You already know the rule. Every writing teacher, every craft book, every workshop you’ve ever sat in has said it: show, don’t tell. And if you’ve been working on your writing for any length of time, you’ve probably internalized it. You’ve cut the adverbs. You’ve replaced “she was nervous” with a physical action. You’ve learned to put the camera on the scene instead of summarizing it from above.
That’s real progress. And it’s not the whole picture.
Because here’s what most writers don’t hear until much later: showing is the foundation, not the ceiling. The writers whose books get finished, passed around, and published aren’t just showing. They’re doing five things — and balancing all of them is what makes the difference between a scene that’s technically correct and one that a reader can’t put down.
The Five Modes
A novelist friend of mine — Dan Pope, author of Housebreaking and In the Cherry Tree — breaks all prose down into five modes. I’ve found it one of the most useful frameworks I know for diagnosing what’s working in a scene and what isn’t.
The five modes are:
- Action
- Description
- Dialogue
- State of mind
- Exposition
The first three (and sometimes the fourth) are showing. The fifth — exposition, the setup, the bookkeeping, the telling — is, yes, telling. And here’s the thing that surprises most writers: you want roughly 20% of each. All five. Including the last one.
Early on, I push writers hard toward the first three — action, description, dialogue. These are the visual, dramatic, concrete elements of a scene. They’re what most writers are missing when they come to me. They’re writing in summary, hovering above the scene instead of being inside it. They’re telling me what happened instead of showing me what it looked like. And so my job, for a while, is to pull them down into the physical reality of the scene: strong verbs, observable actions, bodies in space, one beat at a time.
That work is essential. It’s the foundation. But once it’s there, something shifts — and writers who don’t know about the other two modes get stuck.
What You’ve Earned
Here’s how I explained it recently to a writer I’ve been working with for several months. He was writing a tense, action-heavy scene — a lot of moving pieces, high stakes, bodies in motion. The concrete work was strong. I could see the scene. Bodies were moving. The physical reality was on the page.
And something was still missing.
What was missing was him. The point-of-view character was present in the scene but absent from it at the same time — I could see what he saw, but I couldn’t feel what he knew, what he expected, what the situation meant to him from the inside. The interiority — state of mind, mode four — had been so thoroughly trained out of him that he wasn’t using it even when he’d earned the right to.
That’s the flip side of the showing problem. Early on, writers overuse state of mind and exposition because the concrete work isn’t there. They’re telling because they haven’t learned to show. But once you’ve cracked the showing, the balance shifts. Now that you’ve built a solid physical scene, you’ve created the permission — and the need — to bring in what the character is thinking, feeling, and understanding that the reader can’t see from the outside.
A little goes a long way. I’m not talking about long passages of reflection or interior monologue. I’m talking about a sentence. A word. The character recognized that this was how it was supposed to go. The character knew they were outnumbered and did the math. That kind of interiority — brief, earned, grounded in the physical scene around it — is what transforms a competent scene into one that makes a reader feel like they’re inside a person, not just watching one.
The Telling You’re Allowed to Do
Exposition gets a bad reputation because writers abuse it early. It becomes a crutch — a way of avoiding the hard work of showing. And so the correction is to strip it out, to push toward action and dialogue, to make the scene do the work.
But exposition isn’t the enemy. It’s a tool you reach for at the right moment. Once the scene is physically coherent, once the reader is grounded in where everyone is and what they’re doing, there’s room to summarize. There’s room to tell me what the character knows that I don’t. There’s room to bridge between beats without putting every step on the page.
The key is sequence. Exposition works when it follows showing — when the concrete reality is already established and the telling adds a layer on top of it rather than substituting for it. When you reverse that order, when you tell first and show second or not at all, readers disengage. But when you earn the telling with enough showing, it lands cleanly and moves the story forward.
Think of it this way. Imagine a scene where a character does something physically precise and technically demanding — something that requires real skill and awareness. You show the physical actions in detail, one beat at a time. Then, after those beats have landed, you step back for one sentence and tell me what it cost him, or what he noticed that no one else would have, or what he understood about the situation that the reader couldn’t see from the outside.
That sentence — the telling one — hits completely differently than it would have without the showing. It lands because it’s earned.
What Balance Actually Looks Like
The goal isn’t to use each mode exactly 20% of the time — writing isn’t math. The goal is to notice when you’re leaning too hard on any one of them.
Most writers I work with start too heavy in exposition and state of mind. They’re summarizing, explaining, telling. The correction is to push toward action, description, and dialogue until the scene is physically alive.
But some writers — the ones who’ve really taken the showing lesson to heart — end up too far in the other direction. Every sentence is action. Every beat is physical. And the scene starts to feel like a police report: accurate, clear, and completely lacking an interior life.
The fix isn’t to go back to telling. It’s to recognize that you’ve done enough showing to earn a little telling. You’ve put in the concrete work. The reader is grounded. The scene is alive. Now let me inside the character’s head for a moment. Give me one sentence of what they know, or think, or understand that I can’t see from the outside.
That’s when a scene stops being something a reader watches and becomes something a reader lives.
If you want help figuring out where your own scenes are out of balance — too much telling, not enough showing, or the other way around — you can book a short consult here. That’s exactly the kind of thing I look at when I read pages.
