chekhov

Anton Chekhov on Details, Expectations, and "Show, Don't Tell"

Arguments for "show, don't tell" often cite Anton Chekhov's famous statement:

"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

But not only did he not mean "show, don't tell," he didn't actually even say this. The original statement (translated from Russian in Yarmolinsky's "The Unknown Chekhov") was in a letter Chekhov wrote to his brother:

"In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball."

"Show, don't tell" is at best an oversimplification of Chekhov's words and at worst a misread. A better accompanying directive might be "Use details intentionally." This aligns with the idea of Chekhov's gun, which he DID use often when giving advice to writers. He thought every detail should be used with intention.

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

But most stories are stories not because of where you go, but how you get there and what you experience along the way.

So yes, payoff matters. But a story in which EVERYTHING has intent/meaning/payoff just doesn't—well, it doesn't tell the whole story.