Show, don't tell is a narrative technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through actions, words, subtext, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description.
The technique applies equally to nonfiction and all forms of fiction, literature including haiku[2] and Imagist poetry in particular, speech, movie making, and playwriting.
[3][4][5][6] The concept is often attributed to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, reputed to have said "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
In a letter to his brother, Chekhov actually said, "In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.
For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.
The American playwright and scriptwriter Mark Swan (1871-1942) "could talk of little else" than the motto he'd placed on the wall above his writing desk "Show–not tell".
Creative literature (as opposed to technical writing or objective journalism) in general hinges on the artful use of a wide range of devices (such as inference, metaphor, understatement, the unreliable narrator, and ambiguity) that reward the careful reader's appreciation of subtext and extrapolation of what the author chooses to leave unsaid, untold, and/or unshown.
[15] In a 2013 article, Chuck Palahniuk (author of the novel Fight Club) goes as far as recommending a ban of what he calls "thought verbs" ("Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires […]") favoring instead the use of "specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.
"[16] In his book, Exceptions to the Rule, James Scott Bell argues that "show, don't tell" should not be applied to all incidents in a story.
[23][24] In 2017, Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen questioned the validity of continuing to teach "show, don't tell" in creative writing classes in a New York Times op-ed on the subject.
[25] His position was that such teaching is biased against immigrant writers, who may describe emotions in ways readers from outside their culture might not understand, rendering "tell" necessary.