That 'show don't tell' tip finally clicked for me after a writing group critique

I've been trying to get better at writing scenes for a fantasy novel, but my first drafts always read like a list of events. Last week at my local writing group, someone pointed out I wrote 'he was angry' instead of showing his hands shaking. So I went back and rewrote a fight scene focusing only on what my character saw and felt, like the smell of wet gravel and the thud of boots. It made the whole thing way more alive, and now I'm going through my old chapters with a highlighter. Anybody else have a simple trick that took forever to actually sink in?

2 comments

2 Comments

kimr1027d ago

Oh absolutely, that exact thing took me forever too. I kept writing "she felt nervous" for months until someone in my workshop finally underlined it and asked what nervous looked like. So I described her picking at her cuticles and checking her watch every ten seconds... it was like a lightbulb went off. My big one was telling instead of showing emotion through setting too, like instead of "the room was tense" I wrote about a chair leg scraping against the floor and nobody looking at each other. That rewrite was seriously the best thing I did for my whole manuscript, and now I catch myself before I even type "he was scared" or whatever.

elizabethhayes27d ago

Wait, you actually rewrote whole scenes for that? I always thought showing emotion through setting was kind of extra, but hearing how it changed your manuscript... I might have to try that.