Show, don’t Tell Writing Show Notes & Links
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Part 1 of a 3 part series breaking down Show, don’t Tell in a way you have never heard before. Using evocative examples, she walks you through the basics, while elevating them to a new level. Whether you’ve just started writing, or have been writing for years, you will learn something new in this episode.
In part 1, Suzy tackles:
- What is show, don’t tell?
- Why should you care?
- Places in your writing to eliminate telling and increase showing
- Resources to help you become a more descriptive and immersive writer.
Mentioned in the Episode:
- 5 Elements of Writing Article
- The Emotion Thesaurus
- Episode 14: Show, don’t Tell Page Review: Women’s Fiction
- Episode 22: Show, don’t Tell Page Review: Fantasy
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Episode Transcript (unedited)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to Show, don’t Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We’re gonna explore writing techniques. I’m gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers’ careers that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
And I’m also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you’re just starting out, you’re drafting your first book, you’re editing, or you’re currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show’s gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn’t even know you needed, but you definitely do.
I’m so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, [00:01:00] and you’re gonna also have some fun doing it. Let’s dive in. As you can tell by the name of this podcast show, don’t Tell.
Writing is kind of something that I’m obsessed with at the end. It started out innocently enough. If you’ve been writing for a while and you hear the word show, don’t tell. You might think that it’s kind of tired, old writing advice, and you might’ve learned it in your first week as a writer, as a baby writer, as you’re just getting started and you’re like, all right, Susie, what the heck are you talking about?
Listen up, because I’m gonna do a three part series. This is part one of three where I’m gonna talk about this concept of show tell. Now, I promise you that whatever level you’re at, you’ve never thought about show, don’t tell this way. So when you’re getting notes in the margin from your editor, from your book coach, from your publisher, from whoever you’re working with, your agent, you might say, oh my gosh.
I thought I nailed this show. Don’t tell business. And, and why are they saying show don’t tell. And how the heck did I [00:02:00] miss this? Well, here’s the thing, there’s a lot of pieces that go into it. Show don’t tell. At is most basic, basic form is the idea that if you tell somebody something and sort of lay it out and play language, it’s boring to read.
’cause it doesn’t light up their brain if you show them. If you show your reader what’s going on, then it’s much more immersive and it can help them feel like they’re really in your character’s body. That’s a point of view is for right. If we are telling the story from a certain point of view, we wanna kind of step into their shoes and understand it.
And if you’re just telling us everything that happened and then this happened, and then this happened and then this happened, it’s really hard for your reader’s brain to get engaged. Why is that? Well. 50% of readers in general are what’s called visual readers. So if you are a writer who can see everything in your world that you’re building, that it plays out almost like a movie in your mind, 50% of your readers are like [00:03:00] that too.
And what they need is those sort of visual clues or environmental clues. They don’t need to just be the sense of sight, but they could also be sound or feeling or all the other things that we’ve got. And so what they need is a few cues to actually, and a few clues to create or conjure that movie in their mind.
Now, there aren’t 50% of your readers who do not need all of that and might create it themselves, which is cool. And if you are one of those writers who doesn’t see it play out or doesn’t need that information, then you might think that this doesn’t apply to you. But know this. More than 50% of your readers will actually expect that.
And if they don’t have it, they won’t be able to engage with it. So you’re gonna be turning off a lot of readers. And so even if you currently don’t experience that, or it’s not the way that your brain works, you act to pay even more attention to show, don’t tell in your own writing to make sure that you’re satisfying that huge population.
So [00:04:00] the 50% is for the general population. I suspect I haven’t been able to find stats on this. I suspect that those who are avid writers and AVID readers, that number is much, much higher. And the reason that I say that is because it’s such a cool experience, right? And if you experience that and you love it, then you might be more likely to become an avid reader or writer.
If you don’t experience that, don’t worry about it. I can teach you how to do it. I’ve worked with writers who, who don’t conjure those images. All we have to do is get a little bit of technique behind it to be able to accomplish that. So I thought that I had this show Don’t Tell Thing licked in my first year of writing, and then I sent my book to my editor and I caught this note in the margin that was like, show don’t tell, show don’t tell.
It was like over and over and over again, and it was immensely frustrating. I know that when I work with writers, sometimes they come to me and they’re a little bit embarrassed. They’re like, oh my gosh, Susie, like, I’ve [00:05:00] read all your stuff. I’ve listened to it. I thought I was doing it, and that yet, you know, you’re pointing it out and I’m like, wow, I didn’t do it.
And so why is that? Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t even worry about it. Here’s the thing, is that. When you’re writing a draft, you’re almost always just telling yourself the story for the first time. Even if you have a very detailed outline, you have gone to that level of detail that your story is going to go to, and so you don’t know what’s gonna happen.
You end up summarizing or telling things, and that’s totally okay. We don’t expect you to get this right on the first draft. In fact, don’t even try. It’s something that when you learn where to find it, which is what we’re gonna talk about in the next three episodes, when you learn where to find those places where you might be telling, you can decide whether or not you are going to amp it and show it.
Okay? You are showing tools. It’s kind of like filming a movie. You’ve got a video camera when you’re filming a [00:06:00] movie, and the director. Gets to choose when to zoom in. If there’s two people on a bridge, should we be zooming in on that bridge and listening to everything that they say and being there? In the moment and getting the dialogue and getting the internal reactions and the thoughts and all the things.
Or should we be zooming out because it just isn’t that important and watch them skip across the bridge maybe as a montage with some, you know, with some time passing and some music, right? That’s your telling. So there are definitely places where you can tell, and part three of this series is actually going to be the places that you can tell and how to do it well.
Today I just wanna talk about why you might wanna zoom in on that bridge and why it’s really hard to know if you’ve done that or not. Because yes, your draft is telling yourself the story for the first time, but something else is also at play and that you are super smart, right? And you know this story, Cole.
So when you tell yourself the [00:07:00] story and you write that first draft that’s full of telling, and then you read it back, guess what happens? The movie plays in your mind because you are the author and you know that they skip across the bridge and you know all the things that they say and you know all the things that happen.
But we are kind of lazy what we write, and our brain sort of skips over those things and doesn’t put all those details on the page. One of the things that’s really fun for me anyway, it’s not so fun for the writer, but it’s kind of fun ’cause I’ll be like, Hey, what’s going on here? I’m confused. And then they come back and they say, but Suzy, it’s right there.
And I’m like, where? And they scroll up on the page and they look and they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even put it down. But when you read it back to yourself, your brain fills all of that in. So you’ve got this like little blind spot, you’ve got this blind spot and you need to be aware of it. It’s like I always tell you, when you are learning to paint, right?
When you’re learning to paint or [00:08:00] draw, you start out with stick figures and then you learn some technique and you go along and eventually you can paint the Mona Lisa or something like that, something masterful. And when you look back at your painting, you know the difference between stick figures and the Mona Lisa.
The problem is in writing. You can’t tell. You can’t tell if you’ve written stick figures or if you’ve written the Mona Lisa because your brain reads the stick figures and thinks it’s the Mona Lisa. Okay, if I’ve totally lost you here, I’m gonna get into some practical ways that you can actually level up and use these showing techniques in today’s episode.
In episode one here, I’m gonna go through some of the show, don’t tell examples that you’ve probably heard before. These ones. In later episodes, I’m gonna share with you things that you’ve never heard before, but today I wanna address the ones that are sort of the biggest advice out there, and I wanna level them up for you and show you that it’s not just about the basics [00:09:00] and how you can use those.
I’m gonna break down seven ways that you might be telling in your writing, and the three that I’m gonna address today are ones that you’ve probably heard before, but we’re gonna look at it in a different way. They are naming emotions using ly adverbs and info dumping. Those are all things that you may have heard before, and we’re gonna talk about why they matter, why you should care, how you can fix them in a brand new way, and how you can have tons of fun with it.
In episode two, I’m gonna talk about recapping events that happened off screen. I’m gonna talk about showing many versus one. I’m gonna talk about being vague versus specific, and I’m gonna talk about why you don’t wanna say what isn’t in your scene. Okay. And then in episode three, I’m gonna talk about all of the places where you can tell.
There’s this moment in time when I’ve been working with writers where all of a sudden I’m like, wow, you’re showing too much. All they hear for months and months is like, show no tell. Show, no tell show, don’t tell. And we work on those techniques and then all of a [00:10:00] sudden I’m like, woo, we should really be telling here, because we’re zooming in on that bridge.
And we heard all that conversation as they’re skipping across the bridge. And it sounds something like this. Hey, how was today? It was great. I like your shoes. Yeah, I like your shoes too, right? We don’t need to zoom in on that conversation ’cause it isn’t interesting. So at Soft point we actually show too much.
And so episode three is going to address that and show you when you should be telling. We gonna share with you an exercise that I use with students when I go presenting at schools because it’s hard to demonstrate. Without having visuals, but just imagine a scene. Okay. And, and it’s a magical scene and I’m gonna read you something about it and see what it conjuress in your mind.
The sorcerer stood out a ledge. He looked over the orange clouds toward the red and white castle. There was also a fire breathing dragon. That’s good. Right. No, it’s not good. I wish you could talk [00:11:00] back to me listeners. Um, no, it’s not that good. Right? The sorcerer stood on a ledge. I can kind of picture that.
He looked over the orange clouds, the red and white castle. There was a fire breathing dragon. I’m just kind of listing off stuff. It’s all true. And if you could see the image that I was talking about, it is all true. Those things are all in the image, but it doesn’t give us any kind of flare. It doesn’t tell us any kind of meaning.
It doesn’t make meaning out of what is happening in the scene. So when you’re looking around, it’s not just about description. Right? A lot of people think that showing us is just describing, and certainly I don’t want you to create three or four paragraphs of description and slow your whole book down.
No, that’s not what we’re going for in show. Don’t tell. We want to show things that matter. We wanna make meaning of this, right? Well, this example, the sorcerer stood on a ledge. He looked over the orange clouds toward the runaway castle. There was a fire breathing dragon. No idea what’s going on. There’s a sorcerer, a castle.
A [00:12:00] dragon, right? All of those things are true, but there’s no story there. So I’ll try again. To me. An orange globe and a rising fire spread before him painting the tops of the swirling clouds gathering in the deep valley. The castle Stonewall stood proudly across the chasm. Peaked by their sharp spires reached up into the night.
Stu daring him. The sorcerer pulled his warm cloak around him against the mist, forming his dragons, spread. Their terrible wings unleashed. Their blistering breaths. They had only to get inside the castle would fall. It was time to put his plan in motion. Now, usually by the time I’m done reading that description or that story, the kids are applauding because they’re seated.
They know what’s happening. There’s a top things that I introduced there feels magical all of a sudden we know all kinds of things. Yes. It’s also longer. It’s not [00:13:00] just about adding word count, right? In this case it does, but there’s a rising fire and all of the things that go with that, right? It’s way more exciting and we know a bunch of things.
The sorcerer is about to attack the castle, and he owns the dragons and blistering breath. I mean, we’re using so many more senses in this piece, right? Especially if you’re writing about magic, especially if you’re writing about emotions, especially if you’re writing about something really exciting that’s really alive in your mind.
Take a beat. This is two very, very short paragraphs. It’s actually only four sentences, right? It’s four sentences. They’re longer sentences, but four sentences and it packs so much in. So don’t be lazy about cool things in your book. When it’s time, as the director of your own story, you’re the God of your story.
To zoom in, show it to us, please, by all means, show it to us and [00:14:00] do not be afraid. What it takes is practice, and you need to practice getting comfortable. What’s the difference between that? Three paragraphs of looking around and describing the scene, right? We’re incorporating a lot of different things. I also like to teach the five elements of writing, which are dialogue, setting, actions, reactions, and inner thoughts, right?
So if you’re leaning on any one of those things too hard and we have a whole episode about it, we will link to it in the show notes. If you haven’t heard that one before. But if you vary those things, then your showing isn’t going to feel so boring. Right? It’s never, it should never feel boring. One of the coolest things that I ask the students when I read that paragraph to them or those two paragraphs is, is it hot or cold?
The mist, right? Is the mist hot or cold? And they say this, it’s cold. And they say, well, how do you know that? Did I say that the mist was cold? I don’t say that in [00:15:00] those paragraphs. No. They, they automatically know it. Their brains are super smart, and they say, well, the sorcerer is pulling his warm cloak around him, right?
He’s pulling his warm cloak around him against the mist forming, and so we automatically know that it’s cold and he needs the warmth. And so this is a really cool thing to do, is not telling them everything, right? If we’re telling and we give every little detail, it’s like spoonfeeding. And it’s kind of like reading a textbook where I’m like, here’s a fact and here’s another fact, and here’s another fact, and another fact and another fact, well, another fact and another fact.
I hope you’re super bored hearing me say that. That’s the point. Those facts without context are really boring, and I’m also giving you all the answers. It’s like me giving you the crossword puzzle with it already filled in boring, right? What? What am I supposed to do with that? So instead, let’s pay attention to brain chemistry.
If you [00:16:00] say that it is cold, then I go, cool, it’s cold. That’s a fact. And I have to hang onto that fact, and I don’t really have to do anything with it. Get a little bit bored if you tell me that he pulled his warm cloak around him against the mist forming. My brain actually needs to light up a little bit and go, wait a minute, that crossword puzzle is filled out and that is the clue for, you know, wanna cross, which the answer is it’s cold.
That’s the answer. And so when you’re reading as a reader, you don’t want to be given all the facts or your brain doesn’t engage. There’s nothing for it to do. So sometimes we wanna leave a little bit, right? This is especially true in one of the most common show, don’t tell writing advice that I hear out there, which is don’t name emotions.
So you’ve probably heard this one before. Even if you’ve heard it before, you may have no idea why that’s kind of a faux pa or what actually happens in your reader’s [00:17:00] brains. When you name that emotion, you might not think it’s that big a deal. Hint, it has nothing to do with word count. It has nothing to do with just better writing.
There’s an actual scientific reason for it. And it’s what I just talked about, rather than spoonfeeding them and naming that emotion, which I can’t interact with, I’m making them figure it out. Right? Which we can do very quickly. Our brains are really good at interpreting signals and body signals, and there’s a lot of different ways to do it.
I’m gonna get into that in a minute, but if you tell me she’s sad. Then I’m like, okay, she’s sad. That’s a fact. I’m gonna hold onto that fact. There’s nothing for my brain to do and I don’t engage. Right? If you tell me, or show me that a fat tear rolled down her cheek, all of a sudden my brain has to light up as I’m reading and say, oh, what does that mean?
Well, it means that she’s sad, right? And so my brain is automatically more [00:18:00] engaged, and you’ve pulled me in to your story. This’s actually really tricky to find because there’s so many emotions in like our language, in the English language that you can’t just do a find on every emotion, find me all emotions.
Um, you can’t do that at this point in time, so you have to be really diligent about it and just make sure that you’re not missing those. So if you can try doing this in your first, or at least your second draft, you will catch them. There’s nothing wrong with sometimes saying she was sad. Just know that it’s going to be boring if that’s all you ever do, and you never explore it further.
Here’s where people get into trouble with show don’t tell, is they learn like one or two things in order to capture an emotion and then guess what? It’s all over the book and it’s repeated this fat tear rolling down her cheek through the whole book. And then that can be boring too. It definitely takes a lot of practice.
And [00:19:00] one of the resources that I recommend over and over and over again is the emotion thesaurus, and its sequels by Angela Ackerman and Becca Lesi. I have been a writer in residence with writers Helping Writers, which is their website for years, and this resource alone is worth its weight in gold. If you don’t have it already, you should grab it.
We’ll put a link in the show notes. Basically, it’s one of the best tools to let you brainstorm. So it’s a source. And you could look up sad and look up all kinds of ways that you could represent sad from body language to internal thoughts, to, you’re looking at your five elements. Now you could look at a visceral reaction, right?
A reaction to something or an action. What do you do when you’re sad physically? So all kinds of different ways to do that. And one of the most brilliant things about digging a level deeper is sometimes you realize that your initial thing was wrong, right? So sometimes [00:20:00] if by putting, I’m sad, and then I look up in the thesaurus or I think about it and I look through the 10 pages of suggestions and none of them feel right.
Guess what? She wasn’t sad after all. She was angry. But if I’m lazy about it and I just name that emotion. I am not gonna get to the root of it. Didn’t actually mean she was sad. It meant she was kind of angry, sad, which is very different. It kind of goes hand in hand with being a writer is do a good job of these things, right?
Don’t be lazy about it because you don’t want your reader to fall asleep. You wanna wake up their brains. You wanna mix it up. You wanna be creating your own ways of showing that, okay, you wanna be creating your own ways of showing it, and you will get better and better and better at it as you go. It’s one of the most fun things to do, is to brainstorm with a writer.
I actually do. All the time. One page of brainstorming with writers on how to show more. And so if you haven’t seen those, we’ll link to some of them in the show notes. But if you haven’t seen [00:21:00] those episodes, then check them out. And if you wanna brainstorm a page with B, submit it. We bring writers on all the time from all different levels and all different walks of life and all different genres, and brainstorm how to show on a page, and it is so much more fun than you’d think.
So let’s do one more just before we move on to make sure that you really got this concept. Because Yes, it’s not just that we think it’s, you know, taboo or wrong to name emotions in writing. It just doesn’t really work for your readers. So don’t tell readers that your character feels murderous. Show us they’re narrowed eyes and they’re shaking body right.
Search for these emotions in your draft, happy, sad, frustrated, surprised all of them. Then grab your copy of the emotion thesaurus and drag your reader into your character’s body by adding, showing details to light up their brains and excite them. Okay, this next one I’m not gonna spend [00:22:00] very much time on because it’s really basic and there isn’t that much to learn.
Know that if you are using adverbs that end in the suffix ly, so slowly. Actually all those things, if you are using ones that end in ly, you are almost always telling It is a pet peeve of people in the industry to see that. Right? And it’s kind of, again, it’s a little bit lazy to use those. And so it’s not just writing advice or like this insider information that we look down on.
And it does actually mark a writer as an amateur, if you’ve got a lot of those words, because you are always telling. And what that means is instead of saying he walked slowly. You could say he sauntered. You could say he dragged his feet. You could gimme so many more descriptive ways that are more interesting.
If you find yourself using an advert, then the verb that you used isn’t specific enough. Walking is a really, really common one. Walking, talking, [00:23:00] something moving. He moved to the side of the room. Let’s get creative. There are so many words in the English language. If you find yourself having to amp it with an adverb that ends in ly.
You probably are being lazy about your word choice. So that’s the reason why it marks writers as amateur. If they’re using a lot of those words, you just haven’t leveled it up. Okay, so I’m not gonna say too much more on that. They, again, they’re hard to search on because they end in ly some of the tools, some of the editing tools that you can get out there that are automated.
We’ll actually flag those for you. Or you could simply do a find on. LY. Um, there aren’t that many words and you can see if you have them in your writing and see if you can replace them. Sometimes you’re not even adding word count. You’re taking away because you could replace those two words, the verb and the adverb.
Better verb. That is way more interesting and doesn’t put your reader to sleep. The third and final place where you might be telling in your writing, that’s [00:24:00] sort of typical that I’m gonna address in this part one. Is info dumping. Now, you’ve probably heard of this before. It’s the dreaded info dump and you’re not really sure what it means, or maybe you are sure and you think it, your story can do it anyway because there’s no other way around it.
I’m gonna share with you some advanced techniques to get around it. So what is an info dump? Basically it is any time when you’re giving like really information, rich information without breaking it up, you’re giving too much information. Your reader’s gonna be like, that’s a fact, and that’s a fact, and that’s a fact.
And they try to hold it all in their brains and then their brains get tired and they start skimming ’cause they just can’t do it. Okay. So there’s a bunch of ways that this shows up in writing, and if you’re looking for it in your own writing, there are some really easy ways to find it. First and foremost, if you are scanning your writing and you see like really dense paragraphs where you don’t have a lot of white space, you might be info dumping.
[00:25:00] Now, really common way that some editors or writing coaches teach you to fix that is to use dialogue, but that doesn’t work necessarily. Let me explain because doesn’t work to then just have somebody tell you that information. If you just have somebody telling you all that same information, you put it inside quotes, you haven’t fixed the problem, then you have this other issue, which is the five elements that you are out of balance, that you have too much dialogue on the page.
Again, you can easily see this if you have these really dense paragraphs with. Too much dialogue, right? You can see it on the page. It’s really obvious and it’s hard to read. So if your character is sort of, has more than three or four lines of dialogue in one paragraph, and they’re saying it all at once, break it up please.
This same thing can be true if you’ve got inner thoughts, for example, and you’re leaning really heavily on just that for like three pages. It’s [00:26:00] gonna feel a lot like an info dump, and the reader needs you to be varying these things to make it interesting and let their brain stay awake. Varying the elements is what creates a 3D scene.
So let’s go back to our movie analogy for a minute. If you’re thinking about a scene and there’s characters in the scene, if they were a movie and they’re just standing there saying things or standing there thinking things, then you’ve got an info dump problem. So there’s a bunch of ways that you could break it up.
And the first concept that I wanna talk about that you need to understand to be able to fix this is the concept of story present. So story present isn’t just it. It has nothing to do with point of view. So don’t get that confused with like writing in first person present, for example. It has nothing to do with that.
All it means is what is the basic story that you are following? Then you could have things that happen in the future, or you could jump back in the timeline to the past, [00:27:00] but those things are not happening in story present. So if it’s story present, you’ve got people standing around telling each other things.
They might be info dumping. We’re gonna talk about this again in the advanced strategies in episode two, but for now, let’s just talk about when you’re giving too much information, how you can break it up. So if you remember at the beginning of this episode, I talked about the fact that telling is when you’re giving us facts without interpreting them.
Use your interpreter and your interpreter is your point of view character. So whoever is telling the story, we don’t really care about the facts. What we care about is what they think about the facts. So use them. Use them as the interpreter, and have them interpret this information for us to break up that long bit, right?
Where you’re just giving us facts, show us how it affects them and we’ll care about it a lot more. Okay. So when you come across one of these long tirades or info dumps, here’s the first question that you need to ask yourself. Number [00:28:00] one, does your reader need this information? And I want you to think long and hard about that because if they don’t need it, cut it.
And what I mean by that is. You may think that you need this information. This is true of backstory. You may want the reader to understand that you know what happened in this person’s childhood and you know why they’re doing something. And all these things are incredibly important to you, the writer, to know.
You need to know those things, but does your reader need it at this moment in time? That’s a really, really important question to ask yourself, and if the reader doesn’t need it, if the scene still makes sense without it shut it. Now people often get sad about this when they’re writing ’cause they’ve written, you know, three or four pages of backstory and they think that it’s so cool and so important.
So still write that it is really cool and it is really important, but if it’s not needed, then it doesn’t need to be on the page. You, the writer, needed that information, so it’s not wasted [00:29:00] time to write that. Backstory, it’s super important, but it’s your job as a writer to figure out how to entertain your reader, and if they are bored by it, then it is going to detract from your story.
It’s going to slow it right down, so don’t include it. Here’s the last piece to this test. The reason that I just taught you about story present is this. You can have something that is dual timeline, right? We might be telling a story from two different points of view, one in the past and one in story present.
But story present is the one that we are following the most, wherever that might be. And if you drop into backstory, the only time that we’re gonna care about what happened in the past is if it helps us predict what’s gonna happen in story present, right? If it gives us information that will help us predict.
Then we are interested if it’s just backstory for the sake of backstory, it’s not interesting. ’cause here’s the thing, when you are telling backstory, they’re, it’s very difficult to [00:30:00] set up tension. We already know that the character survived because they’re telling us the story from 20 years later.
They’re fine. We know a lot about them, right? So it’s hard to put them in mortal danger in the past. So keep that in mind when you are deciding what you need to share from somebody’s backstory. In particular, know that you can’t really set up tension in the past, so only, only only give us the information that helps us predict what’s gonna happen in the present.
If you still decide that we absolutely need this information, or your story doesn’t make sense at all, there’s lots of things that you can do. The first and most obvious one is to break up those little bits of information between the story present scenes. So instead of giving us three paragraphs all at once, see how you can spread it out to keep their brains engaged with story present.
Long passages of description and information without your point of view. Character interpreting them for us. Always gonna put your reader to sleep, so [00:31:00] get creative, break it up and be ruthless if you don’t need it. If your reader doesn’t need it at this particular moment in the story, cut it. I hope you’re as extended about revitalizing these three strategies.
These are the most common ones. In the next episode, part two of the show Don’t Tell Writing series. We are going to look at some new ways that you can find telling in your writing. And trust me, nobody else teaches it like this. These three that I address today are ones that are really common. I know that I’ve probably given you a couple of strategies to address them in a way that is different than what you’ve learned before.
So mix it up, get creative. This is where you get to put your stamp on it. Don’t leave these things in your writing and just think it’s good enough. It’s not going to engage your readers. And so I like to say, even if they don’t know why, if you fix these things, your reader is going to all of a sudden love your writing.
It’s gonna be a totally different experience for them because they’re gonna be drawn in, they’re gonna be [00:32:00] immersed, they’re gonna be interactive, and they’re not gonna have those moments where their brain goes to sleep because you’re lighting it up with the choices that you make and the technique that you employ.
Most importantly, I hope you really understand at this point that show don’t tell is more than just basic writing advice. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways that you can solve this problem, and you are gonna be working on it for the entirety of your writing career. I promise you, you are gonna get better and better and better at this.
You are going to practice it. You are going to look for these tells in your writing and you are going to know creatively how to actually address them. That’s what my hope is for you, so that when I read your writing next, my brain is gonna go light all, all steam ahead, like full steam ahead because it’s gonna light up my brain and be super, super interesting.[00:33:00]
Thanks for tuning in to show. Don’t Tell Writing With me, Susie Vori, help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also, visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
If you’re feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn’t quite where you want it to be yet for our show notes, tell page review episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make it the absolute best fast You’re feeling called to write that book.
Keep going, and I’m gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next [00:34:00] week.