Mastering the Art of Show vs. Tell in Fiction Writing
Most fiction writers have heard the advice to "show, don't tell." While it’s true that showing is a superior method for crafting vivid descriptions, the concept goes far deeper than that. Understanding the why and how behind show vs. tell can elevate your storytelling to an entirely new level, creating a more immersive experience for your readers.
Let’s dive into the neuroscience of emotional connection, explore why showing matters, and break down actionable techniques for infusing your fiction with sensory depth.
The Neuroscience Behind Emotional Connection
To understand why showing is so powerful, let’s look at how our brains process information and emotions. When we’re presented with raw facts, like “Bob was sad,” our brains might generate a vague image or feeling, but it’s fleeting and shallow. Contrast that with a vivid five-sense description: “Tears rolled down Bob’s cheeks, stinging the raw cut on his face as his shoulders shook with each sob.” This detail activates sensory circuits in the brain, enriching the experience and deepening the emotional connection.
James Cameron’s Titanic offers a perfect example. Before the movie, many knew the historical facts about the ship’s tragic sinking. But the film’s immersive storytelling—the visuals, sounds, and emotional narratives—put viewers in the shoes of its characters, transforming detached knowledge into an unforgettable emotional experience. Fiction thrives on this ability to make readers feel rather than just know.
Why Showing Matters in Fiction
Fiction readers come to stories seeking emotion, whether it’s joy, sorrow, fear, or triumph. The key to eliciting these emotions lies in creating a five-sensory experience that pulls readers into the scene. Encyclopedias, filled with hard facts, rarely evoke tears or laughter. In contrast, books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the world by immersing readers in the harsh realities of slavery, fostering empathy and sparking social change.
In writing, simply stating that a character is “sad” or “happy” often falls flat. Readers crave details that help them experience the character’s emotions—details that allow them to feel the dry grass scratching at their ankles, smell the coming rain, or hear the tremor in their voice.
How to Show vs. Tell: Practical Techniques
1. Engage the Five Senses
For every scene, ask yourself how you can incorporate sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste to ground readers in the moment. For instance, instead of saying, “Jimmy was bullied,” describe the scene:
“Jimmy sat on the front lawn, the dry grass scratching his bare ankles. Above, black clouds roiled as the metallic taste of fear lingered in his mouth. Tears stung the fresh cut on his cheek, a cruel reminder of the bully’s metal ring.”
This passage doesn’t just tell readers what happened; it immerses them in Jimmy’s experience.
2. Create Specific Visuals
Avoid generic descriptions. Instead of writing, “She walked down the street,” paint a more vivid picture:
“She shuffled down the cracked pavement, her worn sneakers scuffing the ground. The scent of freshly baked bread wafted from the corner bakery, mingling with the distant hum of traffic.”
3. Focus on Small, Relatable Details
Sometimes, less is more. A single, well-chosen detail can speak volumes. For example, describing a character biting into a lemon—its tartness curling their tongue and the juice stinging a cut—can evoke an immediate, visceral reaction because it taps into universal sensory memories.
Common Misconceptions About Emotion in Writing
Writers often equate emotion with grand gestures, such as a character sobbing uncontrollably or laughing hysterically. While these moments have their place, emotion also resides in subtler, quieter experiences. Consider the simple act of biting into a lemon. While it’s not overtly dramatic, the sensory detail brings a relatable emotional layer to the writing.
Similarly, every line in your story doesn’t need to evoke tears or laughter. Instead, aim to weave sensory experiences throughout your narrative to create a continuous emotional undercurrent that keeps readers engaged.
Conclusion: The Power of Showing in Fiction
Mastering the balance of show vs. tell is essential for fiction authors who want to create memorable stories that resonate emotionally with readers. By engaging the five senses, crafting specific visuals, and grounding scenes in relatable details, you can transform your writing into an immersive experience.
Remember, readers turn to fiction not just to learn facts but to feel. Whether it’s the despair of heartbreak, the thrill of adventure, or the quiet joy of a sunset, your goal as a writer is to harness the power of sensory storytelling to bring your narrative to life. So, the next time you sit down to write, ask yourself: How can I help my readers experience this?
In doing so, you’ll not only show rather than tell—you’ll create stories that linger in their minds long after the final page.
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Transcript
Most people think that showing versus telling is just a better way to write a description, and that's true, but it's so much deeper than that.
Today we're going to talk about what it is, why it's important, and how to do it. Stay tuned. I'm going to give you just a little bit of a neuroscience lesson.
I promise it will not be clunky, but here is the bottom line. So the question is, how do we go from knowing something as a conscious fact to actually feeling emotions about it? This is one of the reasons that fiction is so important, and it's been used to create emotion in people for centuries. I can attest to this specifically through the film Titanic.
I remember growing up in grade school and reading about this ship, this cruise liner called the Titanic, that sank way before I was born, and I didn't really connect that emotionally with it. I remember reading about it and them saying it was this huge tragedy, a lot of people died, and I probably even thought, oh yeah, that's sad that a lot of people died there, but that was it. I didn't have a very emotional connection to it.
Then the James Cameron film came out, and yes, there was the romance of it all. There was the DiCaprio of it all. I was like 14 when it came out, so I was one of those DiCaprio-crazed teenage girls and all of that, but more importantly, that film put people in the experience of what it would have been like to be on the Titanic, and it did that so effectively that it became one of the most successful films of all time.
Most people who watched that film, at least the first time, left in tears, and this is what is great about fiction, is that it gives people the experience of something rather than just the facts. You notice how things like encyclopedias never make the bestseller list? It's because they don't create emotion. They're just giving you straight, hard facts, nothing else behind it, and if you look back through the years, things like Uncle Tom's Cabin was used to do this, to put people in the experience of what it would be like to be a slave and to create compassion for these people so that they could change the world, what was going on.
Back to the neuroscience of it, the fact of the matter is when we have a five-sense experience, what happens is that the information that is gathered and recorded by our five senses enrich the circuits of our brain around the fact that we already know, and the byproduct of that is emotion. All right, so let's say that you just tell me something about one of your characters. Bob was sad.
Well, that's just a fact that I know. I'm not going to be connecting to it, at least not very deeply. Now, when I said Bob was sad, you may have noticed that something of a picture appeared in your mind.
Our brains will do that. They will actually fill in images for us, and so you probably had a little bit of something there, but it was very small. It wasn't very specific, and it was just kind of there and gone, almost like the shadow of an image, okay? And that shows you that your brain is trying to give you an emotional experience, but it's not able to do it because you don't have much that's coming from the five senses.
You only have what I have told you, okay? This is the telling we're always saying that you shouldn't do when you are writing your story. Telling is just not effective at creating emotion. Now, this is another point that's important to make.
We assume that emotion is always big emotion, something that makes us cry, something that makes us laugh out loud, something that makes us really scared. Of course, that's all emotion, but you have to understand that when we have a five-sensory experience of any kind, what it does is it becomes familiar to us. So we often hear the example of biting into a lemon, right? Somebody will say, okay, imagine you're biting into a lemon.
Imagine you put it on your tongue. Imagine that tartness, that sourness. Imagine how it sort of makes your tongue curl, and pretty soon everyone's salivating, right? And that's because we've all bitten into a lemon before.
We all know what that is. We know what a lemon tastes like. So we can identify with that experience, and what's happening is it's bringing that experience from memory to the forefront again, all right? And that is what creates emotion.
So we don't think of the experience of biting into a lemon or even thinking about biting into a lemon as an emotional experience, but it actually is. Anytime we have an experience that involves the five senses, that is creating a level of emotion for us. So now I want you to think about that and really apply it to your writing.
If you want to create emotion with every single sentence that you write, every single description that you put into your story, you have to immerse the reader in a five senses experience. Now, don't get me wrong, you don't have to hit every single one of the five senses with every single line. Obviously, that would be a lot, it would be clunky, but you probably, anytime you describe something, need to hit at least one of them.
I like to tell the people, the other authors in my critique group, help me visualize this. If you're just telling me he was walking down the street, I can't visualize what that looks like because it could be anything. Everybody walks differently.
What is he doing? What does his posture look like? What does his body look like? What is he wearing? How is he holding his shoulders? Give me a five sensory experience. Help me visualize it, which yes, that is only the element, but when I say visualize, I really mean all of the five senses. Help me experience this.
That is really how we are going to show rather than tell. Showing isn't just about the visual, it's about the five sensory experience. Let's use an example with this.
I just literally came up with this about five minutes ago. Let's say that you're writing a scene where a young boy, school age, is walking home from school. He gets bullied and then he just goes home.
You are trying to drum up emotions in the reader of compassion for this boy, of feeling sad for him, of empathy, just wanting to give him a hug. You want to really make this reader feel bad for this boy. This first line that I've written is how to tell us what happened.
It's very simple. It doesn't give us a five sensory experience. I simply wrote, Jimmy was bullied.
When he gets home, he sits on his front lawn and cries. I think you can all see that that is not really showing us much. I mean, it's a simple, straightforward, very conscious knowing of what happened.
Like I said before, maybe your brain did come up with some very vague picture of what that might look like because your will do that. But now I'm going to put in something else that I wrote that's going to be a lot more of the showing. I want you to specifically pay attention to the five sense experience that I put in here.
Jimmy sat on the front lawn of his house, the dry grass scratching at his bare ankles. He pulled his knees into his chest and hung his head. Above, black clouds roiled and the smell of wet dirt, a sign of coming rain hung in the air.
Tears rolled down over his cheeks, stinging the gaping cut the bully's metal ring had left on his cheek. Jimmy's shoulder shook with his sobs. Now, could you make this paragraph better? I have no doubt that you could.
But the point I'm trying to make here is that you can see all of the five senses that I've brought in. The scratching of the grass against his ankles. We're seeing what he's doing.
He's pulling his knees into his chest. He's wracked with sobs. We see his shoulders shaking.
The smell of wet dirt that brings in smell. The tears rolling down over his cheeks. It actually makes a big difference to say that somebody cried versus describing what that crying actually looks like on them.
Two completely different things. About the only thing I didn't pull in here was taste. I could pull that in if I wanted to, but again, you don't need every single one of the five senses.
You just need to touch on a few so that you are grounding the reader in the experience. You see what I mean? So in terms of how to show versus how to tell, you just have to ground the reader in that five senses experience. Again, you don't have to use all of the five senses every single time, but when you are writing a description, you need to stop and ask yourself, how can I show this? How can I show what it looks like? What will help the reader visualize it or experience it using one of the other five senses? If you do this every single time, you will never have a problem with telling versus showing, and you will never have boring writing.
That's what's most important. So that is how you show versus tell. That is why you should show versus tell.
Remember, readers only read fiction in order to feel big emotions in a safe space. So every single thing you write, every line, every sentence, every scene, every bit of dialogue should evoke emotion, and that sounds like a really tall order because you're probably thinking of every single line I write has to make the reader cry or react in a big way, and that's not the case. The five senses experience will bring emotion to the reader.
So if you can do that accurately, and there's plenty of other ways that I go through in my programs for how to do this, but if you can do that accurately, we're not talking about making your character cry or have some sort of major emotional outburst on every single page in order to keep the reader hooked. That's actually going to do the opposite, right? We're talking about figuring out how we, how readers and human beings, feel emotion and then harnessing that in our stories, and this is why you should show versus tell and how to do that in order to keep the reader gripped and reading, okay?
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