Thursday, 24 August 2023

Teach yourself to show

"Show, don't tell" is a great piece of advice. But really hard to put into practice sometimes.

There are times when you don't realize that your description is a little too… well, tell-y and not enough show-y.

It's something you have to practice. And an easy way to practice it is to do an edit of all your descriptions. Do a read through of your work looking specifically for descriptions and then see how you can rewrite them.

It was a dark night.
She could barely see in the darkness of the night that surrounded her.

He was drunk.
The scent of whisky and smoke wafted from him as he staggered along the sidewalk.

She was disgusted.
Her nose scrunched at the sight of him, her legs automatically moving to cross in the other direction so she could lean away from him.

You don't need to change every description you write, but you can review each of them to see which you can improve. Eventually, it might even become a second reflex as you are writing your first draft.

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