This week's status report on the novel is much the same as it was two weeks ago and as I suspect it will be two weeks from now; I'm deep in the editing phase at the chapter level. If it's true that writing is editing, then this is where the novel is actually being written.

A little like painting a room, every once in a while I notice a spot I missed. So I go back, paint the spot, and feather the new paint into what's already there'. "Hiding your crimes," I've heard it referred to. The trouble comes when I lose perspective and can't tell if I'm going back to cover a missed spot, or if I'm going back to repaint an area because I don't like the brushstrokes. If you'll permit me to carry the metaphor just a little further, I'm trying to move forward with the painting and not endlessly touch up a troubled spot.

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This week's essay is about the often overprescribed writing advice, "show, don't tell." I see a lot of advice about the craft of writing and storytelling. Some of it's useful, much of it's bad, and then there's advice that falls into a gray area. This is one of those gray bits and I want to explore it. I know many of you aren't writers, but I think you're all regular readers. So don't think of this as just writer's advice, but rather as something to watch for as a reader too.

If you've spent any time around writing advice, you've heard the First Commandment: Thou shall show. Thou shall not tell.

It's in every craft book. Every workshop. Every critique group. Someone writes "Sarah was angry" and a dozen voices chorus back: Show us she's angry. Have her slam a door. Clench her fists. Speak in clipped sentences. The advice is so universal it might as well be carved in stone.

And it's not wrong, exactly. As a corrective for writers who narrate emotions instead of dramatizing them, it's useful. The instinct is to write "he was scared," when instead you could put the reader inside his fear. Make the reader feel the character's pulse quicken and hear the silence stretch out. It can make for an immersive reading experience.

But somewhere along the way, "show, don't tell" stopped being a casual rule-of-thumb and hardened into a dogma. I think it's time to question the zealots.

Here's a thought experiment. Three of your friends are at the bank when it gets robbed. You all meet at a bar that night and tell you about it, one by one.

Now imagine you could bring up the security camera footage on your phone and watch the events for yourself.

Which version of the story is more interesting?

It's not even close. The footage would be flat. An unblinking, uninterpreted, grainy stream of events. People standing in line. A guy walks in. Things happen. People react. The camera doesn't know what matters. It doesn't know who to focus on or when to zoom in. It shows everything with the same indifference.

Your friends, though? They'd be riveting. And each one would be riveting in a different way, which tells you something important.

Your first friend leads with the guy's shoes, because she noticed he was wearing brand-new Nikes with a wrinkled suit. Your second friend can't stop talking about the teller who was cool as ice they whole time, like maybe the teller was in on the robbery. Your third friend is all about the woman next to her in line who grabbed her hand and wouldn't let go.

Three completely different stories from the same event. And every single thing that makes those stories compelling is telling. Your friends are selecting, compressing, editorializing. They're assigning meaning. They're importing their own emotional responses. They're skipping the what they feel are the boring parts and expanding the intense moments.

And while the security camera provides the purest showing of the events, it's also the worst storyteller in the room.

Ursula K. Le Guin made this argument years ago, and she didn't mince words. Stories, she said, are not shown. They're told. Movies show stories. Prose tells them. That's not a limitation of prose. It's the entire point of the medium.

She positioned "show, don't tell" as fine advice for beginners and preachy writers, but pushed back hard against treating it as an absolute rule. Her argument was that the narrator's voice, the telling voice, is one of the great powers of fiction. It's the thing novels can do that movies literally cannot.

And the evidence is everywhere once you look for it. Jane Austen tells constantly. Her direct narration about characters' motivations and failings is some of the most memorable prose in English literature. Tolstoy tells. Dickens tells. Vonnegut tells. Pratchett tells. These writers all understood that the narrator's voice, the selecting, interpreting, and commenting, is the art form.

Le Guin put it this way, "The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves."

Sit with that for a second. The act of narration isn't a delivery mechanism for scenes. The narration is the point.

So what's actually going on? I think the problem is that "show, don't tell" gets it backwards. It treats showing as the primary mode and telling as something that needs to justify itself.

Flip it. Telling is the native mode of prose. It's what your friends do at the bar. It's what a narrator does in every story. Showing is a technique you deploy within telling when you want the reader to feel like they're in the room for a specific moment, watching it unfold in real time.

The novels that try to be all-showing, all the time, tend to feel flat. They're security camera footage. Faithfully rendering every detail, with no narrator between the reader and the action, and with no intelligence selecting and interpreting the events and details. Nobody home.

The best stories move between the two methods. The tell and the show. The writer talks to you in the narrator's voice, compressing and contextualizing as they tell you about events. Then they you drop into scene for the moment that matters, the moment where the can show you moment. Then you pull back out.

It's a bit like the bullet-time shots in The Matrix. We see Agent Smith fire at Neo and the shock on Neo's face. The shock on his face tells the story. Then we move to bullet-time as we are shown Neo dodging the bullets in slow motion where we can see all the details. The bullet that pokes a hole in his coat, and the one that grazes his leg. Then we return to normal speed where we get to see the emotional reactions from both characters that tells us the next beat of the story.

Your friends at the bar know this intuitively. They don't try to show you the robbery by recreating it in real time. They tell you about it, colored by their own memories and emotions. And when the story calls for that precise real-time description, that's when they switch to showing you the events. "And the teller just looks at him, dead calm, and says, The system is down, sir. I literally cannot open the drawer."

That moment of showing works because everything around it is telling.

I'm not saying throw out "show, don't tell" entirely. It has it's place.

The question to ask as you evaluate your writing isn't "Am I showing enough?" It's "Am I telling it well?" Is your narrator's voice doing interesting work? Is it selecting the right details, compressing the boring parts, assigning meaning in ways the reader couldn't know on their own? Is there an intelligence on the page, or is it just a camera?

Tell your story. Tell it with voice and judgment and personality. And show events when the moment demands it. Don't let anyone make you feel guilty for doing the thing storytellers have done since the very first of us sat by a fire and said, Let me tell you what happened.