22 April 2026·3 min read
Show, don't tell is half an instruction
The most famous rule in fiction comes with a footnote almost nobody reads.
The rule works where it applies. If you name a feeling the reader has just watched happen, you take it away from her. She had not finished feeling it before you told her what it was.
Cut the naming and the scene usually stands up fine. That is the useful half.
The correction the authors wrote themselves
The two editors who wrote the best book on this noticed, after the first edition, that writers had taken the advice too much to heart. What came back was correct on the surface and flat underneath: bare descriptions, skeletal dialogue, nobody home.
Their own fix was interior monologue. Feelings need somewhere to live. Delete every internal line and the reader ends up outside your character looking in, and no amount of showing fixes that.
What to do instead of just obeying
Delete the sentence that names the feeling. Read the passage again.
If the feeling is still there, the sentence was doing nothing. Good, leave it out.
If the feeling vanished, the naming was never your problem. The action underneath was not carrying anything, and the label was doing all the work. That case is the interesting one, and the rule as normally stated walks you straight past it.
Read more
Everything above came out of one of these. If any of it was useful, they are where it gets explained properly, with more examples and more patience than a short piece has room for.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers · Renni Browne & Dave King
Two working editors. Every rule comes with a before and after from a real manuscript.
The Art of Fiction · John Gardner
Harder work than the rest, and the only one that explains why the tricks work.
A short note, not the service: the letter you get on your own pages quotes your text and is read by a person before it goes out.
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