Show, Don't Tell Poetry Prompts
Quick answer: Show don't tell poetry prompts: 14 exercises that force feeling into objects, gestures and scenes, banning emotion words so the images do the talking.
Every poetry teacher says it and almost nobody explains it. Show, don't tell does not mean description is good and statement is bad; it means the reader must be allowed to do the feeling themselves. Tell a reader 'I was devastated' and they nod politely. Show them a man mowing the lawn twice in one afternoon because the house has gone quiet, and they supply the devastation from their own stores, which is the only place feeling was ever going to come from anyway. Chekhov's line about the glint of moonlight on broken glass is the whole doctrine in one image.
The prompts below are engineered as traps: each names an emotion and then forbids you from using it, or hands you a scene that must carry a feeling it never mentions. Expect the drafts to feel withheld. That withholding is the exercise working.
The Prompts
In every prompt, the named emotion and its synonyms are banned from the poem. Adverbs describing feelings are banned too. Objects, actions, weather, and speech only.
- Jealousy, shown only through what the speaker does to a houseplant while listening to a friend's good news on speakerphone.
- Write a poem about relief using nothing but the contents of a hospital bag being unpacked back into drawers at home.
- Loneliness, shown through the cooking: what someone makes for dinner in week one alone, week five, and week forty. Three stanzas, three meals, no commentary.
- Show a father's pride entirely through the way he adjusts things: the boy's collar, the rear-view mirror, the volume knob, the photograph on the mantel, twice.
- Fear of ageing, told through a single visit to a shoe shop, in the assistant's patience and the mirror at floor level.
- Write a break-up using only the shared streaming account: what appears in the watch history afterwards, what gets abandoned nineteen minutes in, whose profile still has the child's name.
- Show forgiveness through two mugs of tea, one made the way the drinker actually likes it for the first time in years. The word sorry may not appear.
- Grief for a pet, shown by the routes the speaker no longer walks and the pocket that still crackles. The animal may not be named or described.
- Show new love through punctuality: what time the speaker starts arriving everywhere, what they wear to take the bins out, how long a red light feels.
- A soldier's homecoming, shown only through the family dog's behaviour across the first week. The humans appear only as knees, hands, and voices from other rooms.
- Show shame using a supermarket checkout: the items placed on the belt, their order, what is put back at the last moment, the small talk survived.
- Depression lifting, one degree, shown through a window being cleaned for the first time in a long time. Stay with the physical work: vinegar, newspaper, the arm getting tired.
- Show a marriage's health, good or bad, you decide, entirely through how two people pack one suitcase for the same trip.
- Anger at a parent, shown by the speaker fixing something in the parent's house perfectly, silently, and better than it needed to be fixed.
How to Use These
Draft with the ban taken literally: keep a list of forbidden words beside you (the emotion, its synonyms, its adjectives) and write for twenty minutes without them. When you feel the urge to explain, that urge is a signpost; instead of writing 'she missed him', ask what missing him makes the character do at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, and write that. Verbs are your best tools here. A character who folds, hoards, scrubs, or over-waters is telling the reader everything while telling them nothing.
In revision, hunt down the summary lines that crept in anyway, they always creep in, and test each cut by reading the poem to someone who has not seen the prompt. Ask them what the poem is about in one word. If they land on your banned emotion, the images are working. If they land somewhere near it, even better; adjacent readings are usually richer than bullseyes. This skill transfers directly to contests, where judges reading blind score emotion highest when they feel it arrived on its own. It is the single most common difference between shortlisted and unplaced work in Writory's monthly round.
What poets can take from this
- Replace every emotion word in a draft with the action it would cause, then decide which version is stronger.
- One precise gesture outweighs three lines of atmosphere.
- Weather may echo feeling but should never be the only evidence.
- Beware sneaky telling: 'sadly', 'with longing', and 'somehow' are all confessions.
- If a stranger can name the feeling from your images alone, the poem is done showing.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which someone returns a borrowed item, a drill, a dish, a book, to a person they are no longer close to. The whole history of the friendship must live in the handover: the doorstep, the packaging, what each of them says about the weather.
Questions
Is telling ever the right choice in a poem?
Yes, and the masters use it deliberately. A plain declarative line can land like a verdict after a passage of imagery. The rule of thumb: earn your telling. Statement works when the images before it have built the pressure it releases.
How is show, don't tell different in poetry than in fiction?
Poetry compresses, so a single image must carry what a novelist could build across a chapter. That raises the stakes on selection: the poem shows one gesture, not the whole scene, and line breaks add emphasis fiction cannot reach.
What if my images are concrete but the poem still feels flat?
Concrete is necessary but not sufficient; the images must also be chosen, arranged in a sequence that builds. A list of accurate objects with no trajectory is inventory, not poetry. Check whether something changes between your first image and your last.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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