3 Steps to “Show, Don’t Tell” How You Feel in Your Writing

Have you noticed some conflicting writing advice?

This came up while I was teaching Tame Your Beast of a Book in 4 Weeks. Say that you’ve got a scene in your book where something happens that makes you feel angry. Imagine you’re writing a scene with a bully who punches you in the gut (literally or metaphorically).

And because of that anger, you take some action. You might hit back, get your buddies together to plan revenge, blame yourself, etc. For that action to make sense, your readers need to feel what that was like for you so they understand what comes next. Great, well how do you do that?

Here’s the first piece of writing advice, “Don’t tell me what happened. Show me.”

The old show, don’t tell advice.

You edit the scene to avoid commentary and keep it to the play-by-play like a journalist or anthropologist.

But then, you get the second piece of writing advice, “Don’t just show me what happens, show me what you think and feel.”

Without just telling you?

It’s enough to make you want to throw your laptop at the wall, but you think the better of it and throw a pencil instead.

Okay, back to your writing project.

The key is to balance this writing advice.

If you want the reader to understand why events in your book matter and how they keep the plot moving, here are three things to do:

1. Show your readers feel how you felt before the gut-punch in addition to setting up the scene
2. Show the action that takes place
3. Show how you feel afterward, how you have changed inside that leads to the next thing you do

In practice, here’s an example of a scene where you get fired. That experience will land differently if you entered the office feeling confident and excited about a new project, versus if you already knew you were on thin ice and struggling. That’s the job of #1.

Then, let the conversation unfold with #2. Include dialogue from yourself and the boss delivering the news, also paying attention to tone and body language to convey your emotional state and what your boss’s likely is (but don’t read their mind. Only guess or imagine what they might be thinking. Your thoughts are the ones the reader can hear).

For the scene to drive your narrative forward, end with #3 and let us see what action you take based on your emotional state with the news. This action propels your plot forward to answer the question, “what happened next?” which your reader wants to know. That also tells the reader what the action in #2 means, or why it matters. It matters because of what you do next.

Obviously, this is important writing help for memoir writers, but it also applies to anyone writing stories in your book.

If you have a great story but the point isn’t coming through on the page, see which one of these things is missing and show it to the reader.

Did you rewrite something based on this advice? Comment with your before and after. I’d love to see it.

Want more great writing tips? Take my FREE Quiz to Discover Your #1 Bestselling Author Personality.