"Show, don't tell" might be the most repeated advice in writing workshops. It's also one of the most misleading. Taken as absolute law, it has produced generations of writers who contort their prose into elaborate pantomime when a clean, direct sentence would land harder.

The advice isn't wrong exactly — it's incomplete. The greatest narrative artists across fiction, film, and games don't choose between showing and telling. They move fluidly between the two, deploying each where it serves the story best. The question was never which to use. It was always when.

Understanding the strategic value of direct statement doesn't diminish scenic writing. It restores a powerful tool that clumsy orthodoxy has tried to confiscate. What follows is a case for telling — not as laziness, but as craft.

Every narrative has a rhythm. Some moments need to expand — to slow time, thicken detail, let the reader inhabit a scene. Others need compression. A character crosses a continent. A decade passes. A marriage dissolves. Trying to show every beat of these transitions doesn't honor the story. It smothers it.

Gérard Genette's narratological framework gives us useful language here. He distinguishes between scene — where narrative time roughly matches story time — and summary, where the narrator compresses events through direct statement. Both are essential gears in a narrative's temporal machinery. A story told entirely in scene would be exhausting, shapeless, and paradoxically less vivid, because without compression, the reader loses any sense of which moments actually matter.

Consider the opening of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." That sentence tells — it summarizes a lifetime in a single stroke. And it's one of the most arresting openings in literary history precisely because it leverages telling's unique power: the ability to collapse time and create meaning through juxtaposition rather than dramatization.

In game design, this principle operates through cutscenes and text logs that bridge playable segments. In film, a montage or a narrator's voiceover does similar work. These aren't failures of storytelling. They're strategic compressions — moments where the storyteller steps forward and says, directly, what needs to be understood so the next scene can land with full force.

Takeaway

Pacing is about emphasis. Showing expands the moments that matter; telling compresses everything else so those moments have room to breathe.

Here's something the "show, don't tell" orthodoxy rarely acknowledges: telling is where narrative voice lives. A narrator who only shows you things — who never interprets, summarizes, or judges — is effectively invisible. And sometimes invisibility is what the story needs. But often, the narrator's perspective is the story.

Think of the wry, knowing voice of Jane Austen. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." That's pure telling. It dramatizes nothing. It shows no scene. And yet it accomplishes something no amount of showing could: it establishes an entire worldview, a tone of ironic authority that will color every scene that follows. The voice becomes the lens through which we interpret everything we're subsequently shown.

This is what Genette would call the narrator's commentary function — the capacity to step outside events and offer perspective on them. First-person narrators do this constantly, and we accept it because we understand we're hearing a particular consciousness. But even third-person narration gains enormous power from direct interpretive statement. When Tolkien writes that hobbits are "an unobtrusive but very ancient people," he's telling — and that telling creates the mythic register his entire world depends on.

Across media, this principle holds. Documentary voiceover. A game's codex entries. The title cards in a Wes Anderson film. These are all acts of telling that establish authority, personality, and interpretive framework. Remove them, and you don't get purer storytelling. You get storytelling stripped of one of its most distinctive pleasures: the sense that someone is thinking about the story alongside you.

Takeaway

Voice is built through acts of telling. A narrator who never interprets, judges, or summarizes isn't more honest — they're just absent.

Masterful storytelling doesn't privilege showing over telling. It orchestrates the movement between them. The shift from summary to scene — from telling to showing — is itself a narrative signal. It says to the reader: pay attention now, this is the part that matters.

Consider how Toni Morrison works in Beloved. Long passages of poetic, interpretive telling — narration that summarizes years of trauma, that states emotional truths directly — give way to scenes of devastating immediacy. The telling creates the context and emotional pressure. The showing releases it. Neither technique works without the other. The power is in the transition.

This dynamic also explains why purely scenic writing can feel strangely flat. If everything is shown with equal dramatic weight, nothing stands out. It's the cinematic equivalent of shooting every scene in close-up — technically intense, emotionally numbing. The wide shot, the establishing frame, the narrator's calm summary — these are the telling modes that give showing its contrast and therefore its impact.

The best writing advice isn't "show, don't tell." It's this: earn your scenes by building context around them. Tell what needs to be understood. Summarize what needs to pass quickly. Establish voice, authority, and temporal rhythm through direct statement. Then, when you shift into scene — when you show — the reader feels the ground change beneath them. That shift is where narrative power actually lives.

Takeaway

The movement from telling to showing is itself a storytelling technique. Context and compression are what make scenes feel urgent rather than arbitrary.

"Show, don't tell" persists because it corrects a real problem — weak writing that summarizes where it should dramatize. But advice designed to fix one flaw shouldn't become universal law. Telling is not a deficiency. It's a mode with its own powers.

The writers and storytellers who move us most — across novels, films, games, and every hybrid form between — are those who understand both gears and shift between them with purpose. They tell when context demands it. They show when immediacy demands it.

Craft isn't about following rules. It's about understanding what each technique does and choosing the right one for the moment. That's a harder lesson than "show, don't tell." It's also a truer one.