My workshop keeps writing "show don't tell" on my drafts, so I replace "she was angry" with half a page of clenched jaws and slammed doors. Then the note becomes that the pacing has gone.
It seems like I can be concise or I can show, and I cannot see how to do both.
Accepted Answer
The advice is badly phrased, which is why following it literally makes your prose worse.
It is not a ban on telling. It is a note about where the reader's attention should do the work. Telling is efficient and you want it for anything that is not the point of the scene: transitions, background, time passing.
Showing costs words, so spend them where the emotion matters and the reader needs to arrive at it themselves rather than be informed of it.
A page of clenched jaws for a minor irritation is the same error as summarising the climax in one line. Both are a mismatch between the words spent and the weight of the moment.
If the note keeps coming back, it usually means the important beats are being summarised and the unimportant ones dramatised.
Worth naming the specific failure mode, because it is what you have hit and it has a name.
Replacing an emotion word with a catalogue of physical symptoms is not showing, it is telling in code. Clenched jaw, narrowed eyes and a slammed door are just "angry" written in three lines instead of one, and readers decode them instantly.
Real showing usually comes from what a character chooses to do or notice, not from their face. Someone angry who calmly puts a cup down and leaves the room tells you more than any amount of jaw.
A quick diagnostic: if you could swap the physical detail into any other angry character without changing it, it is generic. Specificity is what stops it reading as a stock gesture.
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