emphasis within italics

[SimonDoom]

My two cents' worth: virtually all writing is "telling" something, but it can also be showing a different thing. When I tell the reader that my heart is pounding and I'm stammering, I am showing them something about my state of mind. When a narrator spends ten minutes telling us about their preferred brand names, the author is probably showing us that they're shallow and materialistic. And so on.

I completely agree with that, and I don't want to sound like I endorse a 100% either/or position. Writing is too subtle for that. Plus, there's nothing wrong to mix some telling with the showing. Sometimes telling is useful to get through passages you don't want to spend as much time describing, or that aren't as important. In passages that mix telling and showing, it can be hard to know what's what.

There's also an important difference between the interior dialogue of a character in which the character is telling things, and a narrator telling things. In the real life, when people talk, they often tell rather than show. Even if the character is shown to be "telling" in the interior dialogue, that may be justified by the character's nature, or it may explain something about the character's personality or motives. There's a difference between what we want narrators to say and what we want characters to say, at least most of the time, with significant exceptions.

 

[Panty Wrangler]

I love all the examples you guys are showing but I think for me I’m driving at a simpler point

Telling:

Sarah had big breasts for a woman her size​

Showing (from Sarah’s perspective)

Sarah looked at her reflection in the mirror, a scowl on her face. She’d always felt her breasts were a bit too large for her frame, and none of her clothes fit quite right.​

Showing (Jim’s perspective)

Jim watched his wife as she studied herself in the mirror. “Damn, she’s hot!” He thought. To him she was as beautiful now as the day they’d met. He loved every curve of her body, but especially her fantastic breasts.​

The first is just kind of lame. The second we get Sarah’s perspective on herself, but with the third we get Jim’s reaction to seeing Sarah, which tells us not only about her but also about his response to her. It didn’t need internal dialog. That’s not my point, I’m just using internal dialog to get into his head and share his perspective with the reader. There must be a thousand other ways to do the same thing, that’s just one.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I completely agree with that, and I don't want to sound like I endorse a 100% either/or position. Writing is too subtle for that. Plus, there's nothing wrong to mix some telling with the showing. Sometimes telling is useful to get through passages you don't want to spend as much time describing, or that aren't as important. In passages that mix telling and showing, it can be hard to know what's what.

There's also an important difference between the interior dialogue of a character in which the character is telling things, and a narrator telling things. In the real life, when people talk, they often tell rather than show. Even if the character is shown to be "telling" in the interior dialogue, that may be justified by the character's nature, or it may explain something about the character's personality or motives. There's a difference between what we want narrators to say and what we want characters to say, at least most of the time, with significant exceptions.

I agree 100% with this. As a rule of thumb, I think "showing" becomes more important for scenes that carry more emotional weight, where it's important to draw the reader into the character's experience. But even there, it's not cut and dried.

At the end of a novel-length story about a relationship between two people, I wrote their parting scene like this:

My flight left from a different gate to hers, and half an hour before. We scouted the two gates together, and then stayed together at mine until the last possible moment, and hugged one another goodbye. It hurt. like. fuck.

In isolation, that reads a bit weak. But by that point I've had 100k words to prepare the reader for that moment and put them in the narrator's head. If I've done my job right, they should know her well enough for that brief patch of "telling" to evoke her feelings. It seemed like the right choice not to try more detailed "show" description there, even though I've used that extensively in the story leading up to it.
I think the best "Show, don't tell" is useful advice

I love all the examples you guys are showing but I think for me I’m driving at a simpler point

Telling:

Sarah had big breasts for a woman her size​

Showing (from Sarah’s perspective)

Sarah looked at her reflection in the mirror, a scowl on her face. She’d always felt her breasts were a bit too large for her frame, and none of her clothes fit quite right.​

Showing (Jim’s perspective)

Jim watched his wife as she studied herself in the mirror. “Damn, she’s hot!” He thought. To him she was as beautiful now as the day they’d met. He loved every curve of her body, but especially her fantastic breasts.​

Hmm. I would think of all three of these as different types of "telling". Contrast:

Sarah avoided jogging. She'd never found a sports bra that could stop the bouncing from hurting, let alone deflect the unwelcome attention it drew.​

Sarah flicked through a brochure on breast reduction surgery. It was expensive, but she'd already spent thousands on lingerie, most of it soon returned.​

The other guys were going to a strip show for Dan's bucks' night party. But Jim declined the invitation: "I don't need strippers when I've got Sarah."​

Those, IMHO, are ways of showing something similar to what your examples are telling. Your #1 explicitly says Sarah has big breasts, #2 says she's unhappy with their size, #3 says that Jim finds Sarah's body attractive. My "show" versions don't say those things outright, but they are implied by what is said. Not perfect parallels, but hopefully close enough to illustrate the difference.

(Not saying that the "show" examples are a better way to provide that information; it depends on the story.)

 

[jsmiam]

@OP, Some conventions are old and outdated (many cultures object to certain foods because refrigeration didn’t exist in the old days, so it’s a tradition no longer valid for health reasons), and some aren’t. I’ll stop there. You like a certain style and that’s fine.

Like the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sues big tobacco because it affected his appearance, rather than having any concerns over health, I’ll propose a second thing to ponder. There is most definitely a small but vocal set of readers who serve as the grammar police, who “4-bomb” stories for rules violations, keeping in mind a 4 brings down (less extremely than a 1-bomb) any score higher than 4.0. (I know them well from my tendency to overuse commas and other violations). I suspect that you are already getting a few 4-votes that might otherwise have been 5 for, in their view, non-compliance. Just a thought.