I find it a little weird to be the one writing this, as I have long harbored a hatred of infodumps. So, why am I writing in defense of tell, don’t show?

Because done well, it makes the story much richer, makes it easy to foreshadow, and makes moving scenes along far faster with smoother transitions.

Done poorly, of course, it gets me to throw my phone across the room, and only after the device has taken flight do I remember it’s not as resilient as a book… but that’s why it has an otterbox protector. That is not the fault of the tool, only its application.

The reason young authors get told “Show, don’t tell” is not because you should never tell, it’s because young authors tend to do too much telling and not enough showing. Think about a 5 year old boy telling you a story as he’s carrying around his toy fireman and an axe.

“This one is a cop, and he fights bad guys. With an axe. He’s axe cop!” The boy hands you a recorder. “His best friend is flute cop!”

(Axe Cop was a real webcomic, made up by a 5-year old kid, and drawn by his much older brother. It was absolutely as nonsensical, non-sequitur, and action-filled as you’d expect, with random dinosaurs and zombies. It was also almost all narrative summary and bits of dialogue.)

The other end of the spectrum is called Heinleining – when you slip the information in so smoothly that most people don’t even realize there was any narrative summary at all. For one famous example:

“As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door irised shut behind him I killed him.”

Many a beginning author is prone to start the story with a prologue about the world and the geopolitics of the corporations and the nations, leading to shadow governments and societies springing up, because they wanted us to understand the world before we started the story… Or they would have spent several paragraphs explaining what the Kenya Beanstalk is, and the station at Lagrange Point L5 (And possibly what Lagrange points are).

A beginning writer who’s had that beaten out of him via repetitions of “show, don’t tell!” would spend paragraphs describing the ride down the Kenya Beanstalk in a capsule, and a flashback describing Ell-Five, along with Friday looking at her reflection in the window of the capsule and giving us a physical description of the protagonist.

Heinlein instead gives us an immediate sense of the strange (the Kenya Beanstalk) the familiar (Customs, Health, and Immigration) and the urgency of a thriller. (As I left…he was right on my heels. As the door irised shut behind him, I killed him.)

Then dives straight into a paragraph of narrative summary disguised as opinion.

“I have never liked riding the Beanstalk. My distaste was full-blown even before the disaster to the Quito Skyhook. A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic. But the only other way to reach Ell-Five takes too long and costs too much; my orders and expense account did not cover it.”

Yep, that’s an infodump, on paragraph 2, Bob Heinlein style. The first sentence isn’t just opinion, it also tells you the protagonist travels a lot. The second doesn’t just explain what a Beanstalk is to the reader, it also hits you with the foreshadowing of the Quito Skyhook disaster which will turn out to be really relevant to the plot, later. The third tells you an alternate method of travel (relevant later), and that the protagonist is under orders with an expense account. Every single sentence is doing at least two things.

I wish I was that good.

Reading Friday carefully, line by line, phrase by phrase, Heinlein has a lot of narrative summary in there… but never enough to stop the flow of the action, or the momentum of the story. When he sticks 3-4 lines in, it’s always at a spot where the protagonist would have mentally or physically paused, taking stock of the situation, and figured out their next step. The information given is what they would have thought about as they took stock – maybe slightly more, but never far outside the boundaries, nor something so blatant that it breaks the fourth wall and is clearly addressing Dear Reader.

And that’s the critical thing.

Telling, instead of showing, gives us information quickly enough we can build the world in our heads… but shouldn’t be so much information that it changes the tension or pacing.

It also lets us quickly transition from one plot-and-character relevant scene to the next.

When I was younger, there was a running joke about how there were no bathrooms on starships, because you never saw the crew of star trek leaving to do the necessary, or coming back from it, much less doing bodily functions.

This resulted in a spate of juvenile stories and extra scenes slapped into stories about starship crewmembers on the loo, or stuck on a starship bridge with no loo nearby, or messing themselves because they couldn’t leave their station. That was funny the first time. Like all shock humour dependent on the incongruity between what you expect and what you get, when it becomes de rigueur, there’s no incongruity, and there’s no humour.

The real reason there were no scenes about going to the bathroom, or working out at the gym, or vacuuming the carpets, or the paperwork, was because it wouldn’t move the plot forward. And everything you do, especially in a short story, MUST carry the plot forward. (A television episode is a short story. Movies are usually novellas; faithful adaptations of books lend to very long, multi-part movies that still cut a lot, or television miniseries.)

The transporter was created because if there wasn’t a way to instantaneously get the crew to the planet, then the vast majority of the episode’s time would be eaten up by going down and coming up, and leave very little for the story at the surface. It’s the visual shorthand of narrative summary: “They left the ship, and went to GonnaKillYouAll XIII. Upon arrival at the surface, they saw…”

The magic of narrative summary is that we can change our location and time in less than a sentence’s length of words. Did it take three hours of bad traffic to get across the city? “Three hours later, Hero clawed free of City’s traffic jams and raced up the stairs to Witness In Peril’s apartment.” (Note we didn’t even stop to describe where he parked.)

We can cover more time and distance than that, and change viewpoints as well.

“Ten thousand years later and half a galaxy away, in the office of the stellar cartography for the Solarian Empire, a junior staffer named Drizzt De’Urban frowned at the data on his holoscreen. “Why was there a star-shattering kaboom?”

If we have two protagonists, we can neatly change viewpoint at establish location and time with a single line.

“After she got home from covering swing shift, Katie was standing in her kitchen having ditched her scrubs for her most comfy set of pajamas. She was making her favourite chocolate chip cookie dough to go with a glass of wine and a movie for bedtime, when…”

However, there are some ways to really mess this up. Here are two:

One is to drag it out, and ruin the pacing within the chapter. Yes, chapters have internal pacing.

Each chapter in a novel is a mini-story of its own, with a rising and falling action, an entry point and an exit point, a hook to get you to pick it up and keep reading, action or resolution to move plot and character arc forward, worldbuilding to flesh out story-in-head, and a twist to make you want to turn to the next chapter to answer a question that naturally came up, or find out the reason for what happened in the chapter, or to see how a character will react when they find out the news you learned but they haven’t yet.

The second is to treat a chapter like it’s a book report, and either open with a summary of what’s going to happen in the chapter, and/or close it with a summary of what happened in the chapter. Like the following:

“It was supposed to be a routine mission to fly supplies via the north Africa route to the allies fighting Rommel. They didn’t expect to encounter djinn, or for the Navigator, Smith, to be killed by the fireball it cast and for the gunners, Jones and Carruthers, to die in the crash. Lieutenant DeWitt would later record it as the worst day of his life, but he wouldn’t know for another six months afterward that he wasn’t crazy, until the OSS recruited him to fight the shadow war.

Dawn rose bright and bloody, as Lieutenant DeWitt made sure all his gear was ready for the flight. He entered the flight planning tent to get coffee, and found Smith, his navigator, bent over a table full of maps. “Have you got the route calculated yet, Smith?”

“Yes sir, I just am doing a slight diversion before we get to the supplies to our boys behind Rommel’s lines to see if we can spot the ruined city again.” Smith frowned. “I swear the thing either moves on us, or hides.”

“Yes, well, quite. If you want to play peek-a-boo with ancient stones, just make sure we’re not wasting too much fuel or time. Headquarters has no sense of humour about us coming up short of petrol before the bunker ship can get through the blockade.”

“It actually works perfectly, sir, because we’ll be dodging a patrol they’ve sent out. See, here…”

…Yeah, no. Stop right there.

As a reader, we are not only reading info we got told in summary now being introduced as if it were the first time, but also knowing that Smith is going to be killed specifically by a djinn’s fireball.

This scene is going to feel like it’s dragging, when it didn’t have to. The reader is waiting for the djinn, the fireball, and the crash.

If you started in the air, then maybe the reader wouldn’t have time to get bored. But if you’re writing at novel pace, the reader, having been promised djinns and airplane crashes, is going to get really, really impatient at the flight planning, character introductions, loading the plane, and any normal flight time.

And if that ruined city should prove to be aliens, and the djinn was actually an AI? Then you’re gonna have to work REALLY HARD to keep them from feeling cheated because they were promised an alt-WWII with magic up front, and got science fiction instead. (And you’ll still lose readers anyway)

So, there you go. Narrative summary, or tell, don’t show. Like fire, a very useful tool, and an absolute disaster when it runs away on you. Use it carefully, but please, use it!