Show Don't Tell: When a Story Preaches Unintentionally

It happens in the revision.

You're reading back through a scene you wrote weeks ago and you stop at a line of dialogue that feels a little too on-the-nose, a character observation that reads more like an essay than a thought, a moment where the story pauses and your intention becomes visible underneath it like a watermark.

The story is preaching. And you didn't mean for it to do that.

This is one of the more uncomfortable moments in the writing process, because you have to honestly face your own instincts. The impulse to make sure the reader understands the point is understandable. You care about the truth you're carrying in this story, and you don't want the reader to miss it. But caring too much, holding the message too tightly, has a way of working against itself. The reader feels the grip and pulls back.

The fix is almost always the same: trust the scene to do the work without the explanation. Cut the line that names what the scene is already showing. You know, the famous, "Show, don't tell," command. Let the character feel the thing without narrating why it matters. Return the story to experience and let the meaning live inside the experience rather than beside it.

This is easier to describe than to do. It takes a great deal of authorial restraint that goes against the instinct to make sure the reader gets it. But readers are rather perceptive. They get it. Give them the benefit of the doubt. They get it more fully, in fact, when the story trusts them to see it.

The best message is the one the reader finds without being shown where to look.

Have you ever noticed a story trying too hard to make its point? Did it pull you out of the experience? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Truth in Disguise: the Surprising Power of Fiction

Fiction lies, technically speaking.

I often joke and say I get paid to lie. The characters aren't real. The events didn't happen. The places, in many cases, exist only in the architecture of my imagination. A novel is, by definition, made up.

And yet.

Readers regularly describe fictional experiences in the language of truth. That character understood me. That story changed how I see things. That book told me something real about myself. We don't say those things about things that are simply false. We say them about things that have gotten somewhere true by an unexpected route.

That's the paradox at the heart of fiction, and it's one I find endlessly valuable. A story can be factually invented and emotionally, spiritually, humanly true at the same time. The invented surface carries something real underneath, and what the reader receives is the real thing, not the invention.

This is why I've never felt any tension between writing fiction and caring deeply about truth. The fiction is the vehicle. The truth is the destination. A well-crafted story doesn't lead readers away from reality. It leads them more deeply into it, through a door that would never have opened otherwise.

In this case, disguise isn't deception. It's strategy and grace rolled into one. It's the reason a made-up story can tell you something true about your own life that no amount of straightforward instruction could have ever reached.

Has a work of fiction ever told you something true? Something you recognized as real the moment you encountered it? What was it? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Why Stories Reach Places Sermons Can't

Why did Jesus use parables and tell stories?

He could have delivered doctrine. He could have outlined theology with precision and clarity and left no room for misunderstanding. Instead he told stories about lost coins and prodigal sons and farmers scattering seed. He wrapped truth in narrative and handed it to people who wouldn't have received it any other way.

That wasn't an accident. It was strategy. And it's the oldest and most effective one we have.

Stories reach places that direct instruction cannot. They slip past the defenses we carry. The skepticism, the self-protection, the quiet resistance we bring when we feel like anything is trying to change us. We let a story in because we think we're just being entertained. By the time we realize it's doing something more, it's already done it.

I've seen this happen in readers. A woman who picked up one of my novels during a painful season and found, in a fictional character's struggle, the language for something she hadn't been able to name in her own life. A reader who said a particular scene spoke to him in a way that years of sermons hadn't touched.

I don't say that to diminish sermons. Preaching is also a key way to convey those hard-hitting truths. But story does something different. It creates an experience rather than delivering a message, and experience changes people in ways that information alone rarely does.

That's why I write fiction. Contrary to what some might think, fiction isn't a replacement for truth. It's stories pointing readers toward it, leading them through it, and wrapped in it.

The story is the sermon the heart is often most willing to hear.

When has a story (a book, a film, a song) reached you in a place that nothing else could? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.