on Writing Forward:
The first time I heard the advice “show, don’t tell,” I was young and it confused me.
Show what? Isn’t writing all about telling a story?
At the time, I shrugged it off as some kind of mysterious double-talk, but the phrase kept popping up: show, don’t tell.
It rolled off my teachers’ tongues. I spotted it in books and articles on the craft of writing. A couple of times, it appeared in red on my papers with an arrow pointing to a specific sentence or paragraph. Then I took a poetry class and had a big ahamoment where show, don’t tell became abundantly clear.
