Make Your Own Rules

I Hate Show Don't Tell and So Should You

I recently embarked on re-reading the latest draft of a novel I’ve been working on for far too long now (it’s becoming increasingly hard not to write something else “just for a little break, and then I’ll get right back to it” - Yeah, right). As I was reading I realized, with no small amount of horror, that there was a recurring issue. I was evoking, rather than demonstrating. I was verbalizing, rather than visualizing. I was picking-up without setting-down. I was… I was… I was telling. And frankly? Quite honestly? To keep it 100 with you? I was not showing.

I’ll admit, I clickbaited you with the sub-header; I do not actually hate “Show Don’t Tell.” I think it’s true in the same way “Sharing is Caring” and “Treat Others The Way You Want To Be Treated” are true - people that live in accordance with Golden Rules tend to be happier, while people who don’t are wretches that hoard wealth and use adverbs to horrifying extent. “Show Don’t Tell” is a good heuristic to help you look for an actual, underlying problem, while also being snappy enough to be memorable. It sticks in your head better than something like “detail is more impactful than generality” which is more useful, but sucks as a phrase.

So this isn’t going to be a “sometimes showing is important too!” blog post, because it’s 2026 and we’re past that. The snake has eaten its own tale and Impressionism is back, baby. Wolfe pack rise up! To quote something a Philosophy teacher of mine wrote on the blackboard (he was quoting Kant but I didn’t do the reading, so I quote the blackboard instead), “all our knowledge begins with experience.”

(As an aside, one piece of advice I genuinely hate is “you have to learn the rules before you can break them,” because even though that appeals to the greasy-haired-James-Dean that lives in all our souls, learning a “rule” that you can then “break” means it wasn’t a “rule” to begin with. It’s stupid, more like propaganda than advice. But I digress.)

So I had a dilemma. I was telling and not showing. More particularly, I was trying to express things in short spaces that didn’t want to compress - not enough space and the idea became unclear; too much space and you lose your connection with the present scene; the right amount of space felt like pure, dry exposition.

I’d had a thought, one or two drafts ago, that there were a few things I’d like to have come up again later in the book (or earlier), and that draft 3 would be the time to do that. Spreading might be one way to ease the uncomfortable, jack-in-the-box tension of those paragraphs. It out would lessen the impact on any given scene, would reduce the amount of telling and make it more palatable to the reader. As I was reading, then, noticing those paragraphs, I was sorting them into two categories: To Be Spread, and To Be Cut. Not all of them needed to be included, and in that case, I could simply scrape it away, leaving the scene itself intact.

This is when a metaphor occurred to me that appealed far, far more than “SDT,” despite communicating a similar sentiment: “No Butter Pads.” As in, when you order pancakes and it comes with a pad of butter on top, you have two options - spread it over the pancake, or scrape it off. Eating a pad of butter in that concentrated block is nasty, salty and gooey like phlegm. Spread out, it provides lovely additional flavor, but you can also scrape it off entirely and just use syrup or whipped cream or whatever. Exposition is the pad of butter. By itself it’s nasty, distracting and overwhelming. Either spread it over the pancake, or cut it entirely.

This is more useful than “Show Don’t Tell” for me, because it addresses a real mistake I was making: repeatedly trying to jam way too much in a small space. When someone says “Show Don’t Tell,” I usually associate that with actions like “use more senses in your setting descriptions” or “do a scene rather than just telling us about it.” So even if someone had identified this problem in my writing and had tried to tell me about it, them saying “show don’t tell” probably wouldn’t have helped me see it, or address it. Honestly, even beyond the vagueness, I probably would have been annoyed because it also seems like lazy advice, the “hmm, tastes a little off” of the writing world.

I won’t go on too much longer because I’m sure you get the idea. The other phrase I’ve liked is “Bounce To Track,” borrowing a term from music production. There’s an interesting history, but practically (for me) it means taking an audio chain (usually MIDI notes, into a virtual instrument, into various effects and settings) and recording it as audio to reduce CPU usage. In a vaguer, emotional way, it means giving up complete control, softly committing to a set of decisions, giving you something concrete to play with.

I like that because it’s easy to write something like “Judie is maintaining an emotional disconnect” in your notes, but the reader isn’t reading your notes. They need to have that disconnect proven, which means they need scenes where Judie is given the chance to connect and refuses it. Once you’ve done that, you’ve bounced it to a track. You can obviously still play with that material, but now “emotional disconnect” is pretty much baked in. Bing bang boom.

So anyway, that’s my advice for today. Don’t ignore the “rules” of writing, but come up with your own versions. I much prefer using tools (to use the word a little abstractly) that I’ve invented myself, even if they’re just rephrasings of other folks’ ideas. “No Butter Pads” and “Bounce It” are fun and personal in a way “Show Don’t Tell” is not.

Catching up on life: I just visited New York, and I saw a couple weird movies, so maybe I’ll go back to talking about culture in my next blog post. Also, did you guys know you can embed betting market info in your posts now? That’s pretty weird. I think betting markets are blatantly exploitative, but at least they’re more interesting than AI. I hope you’re doing well.