Show, Don't Tell

Bibliographic Data

ID20143638
AuthorsJan Zwicky (Heriot Bay Canada, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume87
Issue4
Pages897-912
Publication date2021-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheoria (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0040-5825 • E-ISSN: 1755-2567
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/theo.12301
OpenAlexW3176555393
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

“Show, don't tell” is a maxim basic to literary craft. It enjoins avoidance of abstract, cliché‐ridden summaries and use of rich, vividly rendered details. Anyone who has attended an introductory creative writing course will have encountered it. Practised literary writers know it is true. Why is showing so fundamental to good literature? Why is it more effective than telling? Showing constellates details, placing facets of a larger shape before the reader's mind, a shape that cannot be adequately encompassed by a summary, whose power lies in the simultaneous integration of multiple, superficially discontinuous aspects. This sounds like the eureka effect, the “Aha!” of sudden discovery in mathematics and the sciences. I argue that grasping what is being shown in a literary context is indeed related to insight in theoretical fields. Telling the reader “what happened” makes the mind's eye glaze over in just the way that it glazes over when it is forced to memorize formulae that it does not understand. Showing is like offering an elegant proof; the mind reaches to understand what is going on. When it succeeds, it feels the satisfaction of having grasped meaning

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Craft · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Maxim · Meaning (existential) · Memorization · Power (physics) · Sociology · Visual arts · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · History · Philosophy · Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies · Psychedelics and Drug Studies · Psychology

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