Show Don't Tell: The Worst Advice Ever Given to Poets

Every workshop says it and half the poems it produces are worse for it. A judge who used to preach it explains why show-don't-tell breaks more poems than it fixes, when telling is the right move, and the four cases where showing is actually the problem.

For the first five years I judged, I was the poet who preached it. 'Show don't tell' was my red pen's favourite sentence, and I wrote it in the margin of a hundred poems that would have been better if I had left them alone. Then I started noticing which poems actually won, and the advice started looking like the problem.

The rule is not wrong. It is just incomplete, and the way it is usually taught makes it worse than the disease it is meant to cure.

What the rule actually broke

Show-don't-tell is the reason half the poems in a contest pile are overstuffed with imagery and underfed with meaning. The poet heard 'show' and read 'describe', and the poem became a catalogue of surfaces, the colour of the sky, the texture of the wall, the smell of the rain, with no idea underneath.

The poem that shows everything and tells nothing is not a poem; it is a photograph. And a photograph is not the same thing as a thought.

The four cases where showing is the problem

Case one: the emotional truth. 'I was devastated' tells. 'I sat in the car for an hour' shows. But sometimes the devastation is the point, and the car-sitting is just evidence. If the emotion is the subject, saying it is not a failure; it is the poem.

Case two: the summary that matters. 'We were married for eleven years' tells. It is also the only way to say it. You cannot show eleven years; you can only tell them. Some facts are the poem.

Case three: the voice. A persona poem, a dramatic monologue, a spoken-word piece, these live on the strength of the voice, and voice is telling. The speaker says what they mean, and the saying is the style. Showing would kill it.

Case four: the turn. The last line of a poem often has to tell, because the poem has been showing for twenty lines and now it needs to land. 'And that is why I left' is a tell that works because the show is already done.

The test that decides

Here is the test I use now, and it is better than the rule: does the sentence carry information the reader needs, or is it just telling them what to feel?

'I was devastated' tells the reader what to feel. That is usually the wrong tell, because the reader should be allowed to feel it themselves.

'We were married for eleven years' carries information. That is the right tell, because the reader cannot feel what they do not know.

The rule should not be 'show don't tell'. It should be 'tell what the reader needs to know, show what the reader needs to feel'. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole craft.

Where the rule still works

Showing is still the right move when the poem is about a moment, a scene, a thing happening in front of you. The more the poem is about an event, the more it should show. The more it is about a feeling, the more it can afford to tell.

If you want to see both moves done well, the forms library has examples of narrative and lyric doing different jobs, and the end-on-image post shows the case where telling is the better close. When your draft is ready, the contest window is open. The rule was never 'show don't tell'. It was 'know when to tell'.

Keep reading

For the craft side, the imagery module covers the deeper method. The volta module is the page to read next, and the spoken-word module is where the work goes when it is done.

By Writory Editorial, for Writory.

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