Shannon Dittemore is the author of the Angel Eyes trilogy. She has an overactive imagination and a passion for truth. Her lifelong journey to combine the two is responsible for a stint at Portland Bible College, performances with local theater companies, and a love of all things literary. When she isn’t writing, she spends her days with her husband, Matt, imagining things unseen and chasing their two children around their home in Northern California. To connect with Shan, check out her website, FB, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest.
Writers and industry professionals spend a lot of time talking about the differences between SHOWING and TELLING. Knowing when it’s appropriate to show (most of the time) and when it’s perfectly fine to tell (it is, you know?) is crucial and it can also be subjective.
To bring clarity, we use quotes from fantastic storytellers to make our point and we break down sentences to show you exactly how to do it. But as we drill down to the nitty gritty, we often lose sight of the larger picture. We miss the forest for the trees, if you will.
To make things easy on us, let’s break this out into two categories.
There’s the Micro Show and the Macro Show.
When we talk about the Micro Show, we’re talking about showing at the sentence level. We’re asking you to paint a picture for us, instead of simply pass along information. We’re talking about choosing strong verbs and not leaning wholly on modifiers or adverbs. We’re telling you to let your dialogue do the showing for you and we’re reminding you that you must be careful when you use sense words like: heard, saw, felt, tasted, smelled, sensed.
We’re using examples like:
Use a strong verb
Mike moved slowly to the bar. (not great)
Mike lumbered to the bar. (better)
Be specific
The girl’s dress was pretty. (not great)
Her blue pinafore was trimmed with lace. (better)
Dialogue and punctuation
“Jason,” he yelled loudly. “You broke it.” (not great)
“Jason! You broke it.” (better)
The five senses
The neighbor’s door slammed and then Tim heard the music. (not great)
The thud of the door and, in the space of a heartbeat, his room pulsed to the beat of a stereo two walls away. (better)
These are fantastic tips. More than that, they are simple structural items that will immediately jump your writing to the next level. Simple, simple. And the more you work to write this way, the more natural it becomes.
What is a little less natural is the overall Macro Show. And this takes intention and consistent attention as you write. Let’s talk about it for a second.
When we’re talking about showing aspects of your story on a macro level, we’re talking about big picture items. For example, if I want you, the reader, to know that my main character is loyal, I could handle it one of two ways. I could tell you he’s loyal. I could say, “Henry was loyal even to death.” It’s not a great sentence, not a particularly showing sentence, but it conveys the information I want conveyed.
BUT! If I want to show you that Henry is loyal, I can’t really do that in a single sentence. I must show you Henry’s loyalty by placing him in scenes that prove he is, in fact, a loyal soul. I must show you that he could have chosen another path, perhaps an easier path, but that’s not our Henry. Henry is loyal. I, the author, must construct a scene or an entire story to paint Henry as he is.
And that’s what we’re going to do today.
Your goal is to choose a character trait from the list below and then put a character in a scene to show that trait off. The catch? You cannot use the word you choose. For example, if I decide I’m going to show loyalty I cannot use the word loyal (or any of its variations). Make sense?
Give it some thought and then sit down and get to work. Your scene does not have to be crazy long, friends, to get the job done. Leave your response to this exercise in the comments section below and throughout the weekend, come back and read the other responses and see if you can guess just which character traits the writers are showing off. Feel free to reply to their response with your guess. Kindness matters!
And remember! Whenever you participate in a writing exercise here at Go Teen Writers, you can enter a Rafflecopter drawing. The winner will be selected next week and will have the opportunity to ask us a question for an upcoming episode of Go Teen Writers LIVE.
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