Show, Don't Tell: A command keeping young writers from doing their best work.
Experiments indicate that action words engage people's motor systems, but the effect depends upon context., Daniel tells the young writer Lucien that Lucien has started his novel all wrong. Instead of opening with pages of dialogue among characters, Lucien should have described the characters first and shown them in action. To make readers care about who’s talking, Lucien should have given readers some passion .Source: Daguerrotype by Louis-Auguste Bisson. 1842. Wikimedia Commons.
In contemporary culture, “showing” suggests the presentation of direct evidence, while “telling” implies a subjective, verbal narrative. No such distinction exists in fiction writing, where any image in a reader’s mind is evoked by words. In 2024, however, theof telling has become so widespread that creative writing teachers encounter student novels written almost entirely in dialogue.
Cognitive literary scholar Anežka Kuzmičová has analyzed techniques writers use to make readers feel “present” in a story. She has noticed that writers often describe a place visually, then show characters interacting with their environment, especially through touch. This sequence seems to pull many readers into stories .In studying how words help readers imagine bodily experiences, Kuzmičová draws on the research of cognitive psychologist Rolf A. Zwaan and his colleagues.
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