Do You Know The Origins of Frequently Quoted Advice?

Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps.

Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find the silent film industry, and writers deciding between conveying information via dialogue card, or putting it into action. Also popular in turn-of-the-century theatre scene of the early 1900s, where “showing” gave actors to display the emotional responses to scenes in ways the writer could not convey.

Neither origin makes for terrible advice—ten thousand steps a day is good for your health, and show, don’t tell can be solid advice for a prose writer—but it also gives you wiggle room to escape the tyranny of the ideals presented.

Any activity is better than none, when it comes to health, and the health benefits kick in long before you hit a ten thousand step a day goal.

Showing is a worthy goal for a scene, but there’s a time in place to just tell the reader something. Not everything needs to be dramatised, and access to the narrator’s interiority is a trick that prose can deliver that theatre can’t.

Context matters. Goals matter. And oft-quoted advice isn’t always the best solution in every situation, merely the version we’ve inherited over time because they worked out more often than not.