In his letter to Joan Lancaster in June 1956, C. S. Lewis wrote: 'In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."'
'On the dam of the mill a fragment of broken bottle flashed like a small bright star, and there rolled by, like a ball, the black shadow of a dog' – Anton 'is that a gun on your mantelpiece or are you just pleased to see me?' Chekhov
'Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.' – Mark Twain
This is the goal of 'good writing'. It is claimed to make the reader do the work of feeling instead of being told how to feel, as a mechanism to engage the reader. Instead of asserting that something happened, it gives the reader evidence that it happened.
"Show, don't tell" is one of the iron laws of literary fiction, along with "murder your darlings" and "remove all the words ending in 'ly'." It's a hallmark of western literature, and it's firmly based in the conviction that writing can and should express "universal themes".
Alexis Enrico Santi, editor of Our Stories, wrote: Literary fiction is writing that concentrates not on the climax but all the foreplay before and after […] What bridges the gap between the reader and writer is the essential senses of human emotion: smell, sight, hearing, touch -- these are universal. Everyone who reads is looking to access their own emotions to 'live' inside your fiction. Whenever you are communing with these senses, you will be connecting with your reader."
From Wikipedia: "Literary fiction is a term principally used for certain fictional works that are claimed to hold literary merit…To be considered literary, a work usually must be "critically acclaimed" and "serious". In practice, works of literary fiction often are "complex, literate, multilayered novels that wrestle with universal dilemmas".
But there will always be a major role for simply telling. Importantly, it is not possible to describe motivation by "showing".
"[M]otivation is unshowable. It must be told. […] Motivation is precisely the one thing that cannot be shown. […] When you are using a POV character, the single most important thing that you must tell the reader is the full purpose of what the character is doing, as soon as the character knows it himself. If you do not, you are cheating, and the audience gets less and less patient with you, until they lose interest because you are not telling them the most important information that people come to stories -- especially fiction -- to receive! -- Orson Scott Card.
If you try to describe a person's inner state only by showing what he does, one problem you will run into is what psychologists call the Fundamental Attributive Error. This is the tendency to believe a person's actions are the result of their personality rather than outside forces. For example, you're likely to believe the speeding car that cuts you off must be driven by a selfish jerk, when in fact it could be driven by a soon-to-be father who is trying to get his wife to the maternity hospital and was temporarily distracted.
Even if you excel at "showing", you will be, as the reading for this class described in "constant dissociation", forever describing a cloud around a person without ever acknowledging there's a person at the center of the cloud, an "I".
Since good writing is said to come to grips with "universal" themes, to "show" them, a writer must assume that it there is a universal way to 'be in love,' 'to be terrified,' 'watch a beautiful sunset' and so on. But is that a good assumption? Leaving aside the whole branch of anthropology dedicated to the study of "literary universals" (the upshot being that not as many things as we think are universal in discourse) literary fiction is western, largely white, and 'the canon' is still mostly male. Styles, themes and techniques fall into and out of fashion. It is not universal.
The "universality" of literary fiction has been challenged by on multiple grounds. For example by Namratta Podar on the grounds of Colonialism, because it ignores the orality (story telling) tradition in societies around the world. It has also been challenged for containing implicit Colonialism by Cecilia Tan because the literary form, particularly when "showing", often requires the story to be about the impact a newcomer has on a world that is new to them, and vice versa.
It has also been challenged on the grounds that no experience can be universal. Empathy is a myth. In "Consider The Lobster," David Foster Wallace expounded on the life of the lobster. It does not have a nervous system that resembles that of a human, so can we truly say a lobster 'was in agony' when it was boiled in a pot?
"Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory and ethics." In this case, 'the lobster was dropped in boiling water' – telling, not showing – is a true account. -- David Foster Wallace, in Ethical Challenge of Posthumanism.
More narrowly, we are all, like Wallace's fish in This is Water, unaware of our environment. We are embedded within a medium – our Umwelt, as von Uexküll named it – and do not realize that our own senses, effectors and environment are not contiguous with the Umwelten of our so-called peers.
This issue is exacerbated in speculative vis à vis literary fiction. In the latter, the Umwelt of the colonizers and the colonized may not overlap to a significant degree, but in the former one set of characters might literally be lobsters. A long time in literary fiction may be a hundred years (of solitude), in speculative fiction it may be a billion years – or a millisecond. A long way in literary fiction may be Eastern Europe to New York, in speculative fiction from Schenectady to the Andromeda Galaxy.
It is informative to see how television approaches this. In "The Expanse" (2016–), a portal opens between distant systems. The portal – the "Ring" – is not said to be Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, immense, planet-sized. It’s barely described by the characters. This is a TV "show" and of course it makes sense that they will "show" the size of the Ring. But in contrast, the interpersonal relationships between the characters are talked through exhaustively in dialog. If a character betrays another character, it is explained – told – in minute detail. The precise relationship between the characters, at this current juncture of the plot, like motivation, may need to be spelled out.
In written SF, we often need to "tell" both exposition and motivation. We must find a way to describe a situation no one has ever come across before – a portal between star systems – and we have to explain how the characters are interacting.
For the former, we have two main choices: infodump, what Damon Knight called the expository lump, and incluing, named by Jo Walton, where the situation is described in small pieces as the character encounters each part of their environment.
The most famous incluing phrase in SF is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". This advances the action while showing that we are not in 21st Century in three short words. It's not a trick that's easily replicated, however, or it wouldn't be the go-to example.
Infodumping includes the classic, much maligned technique of people explaining things to each other. "As you know, Bob, we settled this planet almost a hundred years ago but still on occasion a wild invisible creature from the mountains attacks the settlement and steals our children."
(Perhaps "incluing" would be something like, "I walked on the outside of the trail, carrying a big stick. I didn't believe there were any invisible monsters in the mountains, but my little sis did. Four generations of settlers had metaled and graded what was once just a rocky path, but to her it was still the edge of civilization and monster lurked in the bushes.")
In summary, it's called telling a story, not showing a story. Showing has its place, but plot will always require telling. A dedication to showing will produce a work where nothing happens except for the experience of the main character, and if you don't feel like him, then for you nothing has happened at all.
SF Critic Damien G Walter wrote on the Asimov's forum: "I've noticed a lot of writers, particularly those who write novels over short stories, refer to 'show don't tell' as using scene and dialogue instead of narrative voice. IMHO that advice is not very helpful. Narrative voice is pretty essential in a good story, and trying to stick to this idea of 'show don't tell' is a mistake."
Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson (as Mistborn) wrote: " Show don't tell is pithy, and it is good advice. But it's not the whole story. What it really should say is this: learn when to show and when to tell."
(Written because we had to "do" show don't tell for our writing class.)
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