Busting the Myth: Why “Show, Don’t Tell” is Killing Your Writing

Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash

Kyler adjusted the focus on his laptop, staring at a three-page action sequence he’d been agonizing over for his latest thriller chapter. He had followed the classic writing dogma to the letter: show, don’t tell.

To convey that his protagonist was anxious during a high-stakes meeting, Kyler had spent 400 words rendering the microscopic details—the sweat pooling on the character’s palms, the erratic thrumming of his pulse against his collar, and the nervous rhythm of his heel tapping against the linoleum.

He sent the draft to his beta readers in his Discord community for a quick pulse check. Ten minutes later, a notification popped up from one of his top readers, a systems analyst.

“Pacing bottleneck here, Kyler. The tension was building beautifully, but then you hit the brakes to describe shoe tapping for two pages. I glazed over.”

The feedback hit Kyler like an engineering diagnostic report. He looked at the prose through a new lens: he was wasting reader bandwidth. By forcing the audience to process an uncompressed stream of sensory data, he had ground the narrative momentum to a complete halt.

Kyler highlighted the massive block of text. He hit delete. In its place, he wrote a single, punchy line of data compression: he was terrified, and the clock was ticking.

He ran the chapter again. The flow was instant, lean, and high-velocity. He didn’t need to render every spark to prove there was a fire; sometimes, a writer just needs to tell the reader the room is burning so they can get to the escape.

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

And that brings me to what we are going to talk about today.

The internet is swarmed with a dangerous lie: that spells show, don’t tell.

Young writers are being brainwashed with the idea that they should describe every dripping sweat, every throbbing vein, and every beating heart; that they end up spending 3 pages describing the exhausted MC.

Producing purple prose. But this causes the reader to get bored, and when they become bored, they drop the book.

As a new writer, I always fell for this trap, describing everything describable.

But not until I studied other authors' works. Writing is like a camera recording; sometimes you zoom in on the important parts, and other times you zoom out, recording everything.

The same method applies in writing, sometimes you show only the important parts and tell the rest it’s not a constant law or something, but a variable variable. I hope you got that? Let me believe you did.

Tell me below which part you're struggling with as a writer, and I’ll make an article about it.

Repost, don’t gatekeep.