Show, Don't Tell: The Key to Unlocking Your Depths.

Writing is hard.

Making sense of all the thoughts in your head and putting them down on paper feels like a miracle in and of itself.

Even harder is trying to express the thoughts and feelings that you can’t quite articulate. You feel like Captain Nemo in the famed Nautilus submarine trying to find the lost city of Atlantis. Coming across clues and artifacts but not the actual city.

And then kicking yourself about your failure because well...you’re Captain Nemo.

The evidence is there, the articulation and revelation is not.

That’s what the act of showing and not telling can feel like. And it was something that I struggled with for a long time.

Not just in writing, but in speaking too. Just the other night at a bible study, my brain seemed to freeze mid-sentence as I was trying to explain my understanding of a concept in the book of Romans.

The leader of the group had no problem with my sudden brain glitch and having to abandon the effort. It happens to everyone. And I knew that. But in the moment, I felt like an idiot.

I lost the keys to my inner world and couldn’t open the door so others could see it.

On the flip side, me telling my experience with tithing in the church and a story of another experience I had came out so much easier.

Why was that?

Maybe because I was relaying a concept through the lens of my own experience instead of with the academic clarity of a PhD grad?

I was showing rather than telling.

The Difference Between Showing and Telling

Here’s the simplest way I can put it: Telling states a conclusion. Showing invites someone into the experience.

When you tell, you hand someone the answer: “I doubted God.” “America is broken.” “I felt lost.”

When you show, you let them walk through the door with you.

Instead of “I doubted God,” you might write: It was 2 a.m. and I was standing in my driveway, staring up at stars I couldn’t name. The cold bit through my jacket. I whispered questions into the dark, questions I’d never say out loud in church, and got nothing back but wind and silence.

See the difference? One labels the feeling. The other lets you feel it.

Or take something like cultural division. You could write, “Political arguments are tearing families apart.” True enough. But compare that to this: Thanksgiving dinner, 2020. My uncle’s fork clatters against his plate mid-sentence. My aunt’s jaw tightens. Someone changes the subject to the weather, but the room stays heavy. We all keep chewing, eyes down, pretending the last five minutes didn’t happen.

Which one lands harder?

Showing doesn’t mean you avoid the point. It means you trust the reader, and yourself, to discover the point through the details. The clenched jaw. The clatter of the fork. The cold wind against your face at 2 a.m.

It’s the difference between handing someone a map to Atlantis and letting them dive down with you, artifact by artifact, until the city reveals itself.

And here’s what I’ve learned: when you show instead of tell, something shifts. Not just for the reader, but for you, the writer.

Because showing forces you to sit with the complexity. The nuance. The full weight of what you actually experienced, not just the label you slapped on it afterward.

Why Showing Sets You Free

Here’s what happens when we only tell: we reduce ourselves to labels.

Angry conservative. Doubting believer. Failing parent. Burned-out entrepreneur. Anxious millennial.

The labels aren’t wrong, exactly. But they’re incomplete. They flatten us into categories that are easy to dismiss, easy to judge, easy to misunderstand. They turn the full, messy complexity of a human life into a checkbox on someone else’s mental form.

And here’s the problem: when we live in labels, we can’t actually connect. Because labels don’t let people in. They keep people at arm’s length, sorted into boxes, reduced to conclusions.

Telling confines us. Showing sets us free.

When you show, you honor the whole story. Not just the conclusion you arrived at, but the road you walked to get there. The contradictions. The moments of doubt mixed with clarity. The anger that coexisted with love. The failure that taught you something you couldn’t have learned any other way.

This is how we actually reach each other.

Because when you show the specific, sensory, lived details of your experience, something remarkable happens: people recognize themselves. They think, “Oh. I’ve been there too.” Not because they’ve lived your exact story, but because they’ve felt that cold wind at 2 a.m. They’ve sat at that Thanksgiving table. They’ve clenched their fists and felt the room get too warm.

The details are the bridge. The specifics are what make the unexplainable suddenly explicable.

Even ancient texts understood this. Scripture doesn’t traffic in abstractions. It shows.

It doesn’t tell us “mercy is important.” It shows us a father scanning the horizon for his wayward son, then running, full sprint, robes flying, to embrace him before the boy can even finish his rehearsed apology. Dusty feet. Torn sandals. The smell of pig slop still on his clothes.

It doesn’t tell us “brokenness is universal.” It shows a man hiding in a cave, writing poetry with tears on his face, his voice cracking as he cries out questions into the dark.

It doesn’t tell us “compassion matters.” It shows a conversation at a well in the heat of the day, between two people who weren’t supposed to talk to each other, offering something neither knew they were dying of thirst for.

The showing is the point. Because showing invites us in. It makes space for empathy, for recognition, for the kind of vulnerability that actually connects us.

When you show in your writing, in your conversations, in how you try to explain yourself, you’re not handing people a verdict. You’re inviting them into the room with you. And in that room, real understanding becomes possible.

This matters more than ever right now.

We live in a culture that runs on soundbites and labels. Red or blue. Woke or bigot. Faithful or fallen. The algorithm rewards the hottest take, the sharpest dismissal, the quickest reduction of a human being into a caricature.

But showing fights back against all of that.

When you show the specific, sensory, lived details of your experience, you reclaim your full humanity. You refuse to be flattened. And here’s the beautiful part: when you do that, you give others permission to do the same.

Someone reads about your 2 a.m. driveway moment, whispering questions into the dark, and they think, “Oh. I’m not the only one.” Someone hears about the Thanksgiving dinner where the fork clattered and the room went silent, and they exhale, because they’ve been in that room too.

Showing doesn’t erase division. But it makes connection possible. Because it trades labels for humanity. It trades conclusions for stories. And stories, specific and honest and vulnerable, are how we actually find each other in the noise.

Try It Yourself

So here’s what I want you to do.

Think of something you’ve been trying to articulate lately. A struggle. A doubt. A moment of clarity or confusion. Maybe it’s something you wrote in your journal, or something you’ve been trying to explain to a friend, or a prayer you keep stumbling over.

Now find one sentence where you told instead of showed.

“I felt anxious.”
“I was angry at God.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”

Take that sentence and rewrite it. Show it instead.

What did your body feel like? What did the room look like? What were you doing with your hands? What sounds were around you? Was there a specific moment, a specific image, a specific detail that captures what you were feeling?

Don’t overthink it. Just try.

You might be surprised what surfaces. Because when you stop labeling the feeling and start describing the experience, you often discover something you didn’t know was there. A new angle. A hidden thread. A piece of the story you’d forgotten or overlooked.

And if you want, share it. Drop it in the comments, or try it in a conversation, or bring it into your next prayer. See what happens when you stop telling people what you felt and start showing them where you were.

Because here’s the truth: the lost city isn’t gone.

It’s been there all along, waiting in the details. In the cold wind at 2 a.m. In the clatter of the fork. In the dusty feet of the prodigal son running home.

When we show instead of tell, we don’t just find words. We find freedom. We find connection. We find the image of God reflected back in the specifics of our own lives and the lives of others.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we help someone else find theirs too.

This is exactly why I’m working on a book right now. It’s a blend of Allegory and Christian Living for men caught in survival and performance, men who’ve learned to build their identity around what they produce or achieve. And it’s designed to show them first what real identity, belonging, and home in God actually look like. Then tell them second.

Because healing isn’t something you lecture someone into. It’s something you walk through. It’s something you experience and discover for yourself.

The book is in it’s final stages of editing and prep.

You can check me out on Quilltips (Still a work in progress) for updates!