If you’re reading this essay, you’ve heard it. It’s the first piece of advice anyone in the market for writing advice hears. (Beyond the basics of where to put commas and verbs, that is.) And if there’s one trope next in line after wisely repeating “show, don’t tell”, it’s complaining about “show, don’t tell”, or critiquing its application.
We’re going to be doing a bit of that here, but I promise I’ll get to slightly more novel insights later. This introduction is so that we’re all on the same page about “show, don’t tell”. After all, one of the most obvious questions to ask after hearing it has very different answers depending on who you ask: what exactly is ‘telling’ and ‘showing?’
Consider a sentence like “Jimmy was sad.” Obviously, and I think anyone informed would agree, this is telling. It’s stating the character’s mood — what would be the remedy, then? “show, don’t tell” advocates for illustrating these exposited facts instead with actions and details. We could say “Jimmy cried.” or “Jimmy’s sister died.” or “Jimmy felt as though all the color had drained from the world.” Or could we? I’d interpret the last one as telling — we’re still saying how the character is feeling. But I most will agree, cliche or not, the last is the most effective, at least in a vacuum.
Of course, you could say I’m cheating. I could insert writerly pomp into all of them. Say “The blackest despair welled up within Jimmy.” or “Jimmy’s mouth contorted in a wide, pained ‘o’, and he wailed as rivulets of tears downed his face.” Embarrassing work, but you get the idea. One could argue what strength there is in these revisions lies precisely in the showing — ‘blackest’ is a sensory detail, ‘all the color had drained’ is a sensory detail. Maybe it’s all a spectrum, and we all do a little bit of both.
There’s a bit of confusion about just what is showing — I’ve seen describing a character’s inner monologue called telling. “The girl sunk into a pool of acid.” is perfectly visual, something ‘shown’, but would it not be more showy to illustrate how the acid burns her skin like hot fire, sluices into her nose and mouth and kills her from within?
The greatest fault of the advice, in my view, is just that it leaves to individual elaboration just why it works. Because it sounds better? Because it engages the reader more deeply? Because it’s what Good Writing is? Sure, but why?
The contention of this essay is that the aptness of “show, don’t tell” is a happy coincidence or messy abstraction. Its success is due to a confluence of factors, distinct principles all realized when you ‘show’ instead of ‘tell,’ and a complete account cannot be shorter than an appraisal of all of them.
“Show, don’t tell” is like a car. It runs, takes you where you need to go, and that may be enough. But if it breaks, why? The engine has many parts with separate modes of failure. You want to know all of them, to repair the car, or just appreciate how it runs. You shouldn’t pour sugar in the gas tank, but what specifically goes wrong if you do?
There’s a joke to be made here, that goes something like: don’t tell me to “show don’t tell”, show me. Or, to be really accurate to that mangled Chekhov quote, you’d need something else at the end of that sentence — how about the entire rest of this essay?
The Argument Model
To get this started, we need better terminology. “Show don’t tell” is catchy, but for a precise analysis, specificity benefits us. I could overload these words with novel definitions, but then I’d be just like the hundreds of articles preaching their half-parroted, half-bespoke explanations of the advice.
Fundamentally, what differentiates telling and showing? The way this is commonly framed, it’s the difference between saying what the reader should think, and letting them come to that conclusion on their own — that is, giving them the cues to really believe what’s happening. If you chew on this for long enough, you’ll probably split it a similar way to how I’m about to.
Writing is communication, and if a writer needs to convey something to the reader, there’s three ways to go about it. The first is to simply assert it. “Jimmy is sad.” The second is to suggest it. “Jimmy cried.” The last is to do both. “Jimmy cried because he is sad.” There are probably better words for this last one (argue, perhaps, or explicate), but I’m going with justify.
For a framework, this has about all we need. Telling/asserting is to give the reader the conclusion to your argument, and showing/suggesting is to give the reader the premises of your argument.
We need words for interacting with these statements. The act of following premises to a conclusion is extrapolating. When we suggest, this is what we expect the reader to do, but it’s also what a writer is going to be doing when writing their story, at least some of the time.
What about the opposite, though? Starting with the conclusion and figuring out what premises you can use to justify it? I.e., the thing “show, don’t tell” proponents expect us to do? There are a lot of unflattering words for this sort of thing — confabulate, rationalize — because it’s not a very virtuous thing to do in debates, but since this is all good fun, I’m going to pick something impressive instead: reification.
To reify is to make what is abstract concrete, and for the rest of this essay, reification will be our word for substituting conclusions for premises.
In this framework, the ultimate subjectivity of what we’re doing becomes evident. A story is just statements, and they’re all assertions. The categories of ‘suggestion’ or ‘justification’ are perspectives. We earlier called “Jimmy cried” a suggestion because context made it clear I really wanted to say “Jimmy is sad”.
Technically, whether two statements imply a third is entirely logically objective, but stories aren’t perfect syllogisms. We’re reading through the lines, and oftentimes what we get is less true justification than partial, plausible justification. (We can add in the term ‘interpolate’ for the act of simultaneous extrapolation and reification, but we really don’t need to.)
This is not entirely fair. Reify isn’t really just a pretentious way of saying show instead of tell. There’s a important difference between the central example of showing instead of telling this doesn’t account for. We can, with little difficulty, reify telling with more telling. It’s just a logical relation between statements — I can reify “Jimmy is sad” into “Jimmy lives under capitalism”, but I’ve done little to make it more vivid.
My real definition of “show, don’t tell” is the process of sensory reification. Justifying the nonsensory with sensory details. Facial expressions instead of moods, actions instead of intents, and so forth.
But, as earlier stated and now clarified, this essay contends that sensory reification is really a bunch of different things in a trenchcoat. So, why does it work? Why would you do it?
I have seven answers. Some of them overlap, and a few of them you’ve probably heard before, but I’ve never seen a treatment this thorough, so I’m filling that void. In outline, I intend to describe seven aspects.
And then if we get through all of that, I’ll finally, maybe, bring it all together with a conclusion.
The Rhetorical Appeal
At the broadest level, sensory reification isn’t a principle of fiction writing, but good rhetoric generally. The type of it that’s easiest to do is the simple replacement of ideas with the actions that stand in for them. Smiles for happiness, hearts racing for excitement. Part of what effect this achieves, what makes it good to whatever extent that it is good, applies equally well to fully abstract things. It’s more appealing, has more rhetorical oomph, to say “He punched the guy” than to say, “He was aggressive,” in the same way metaphorical statements like “Despair punched him in the gut,” or “The pandemic scoured the country,” are appealing, despite being abstract ideas.
A few things are at play here. It’s more exciting to get a clear, easily imagined image. Writing that’s mired in abstractions far removed from everyday experience is harder to connect to. Additionally, specific and novel phrasing catches the eye and engages the reader. Say “Time passed,” and it’s so conventional it says almost nothing. Say “Time slipped away,” and there’s more to it, but say something more like “Time sunk down,” or “Time bled out,” and it’ll definitely stick out. It gets tryhard easily, though, as you can already tell. Put simply, sensory reification is a source of entropy in writing. As talked about by practicing writers, this lens is more appropriately known by the name ‘punchy prose’, the process of attaining this sometimes called ‘punching up’ the writing.
Finally, and speculatively, I suspect a key factor at play is cross-modal association. Many studies suggest that reading the words for an action triggers the same parts of the brain as seeing or doing those actions, so it could be that what makes descriptions of characters doing things so compelling is tapping into those sensory associations, in a meaningful sense, literally recreating the experience in a reader’s mind.
So, the rhetorical appeal argument for sensory reification is founded on a belief that it improves the quality of prose on a merely mechanical level, much in the way the rule of three or other kinds of symmetry enhance the flow. The limitation, then, is the same as any other rhetorical device: it should be discarded when it gets in the way of your meaning, or conflicts with a more appealing device you’re setting up, or simply doesn’t do enough to make things appropriately ‘punchy’. I’m loathe to give advice as limp as ‘use it when it works’, but if I really wanted to write about the aesthetics of prose, it’d be a whole essay on its own. I’m getting this out of the way so that we can talk about more interesting things.
The Interpretative Engagement
If I say ‘2+2’, I don’t need to type ‘4.’ Indeed, you might feel condescended to. If I give you the evidence and a list of suspects, and you’re a frequent mystery reader, you’re probably inclined to try to suss it out yourself. When we suggest instead of an assert, we’re asking the audience to read in between the lines, do some of the work themselves. “Show, don’t tell” proponents will claim that readers want this, that spelling everything out is boring. It’s not uncontroversial. Subtext is for cowards.
I think it goes a bit deeper than that, though. It’s compelling to theorize that stories are adaptation ancient humans developed to share their experience. That the original purpose of them was warnings, teaching tools. Our heroes encounter a problem, and this is the story of how they solved it. If this ever happens to you, well, now you know. If the story is made interesting, it can survive generations of oral transfer. If we grow to find them interesting, our knowledge compounds faster. I don’t know if that’s all confabulation, most evolutionary psychology is.
Still, it’s more substantiated to believe that the brain wants to predict its inputs. It fits with the evidence, and fits with evolutionary reasoning. Driven by Compression Progress argues persuasively that so much of art and aesthetics can be explained by an innate drive for modeling input accurately, yet succinctly.
It’s satisfying to figure out the solution to a good riddle, to say nothing of the rush of reaching the climatic reveal of a series, and feeling everything up till then click in that surprising yet inevitable way Aristotle was so fond of.
There’s a few parts to my argument here. One is the thing I’m obviously saying, that the brain likes to predict, and sensory reification repeatedly lets it succeed at that rewarding activity. But once again, this principle is just a bit more general than “show, don’t tell”. The process of engaging the brain’s predictive faculties doesn’t just let you read between the lines and catch what the writer is too cowardly to say outright. This process of prediction entails modeling the world.
As in that famous Chekhov quote, a little brushstroke of detail like the glint of moonlight on broken glass can define the night in a way the word alone does not. I think, to account for details like that, your model has to be pretty high fidelity. You talk about the heat, and then you talk about the sweat running off someone’s brow, and then later on something slips out of their grip due to the wetness of their hands. That feels right. We’re primed for it.
Not only do I conjecture that a steady flow of details like this could shift neural prediction into a higher gear, I think it also acts as a sort of training data for it. If we’re driven by compression progress, then more novel details means more things to compress. Conversely, a scarcity of such details leaves that bit of neural machinery unused, as dissatisfying as a song with no bass.
(This isn’t all conscious, mind you. I don’t think you’re actively doing all of this modeling and extrapolating the same way you try to guess at whodunnit or make fan theories. Optical illusions happen on their own, without (despite!) your active involvement, and interpretative engagement, likewise, happens sub- or semi-consciously. This, perhaps, is part of what’s going when people reread stories. You may have read it before, you technically know what happens, but you also know what happens in a song you’ve heard before, too, and that doesn’t stop the circuits that process it from computing reward.)
There might even be a network effect here, with this process creating a sort of interpretative momentum. Engagement is commonly cited by “show, don’t tell” proponents. If you’re trying to figure out one thing, it’s easier to try to figure out another thing.
Or instead, maybe it leads to saturation and fatigue. After all, an easy way to make any text harder to predict, more like a puzzle to be solved, would be to blank out every letter of every word not necessary for identifying it. There’s a minimal set for every word in every grammatical configuration, and it’s totally possible to figure this out, but I suspect readers won’t find it fun. Why not? Perhaps it’s just that we don’t need to do it in our every day lives, and others don’t praise and reward it, and there were no sustained letter-guessing games in the plains of Africa. Without practical, social, or innate utility, enjoying it would be down to random individual quirks.
Point is, we can’t reduce interpretative engagement theory down to just “more ambiguity is better”. We could salvage it a bit and say some sorts of ambiguity are better — it should be uncontroversial that you should justify the resolution of your story rather than asserting it. Conventional writing advice, similarly, would have you breaking your back committed to the reification of emotion.
I think a fair guideline is that readers have a certain threshold of cognitive load they’re willing to operate under. By looking at sensory reification this way, the question of whether to show or tell becomes questions like, am I making the reader keep track of too many things to understand what’s going on? Have I balanced ‘easy’ sentences with ‘hard’ sentences, or are there dense passages where many inferences required in quick succession? Am I writing the sort of story for the sort of audience that wants it to be ‘deep’ and inference-heavy, or clear and accessible?
As far as interpretative engagement is concerned, the question of what details to include, and whether a detail is ‘good’, becomes the questions: what does this detail let the reader predict? What later details does this prime them for? Is it satisfying to our intuition and sense of pattern-matching?
Of course, there’s a more important concern that no discussion of modeling fiction would be complete without.
The Frugality of Disbelief
Which is cheaper? Buying take-out, or making food at home? Generally speaking, of course, take-out is going to cost you more on average than sensible meal prep. But that answer is easy to challenge, isn’t it? If you do particularly valuable work, it could conceivably cost you more in total to spend time cooking than just ordering take-out. Or, if we essentialize this retort, time and convenience are values in and of themselves.
“Showing” takes more words than “telling,” and if an author has to pay for every word, they’d do so much more asserting than suggesting. But if instead you taxed an author every time they introduced a new story element, it’s more likely they’d get really good at suggestion and justification. And there already is a tax on new elements: disbelief. A story filled with impossible contrivance and deus ex machina will disengage readers.
Still, would you rather buy a $200 bike, or a $2 000 motorcycle? One of them is cheaper, sure, but one is cooler. Saying “A man walked out of his house,” is cheap in terms of disbelief, and “A man leapt off the roof and flew,” is very expensive, yet pretty cool.
This doesn’t have much to do with sensory reification at first blush, but like most principles, this one is more general. Still, as touched on in the rhetorical appeal section, it’s easier to believe something clearly imaged than something abstract. Showing a characters facial expression, I think, costs less in suspension of disbelief than telling their mental state. A microscopic difference, but it’s larger if you give all the reasons for them to feel that way, or limn it vivid in raw detail.
Or consider the difference in saying “they fought” versus giving a blow by blow. The advantage in giving a justification down to the individual exchange of fists is that when you say who won, we believe you. It feels less like things happening for the sake of plot, and more like of course they’d play out that way.
This is how “show, don’t tell” is commonly framed. If you say what a character is feeling, we just have to take your word for it. If you give us evidence, we trust it more.
This is perhaps the simplest lens to break down into actionable advice. Sensory reification is necessary to justify things we can’t take for granted. We don’t need you to demonstrate in full detail that Janice can walk down the street. But if you say she can fly, it’s that much more important to talk about force and wind, how cities look from above. Or give her a jetpack. When a knight fights a peasant, we need less detail if the knight wins than if the peasant does.
This talk of trust and what makes sense leads naturally to the familiar talk of worlds having rules, which makes the next section essentially an extension of this one.
The Skillful Play
Is more fun to play an arena shooter as usual, or to play where the other team has aim bots? It’s not fair. In a less moralistic sense, it doesn’t take as much skill to win with an aimbot, and playing against it isn’t as fun nor inspires respect.
Is it easier to assert or to suggest? Easily answered, as reverse-engineering intuitive reasoning takes time and a deft touch. I’ve sometimes wondered about author commissions, and this intuitive feeling I sometimes have that it’s a strange thing. Visual art, obviously, takes skill to do well, but writing? It feels like something anyone can do. I know it’s not, that it’s not just putting down words. But isn’t it?
The intuition I stumbled across that made it click feels somewhat analogous to a certain puzzle archetype often found as a dungeon obstacle or a hacking minigame. A grid of buttons, some of them lit and some not. Pushing a button turns it on or off, but it flips the four buttons orthogonal to it. The goal is to get all the buttons to light up (or turn off). The difficulty comes from the fact that every button press affects other buttons and it can quickly create a mess that erases what progress you try to make. There’s probably an algorithm for it; I never figured it out.
Words and sentences create implications, and it all compounds. Arranging those implications so that the right experience plays out in mind, simulates a world, creates something recognizably true to life, that’s something I can believe is comparable to arranging lines so that they look like something.
But I’m getting way off track. You’ll believe me if I just say writing takes skill. How does one demonstrate mastery of a skill? In games, it’s often done by way of challenges. Get a high score, a lowest time. Beat Super Mario Odyssey without jumping, complete Hollow Knight without getting hit.
How about writing a story without the letter e? Without using the copula? Without action or plot?
Again, a bit off track. This essay is about “show, don’t tell.”
There’s two parts to the argument here. The first is that sensory reification is a sense a fairer, funner way to write, much in the way I called it frugal. You steadfastly avoid bending or cheating the rules, not only of your world, but also of the meta of how we write stories. The other is that more than fair play, it’s a demonstration of skill, or even a self-imposed challenge. It’s writing that’s difficult and clever, rather than plain and easy.
In other words, sensory reification becomes a kind of author wank.
Not always. Sometimes, it’s necessary, not to show off your rhetoric chops, but to get your point across.
The Asymbolic Clarity
I believe it was Drawing of the Right Side of the Brain that claimed one of the biggest roadblocks to realistic sketching is our brain’s tendency to substitute the reality with a symbol. When we want to draw an eye, we draw a pinched oval with a dot in the middle, but eyes don’t really look anything like that. Even if you were simplifying it to a few lines, which lines you’d pick would depend on the angle; even a relaxed eye viewed dead on has a different shape. But that’s our ideogram for ‘eye’, so that’s what our brain inserts.
You know what I’m about to say. When we ‘tell’, oftentimes, we’re inserting the symbol for what we mean, but the real thing doesn’t come labeled. An interesting quirk to this lens is that even things we might sooner sort into the ‘show’ camp are still symbolic. When we write a character with tears, or a racing pulse, or a smile, how often is it just our first association, a quick substitute for ‘sad’, ‘excited’, ‘happy’?
This sort of a substitution can get you into trouble — you can’t see expressions in a pitch black room, or in the shade on a dark night. When you’re writing from preconceived notions, it’s easy to insert the shorthand without thinking.
(Obviously, this isn’t to suggest never using normal, simple body language. People do smile when happy, after all.)
Furthermore, the informational content of a symbol is limited. ‘Angry’ is one word, but there’s anger at losing a video game, and there’s anger at being attacked. To use the same word is to erase the nuances, and nuance, I think, is a key part of the spirit of “show, don’t tell.” Interesting stories tend to have nuance, and boring stories tend to not, so we reach for nuance additives.
Two paradoxical ways of describing reification-as-clarity is that it’s expanding your writing to reduce it, and reducing your writing to magnify your subject matter.
To explain, two ways of measuring a passage is the actual word count, and the number of abstracting assumptions — or if you rather, how long it is, and how long it’d be if you explained it all from first principles. Assertion often abstracts us from our subject matter, cloaks reality in judgment and preconception. Thus, in reducing the symbol to the substance, we say what we really mean. Sometimes, what you really mean is gotten across perfectly well by asserting, and extra reification it adds nothing. Even in that case, perhaps you should mean more than that. “Show don’t tell,” then, becomes a call to add nuance. Picking apart the vague and cliché bits of writing to their bones, is one road to revising them into something that can’t be simply summarized.
So to summarize the asymbolic clarity argument for sensory reification, we give a trio of prescriptions. First, to not mistake symbol for substance. The ideogram of an eye is not an eye, and if you want something accurate, something we can look at in a spark of recognition go “that’s what it really is!”, on an intuitive rather than intellectual level, then you have to throw the symbol out. At an extreme, this becomes defamiliarization. Second, to be cognizant of the nuances occluded by symbols. There are always specifics, things that make this instance different from all the others in the category, and what are they? And if there aren’t, why not? A good story, I contend, can’t be summarized, not without losing something of what makes it so compelling. And third, of course, is that sometimes symbols are never an option. Sometimes there really isn’t a way to assert what you need to convey, and you have to suggest it, and you have to know how to do that.
Why do we care about what’s reified, though?
The Character Focus
Much in the way a strongly tonal chord progression gravitates toward a key center, a vivid passage implicitly grounds itself in a character perspective. ‘Showing’ tends be more personal, intimate. Showing often calls attention to how things feel — and feel to whom?
Sensory reification implies senses, which imply a sensor. Most often, this will be your viewpoint character, the narrator or the close third person protagonist. Someone is experiencing what you’re showing, and viewing sensory reification as an outgrowth of perspective writing like this, a few corollaries follow. Mainly, of course, that you should only reify things that your perspective character cares about. There’s a dissonance in lavishing detail on something that the one supposedly doing the lavishing doesn’t care about. More than that, you should only reify things that we care about. Things that affect the character’s story.
This is, perhaps, some of the most standard advice for “show, don’t tell” articles and the critiques, so perhaps it’s a little odd it’s showing up this late in the essay. But for that reason, I won’t belabor. To reify is to give something emphasis, to implicitly establish its importance. Something can meet every criteria for reification in the previous five sections, but if that’s not what your story is about, well first of all how did you end up in this position, but second of all, no, you shouldn’t devote time to it, damn the repercussions.
But while we’re on the topic of how time is spent…
The Standard of Pacing
Sensory reification is slow. It’s so much faster to just assert what you want to say. In the time it takes you to render the ins and outs of one emotional state, I can rattle off the names of a dozen.
I still don’t know what pacing is. (Long after this post was published, I figured it out.) But I don’t think it’s off-base to suggest that reification has something to do with it. Slow pacing is generally considered a bad thing, and showing slows down the pace, so what’s up with that? Is it just a trade-off with all the other benefits?
As ever, this argument for reification is multifaceted. For starters, there’s a case to be made for balance. Suppose you outlined a story in 12 chapters, and half of those chapters require really detailed reifications of worldbuilding details and character motivations in order for the plot to make sense. The rest are rather thin on necessary details. Should you leave it like that? It could be jarring, for a story to seesaw irregularly between passages of high reification and low reification, as much so as a book whose chapters range from a few pages long to several dozen.
This is an argument for filler, put as plainly as possible. Padding what’s there just to even things out. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll quote myself:
An analogy to visual arts makes it clear: if you sketch a figure and lovingly ink the contours of its face, color in the eyes and blush on the cheek, but do nothing more, it looks a bit odd. Unbalanced: a concentration of detail here, and unrefined sketchiness everywhere else. It looks unfinished, and the typical way to make it look finished is to bring the rest of the piece up to a comparable level of rendering, even if the centerpiece, the point of the painting, is the face.
If you write a story and furnish it with functional and cool details, it’s rare for this to render a complete whole. There will be passages where events proceed straightforwardly enough to be easy to summarize; there will be objects that exist before or without you thinking of some poetic and striking way to describe them. You could rewrite things so that these passages instead offer some unexpected twist or crucial insight; tear your hair out to give every one-off character a soul… and perhaps it’s good advice to avoid situations where you are just contriving detail after detail to merely mimic a fleshed out story — but one must admit, it’s a strenuous ideal. Filler details, practically speaking, are going to crop up. And imaginative negative space isn’t a terrible thing.
This might not just be for padding, either; if you’re writing a mystery and only ever lavish description on the important things, suddenly your writing style might be leaking information about plot direction.
There’s another angle on this, though. When one argues for “show, don’t tell”, and the slow pacing that entails, it can be read as an assertion that stories should be paced this way, that show don’t tell is a demand for your story to adopt the standard of pacing that happens when you reify, much in the way genres have standard tempos and timbre, comic books a standard of artistic rendering.
It’s not purely arbitrary (much as the lack of shading in many animations isn’t arbitrary), but a consequence of constraints. All factors outlined above give a impetus for a story to reify. If these are all good things, it’s more good the more you do it, and riding that incentive gradient, soon it becomes omnipresent, the norm. Perhaps this is partly a lost purpose, or taste setting. There are reasons one may show instead of telling, but nowadays, I think at least part of it just that’s the way it’s done.
Coda
I forgot where I was going with this, if I’m being completely honest. I outlined this essay on a long walk, reasoned out a few of the important lines of argument, and then wrote it all the way through, and now it’s been hours and I literally do not remember what was supposed to go in the conclusion. Probably wasn’t important, then.
What was the point of all of this? I think we’re well beyond proclamations of “showing good”, or “both are good” in writer discourse, and the only real way forward is more nuance, more detail, an account of why this or that works. Better theories, that can’t be reduced to a pithy sentence.
How about reducing it to eight sentences, then? In summary:
Sensory reification is the substitution of sensory detail in order to suggest, represent and justify nonsensory ideas, and its strength lies in seven principles:
- Rhetorical Appeal: It contributes to the quality of prose through its novelty and specificity.
- Interpretative Engagement: It immerses intuition and pattern-matching in the process of modeling and comprehending the fictional world
- Frugality of Disbelief: It justifies events, grounding them in more than supposition, attaining plausibility through details.
- Skillful Play: It demonstrates an author’s skill, impressing readers intellectually and imparting an aesthetic of maturity.
- Asymbolic Clarity: It renders ideas with greater clarity and nuance through accuracy and understanding, rather than tropes and shorthand.
- Character Focus: It pulls us into a character’s perspective by highlighting their experience and interpretation.
- Standard of Pacing: It guides the pace of a story to a consistent and conventional baseline readers have come to expect.
To compress it further? Reify when you need aptness, when you need stimulation, when you need plausibility, when you need artistry, when you need fine distinction, when you need characterization, and when you just need to fill space. But to put it even more concisely? Well, I suppose it’s close enough to say: show, don’t tell.