That "show don't tell" advice almost ruined my first short story

My writing group leader in Austin kept drilling show don't tell into me, so I turned every single line into a metaphor. Took me 4 months to realize my 2000 word piece about a dog dying was so vague nobody even knew it was about a dog. Wish I'd just told them the dog died and moved on, the feedback would've been way more useful.

2 comments

2 Comments

linda1141mo ago

Oh man, that hits hard. Here's the thing nobody's really talking about: the real problem isn't show don't tell, it's that the rule gets pushed on people who are still learning how to trust their own instincts. Like, you probably already knew how to write a dog dying in a way that felt real, but the group leader made you doubt that. The advice only works when you've got a solid base of writing plain and clear first, you know? I always tell new writers to nail the boring version, just get the facts down, then decide where showing actually adds something. Most of the time, it's like two or three key moments in a story that need the metaphor treatment, not every single line. The rest of the time, telling is just respecting your reader's time.

lilyp371mo ago

Two years ago I would've argued the opposite, that show don't tell was the only way to write anything worth reading. Then I went back to a story I wrote in my early twenties, just a plain scene about my grandpa losing his wallet at the grocery store, and realized how much power it had without a single metaphor. The version I would've written after my writing group would've had the wallet as a symbol for lost time and the grocery cart as a boat on a stormy sea, and it would've been nonsense. Now I tell people to write the boring draft first, like you said, and only then ask where showing actually earns its keep.