Show and tell in fiction

Published: June 8th, 2026

The above title refers to advice I was given constantly by established writers at the Swanwick Summer School in Derbyshire: an annual event, usually held in the second week of August – that I attended for 32 consecutive years. I heartily recommend this focused week on writing to any writer who wishes to make their way into creative writing – either fiction or non-fiction. 

Back to my title, the focus of my blog. What is ‘show and tell’? As I have come to understand it over many years of writing, this technique refers to the combined use of dialogue and prose to tell a story. Without dialogue, fiction can often be dull and emotionally distant from readers. Yet, dialogue needs to be interspersed with prose in order to balance out the writing. Dialogue helps to ‘show’ the action, while prose mainly does the ‘telling’. 

This fine balance of ‘show and tell’ is also linked to the pace of a novel or any fiction. Is the action too slow – or too fast? Have you, like me, recently read Dickens, or another classic writer, and noticed the slow pace of the story – common to most classic novels, but felt as if you are wading through treacle? In my view, modern readers prefer stories that romp along at a reasonably fast pace. 

So, how do we, as authors, get the pace to fit the action – and link this to the characters, whose stories are being carefully joined up, and threaded like a length of rope, through a novel? In any story what do readers gain from dialogue? And how do they remain wanting to read on? We might ask, in any book, what makes the story both engaging – and memorable? 

The words speak. As readers we hear how they are being used. Does a character use swear words to vent their anger? Are they shouting? Or, are their words soft and loving, perhaps in a sex scene? Do they, through the tone of their words – ask, whisper, mumble, murmur, expostulate, retaliate, shriek, scream etc.? As we read, these differing emotions should jump out from the page, enabling us to form a picture of how these characters speak, as if they are on the stage of a theatre. Thinking of pace, we might consider the idea of plays – told solely in dialogue, yet covering (mainly) only brief passages of time. So if stories were to be told using solely dialogue, books would be hundreds of thousands of words long. Far too heavy.

So, where does prose feature? How does this tell the story? We can perhaps describe a character’s appearance, or a setting, or the weather. Authors also use a range of senses to convey, as well as sight, what their characters might touch, hear, smell or taste. Music? Food? A pebble from the beach? Descriptive prose adds to the fully rounded atmosphere of the tale that is being both shown and told. 

Of course, prose also serves to speed up the pace: moving the story forward…through weeks, months, even years, in a way that dialogue alone could not possibly do. 

So, a fine balance of both dialogue and prose, interspersed together, enables characters to tell their own stories. As authors, we see them. Hear them. They communicate; telling us how to write their stories down. We are merely their writers – but they are the story tellers. 

So, back to ‘show and tell’. I hope my own novels feature a combination of both, each written from my characters’ beating hearts. Books 1 and 2 of my historical romance trilogy ‘Legacy of Deceit’ are out now on Amazon, both with excellent reviews. My third is three quarters done. Almost there…sprinting towards that exciting finishing line. Perhaps novel writing is a bit like running a marathon?

Writing is also a creative art. Fun – as well as a hard slog.

A Lie Never Dies   Book 1

https://amzn.eu/d/6yTM4R0

Love,Lies …and Loss.   Book 2

https://amzn.eu/d/0cVdQjzx

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