Show, Don't Tell: Common Mistakes New Fiction Writers Make and How to Fix Them

"Show, don't tell" is the first piece of advice most writers meet, and the one most often applied badly. It gets repeated so often that it starts to sound like a law rather than a tool. What it actually asks for is straightforward: hand the reader evidence, then let them reach the conclusion themselves. Do that well and your fiction becomes difficult to put down. Do it clumsily and you end up with pages of sighing, clenching and meaningful glances that somehow say nothing at all.

What the advice really means

Showing is not just visual. It covers dialogue, action, interiority, sensory detail, rhythm, and what you choose to leave off the page.

Telling hands over a verdict: Priya was exhausted. Showing hands over the evidence: Priya fell asleep sitting up, her tea still steaming beside her. The second version asks the reader to do a small piece of work, and that work is what makes it feel true. A stated emotion is information. A demonstrated one is an experience.

Mistake one: naming the emotion before the scene has earned it

This is the most common version of the problem, and it usually looks like this:

Daniel was furious with his brother. He couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

Was furious and couldn't believe are conclusions. They tell the reader where to land before the scene has taken them anywhere. Strip them out and see what's left:

Daniel set his mug down so carefully it made no sound. "Say that again," he said.

Nothing here announces the anger, but you feel it. Notice how quiet it is. New writers often swap one stated emotion for one loud gesture — a fist on the table, a shout, a door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame. Louder is not more specific. Restraint usually lands harder, because it hints at something the character is holding back.

Filter words: the quiet way you are still telling

Look for felt, saw, heard, noticed, realised, watched, seemed and wondered. Each one places a pane of glass between your reader and the scene.

She felt the room grow cold. He noticed her hands were shaking.

Cut the filters. The room grew cold. Her hands were shaking. Keep the filter only when the act of noticing is the point — when a character deliberately chooses to look, or refuses to.

Mistake two: showing everything at the same volume

The usual overcorrection is to show absolutely everything. Every cup of tea gets a paragraph. Every room gets five similes, each one reaching a little further than the last. The result is prose that is exhausting to read, and worse, the moments that should matter collapse into the ones that shouldn't.

Showing is a spotlight, not a lighting plan. Pick your scenes. Two or three per chapter can have the full treatment — dialogue, physical detail, interiority, the lot. The rest can be summarised in a line and moved past. Your reader will not feel short-changed. They will feel momentum.

Mistake three: reaching for the first gesture that arrives

Certain physical reactions turn up so often they have stopped doing any work:

• a heart hammering, pounding or racing
• a stomach dropping, churning or lurching
• a breath they didn't know they were holding
• eyes widening, jaws dropping, blood running cold
• a single tear rolling down a cheek
• fists clenching, knuckles whitening
• a smile that doesn't reach the eyes

None of these is forbidden. The trouble is that they arrive first, and first thoughts tend to be shared thoughts — which means your reader has seen them a hundred times before.

Ask a better question: what would this person do, with this history, in this room, with these people watching? Someone who has spent years hiding fear might go very still and painfully polite. Someone who grew up in a loud house might do the opposite of what's expected and laugh. Specificity beats intensity every time.

Mistake four: refusing to summarise

Telling is not a sin. It is how you cover time, distance and repetition. Three weeks passed. She grew up in Leeds. They argued about it for most of the drive home. All telling, all correct, all welcome.

Try this test on any moment in your draft. If it changes what a character wants, knows or fears, write it as a scene. If it only moves them from one scene to the next, summarise it. Fiction without summary loses its sense of time; everything happens at the same weight, and the reading becomes a slog.

Fixing a page: five practical moves

1. Delete the adjective and read it back. If the scene still communicates the emotion, leave it deleted. If it doesn't, you have found a scene you still need to write.
2. Highlight the filter words. Run through a page and mark every felt, saw and realised. Remove most of them and watch the prose sharpen.
3. Replace one gesture with a choice. Stop asking what your character feels. Ask what they do about it, and what that costs them.
4. Read the dialogue with the tags covered. If you can't tell who is angry from the words and the pauses alone, the adverb is a patch over a weak exchange.
5. Colour-code a chapter. One colour for what the reader lives through, another for what they are told. If one dominates completely, the balance is off.

Putting it to work

Take a page of your own writing — or a page you admire by someone else — and rewrite one paragraph twice: once showing, once telling. Then decide which the moment actually needs. It is rarely all one or the other. Good fiction moves between the two, sometimes within a single sentence, and the judgement call is the craft.

Expect to over-show for a while. Most writers do. The habit passes once you stop thinking of it as a rule and start thinking of it as a dial you control. Read your pages aloud, share them with readers you trust, and pay attention to the moments where someone says they skimmed. That is usually where the telling has crept back in.

Photo: Predra6_Photos / Pixabay