Show, Don't Tell: 15 Before-and-After Rewrites

The rest of this post is fifteen sentences that tell, each rewritten to show, with a note on what changed. The examples come from my own drafts and from workshop manuscripts, altered. At the end, the cases where telling is the better choice, because it often is.

Emotion

1. Anger

Before: She was furious with him.

After: She set the cup down so carefully it made no sound, and then she wiped the ring it had left, and then she wiped it again.

The tell names the emotion. The show gives a behaviour that only makes sense if she is controlling something big. Readers supply "furious" and, as a bonus, "and trying not to be."

2. Fear

Before: He was terrified of what was behind the door.

After: He put his hand on the door and then took it off and looked at his palm, as if the wood had left something on it.

Fear on the page is usually a body doing something slightly wrong. The hand that retreats and the pointless inspection are wrong in the right way.

3. Grief

Before: Months after the funeral, she still missed him terribly.

After: She still bought the bread he liked. It went stale on the counter and she threw it out on Sundays and bought it again on Mondays.

The routine that has outlived its reason is grief's most reliable image. Note that the rewrite also covers the "months later" without a time stamp: the repetition implies duration.

4. Love

Before: He loved her more than anything.

After: He knew which of the stairs creaked and stepped over it every night so she could sleep, and she had never once noticed, and he did not want her to.

The unwitnessed kindness. "More than anything" is unmeasurable; a specific stair is not.

5. Nervousness

Before: "I'm fine," she said nervously.

After: "I'm fine," she said, and laughed, and then looked at the laugh as if someone else had made it.

Adverbs on dialogue tags are the commonest tell in manuscripts. The rewrite puts the nervousness in an action after the line, which also controls the pace.

Character

6. Competence

Before: She was an excellent forger, the best in the kingdom.

After: She held the page to the window, looked at it for the time it takes to breathe twice, and said, "The ink's right. The hand's wrong. Whoever did this learned on the new copybooks." Nobody in the room knew what the new copybooks were.

Show competence by showing someone do the thing, quickly, in a way that leaves others behind. The last sentence is the reader's proxy: we do not know either, and that is the point.

7. Cruelty

Before: The regent was a cruel man.

After: The regent listened to the whole petition, nodding, and when the woman had finished he asked her to say the last part again, and she did, and he asked again, and she began to understand, and he watched her understand.

Cruelty shown is usually patience. The tell gives a label; the show gives a method.

8. Kindness

Before: Ruiz was kinder than he looked.

After: Ruiz put the glass in front of her without being asked and went to the other end of the bar and stayed there.

The kindness is in the second half: he gives her privacy. The reader learns the "than he looked" from the fact that this needed saying.

9. Intelligence

Before: Teo had always been the clever one.

After: "You checked twice," Teo said. "On the night he died. You'd only check twice if you already knew it was gone."

He infers something true from something small. That is what intelligence looks like from outside; the label is what it looks like from an author who has not written it.

Setting and atmosphere

10. A rich family

Before: The house was enormous and clearly belonged to a wealthy family.

After: The hall had a fire in it, though nobody was there, and had had one all afternoon; the ash was banked two hands deep.

Wealth is waste nobody notices. One detail, with a cost attached, does more than "enormous."

11. A dangerous neighbourhood

Before: It was a rough part of town and she felt unsafe.

After: The shop on the corner had its prices painted on the inside of the window, facing in.

The environment has adapted to something. The reader works out what.

12. Tension in a room

Before: There was tension in the room; everyone could feel it.

After: Three people at the table and nobody had touched the bread.

Abstract nouns (tension, chemistry, awkwardness) are always tells. Replace them with the small physical thing that everyone in the scene is avoiding.

Backstory and relationships

13. A broken relationship

Before: They had been close once, but the betrayal had destroyed their bond.

After: She sat in the second chair, not the one nearest him, and he noticed her choose it.

Twelve words and the reader knows: history, distance, and that he is watching the distance. The tell's "destroyed their bond" is doing none of that work.

14. Backstory (a wound)

Before: Ten years ago she had testified against her brother to save herself, and the guilt had never left her.

After: She had not said his name aloud in ten years. She noticed she was counting.

You do not have to show the whole event to show its weight. Show the habit it left.

15. Time passing

Before: Years passed, and the town changed.

After: The bakery became a pharmacy and then a shop that sold phone cases and then, for a long time, nothing.

Summary is legitimate (see below), but even summary can be concrete. The sequence of shopfronts is faster to read than "years passed" and carries a mood.

When telling is the right choice

Now the part the slogan leaves out. Telling is a tool, and there are jobs it does better.

Transitions and unimportant time. "They rode for three days without incident." Do not show three days of nothing. Tell it and get to the scene.

Facts the reader simply needs. "The coronation was in nine days." Showing this through a scene of someone counting on a calendar wastes a page on a number.

Deliberate flatness after intensity. After a shown death, a told sentence can land like a stone: "He was buried on the Tuesday." The plainness is the effect.

Voice-driven narration. A first-person narrator who says "I hated him, and I want to be clear about that" is telling, and it is characterisation. The tell is the show, because what it shows is the narrator.

Pacing control. Late in a thriller, you may need to compress a scene that would have been shown in act one. Telling accelerates.

The rule underneath the slogan is about attention. Showing spends the reader's attention; telling saves it. Spend it on what matters and save it everywhere else. A manuscript that shows everything is as exhausting as one that shows nothing.

How to find your tells in revision

Search the manuscript for:

• Named emotions: angry, sad, afraid, nervous, happy, guilty, and their adverbs.
• "Felt" and "feeling" as a verb of emotion ("she felt a surge of").
• Abstract nouns for mood: tension, chemistry, awkwardness, atmosphere.
• Adverbs on dialogue tags.
• "Clearly," "obviously," "it was evident that."
• Sentences that explain the previous sentence. ("She threw the cup. She was angry.")

Each hit is a candidate. Not every one should be converted; some are correct tells. But every one should be decided.

Showing and AI drafting

If you draft with a model, expect to do this pass thoroughly. Language models default to telling, because the statistically likely sentence after an action is the sentence that explains it. You will get "she felt a wave of guilt wash over her" after a scene that already showed the guilt. The habit is so consistent that I keep it on the checklist in How to Edit AI-Generated Prose.

Two prompts that help. Asking a model to "rewrite this paragraph removing every named emotion and replacing it with a physical action or a specific detail" works surprisingly well, because the task is mechanical. Asking it to "show, don't tell" does not; it will produce more adjectives.

Try it in SparkLore

The rewrite prompt above is built into SparkLore's editing tools as a one-click pass on a selected paragraph, with the bible's voice samples attached so the shown version sounds like your book rather than the model's. If you want to test the principle on a fresh passage first, the free AI story continuation tool accepts an instruction line; paste a told paragraph and ask it to continue with behaviour only, no named emotions, and compare. Sign up to run the pass across a whole chapter.