specific scene. That figuring-out is the work. It’s also the part that makes writing worth reading.