SHOW, DON'T TELL (is a lie) | On Writing

i have been reading all of these books and you have been lied to show don't tell is the ungodly hammer with which all new writers are bludgeoned repeatedly until they run back to their mothers and they say mum i'm scared to which their mother says don't tell me show me and here's the thing it's not always true now show don't tell is a massive topic so we're gonna narrow down to a teensy-weensy tiny come here can be a little closer tiny whiny little part of it and that is writing character emotions and two big mistakes writers make when doing it let's go and because learning never ends i've started a series of companion videos called beyond writing this time it's exploring more emotions more stories more examples like how stephen king creates fear the hunger games and some of my own writing as well and you can get this ongoing series with the nebula curiosity stream bundle which right now is 42 percent off just 12 bucks for the entire year and this is a really cool sponsor for me because i'm able to sponsor my own video with my own stuff it'd mean a lot to check it out part one tell don't show us writers easily fall into this trap of thinking there's an emotion iceberg where you've got telling at the top she felt happy with herself then physicalizing like clenching fists and a little deeper it's describing the feeling and the abstract then character action then introspection and we always want to be as deep in the iceberg as possible but no i mean can you imagine if every emotion your characters felt had to come out in these sentences or even paragraphs of prose your pace would be slower than the russian advance into ukraine not to mention melodramatic with every emotion being this big moment no there is absolutely a place for telling your characters are feeling things all the time and not all of those feelings are important listen to this piece from neil gaiman's the ocean at the end of the lane the pond is next i thought i just have to go around this shed and i'll see it i saw it and felt oddly proud of myself as if that one act of memory had blown away some of the cobwebs of the day this character feels proud for remembering something from their childhood just a dash of it it's not a big emotion it's not something we should narratively dwell on so gaiman just tells us and he hides it in amongst some interesting language that fits in with the wider themes of the scene someone rediscovering their childhood home telling in small moments as well in transitions between scenes is okay but don't get too excited showing is the way that we get readers to care about our characters and their experiences so you've gotta know when to show and not tell and that in my mind really begins with part two specificity emotions are so much more than anger or sadness or happiness you can have a sadness that just hits you for a moment or a sadness that is the first thing you feel when you wake up in the morning before you even remember what you are sad about it's on a spectrum that goes a thousand different ways because all of these emotions can come in so many forms listen to this piece from margaret atwood's the testaments i feared i might lose my faith if you've never had a faith you will not understand what that means you feel as if your best friend is dying that everything that defined you is being burned away that you'll be left all alone you feel exiled as if you were lost in a dark wood it was like the feeling i'd had when tabitha died the world was emptying itself of meaning everything was hollow everything was withering edward here is describing sadness in the abstract for a character who is losing their religion but it's so much more than that it's layered with a loss of identity of direction of depersonalization she isn't just showing us sadness but a specific kind of long lasting pain that leaves you questioning what you are left with in the wake of it her specificity here helps create a unique experience that we can engage with and that's immersive right rather than just saying the sadness was an abyss a general statement because there's not much point in showing emotion in writing but not getting to the heart of what that actual emotion is look at her word choice here the words here are specific they're evocative they have multiple meanings behind them now edward could have written here it's like everything defined you is dying but she chose the words burned away it's more active that something or someone is doing the burning to her and it's painful because dying as a word doesn't necessarily mean that it's painful and it can be passive you feel exiled to such a great expression compared to you feel alone it carries a lot more weight then the world is emptying itself of meaning and hollow and withering they're such powerful words compared to just saying that she felt empty which is something i see a lot in books it's kind of overused cliches kind of lose their effect on readers we glance over them when reading they don't carry the weight or meaning that they used to or meant to and edward here avoids them now there are exceptions to this of course in enrique maria remarks all quiet on the western front a traumatized german soldier in world war one describes reading a letter from a soldier that he just killed in this way but each word i translate pierces me like a shot to the chest like a stab to the chest now you would be right to point out that this is a cliche but this passage really captures the horror and guilt and sadness with language that arises from war and even more so by correcting it to a stab rather than a bullet it makes the death more personal a bullet is inherently impersonal it puts space between you and the person killed and this is about him realizing that this man he just killed was a real person with a real life of their own in this context the cliche fits it brings him a lot closer to him it's really quite profound sometimes your word choice is just personal style though like hemingway takes two much simpler word choices than say jorge louis borges and in first person the word choice is really going to come from the words that the perspective character would use right you could say my dear children that emotions are complicated and in being mindful about word choice and specificity you're going to want to look out for the words very or extremely when describing emotion stephen king hates adverbs like these because they often mean that you're not quite being specific enough with the emotion you're playing with you're not capturing the scale you intend and we don't tend to get anything more out of being told that someone was very afraid versus afraid and by the way i counted and king only uses these terms 10 times outside dialogue when he's describing things in his book misery i don't actually have misery here with me so um you're stuck with salem's lot so do go through your book control if and maybe instead of very tired try exhausted sleepy drained sick of it these all mean more specific things likewise look out for filter words felt sore realized new these create psychological distance between the reader and the character their emotions by reminding them that this is a story if specificity is about bringing you closer to the exact emotion of your characters then cutting these words out is one way to close that gap as well and with all of this in mind it's really important to hug your cat go and pick them up right now give them a cuddle cradle them like the baby that they want to be yeah this is what momo loves momo loves this you ain't you you you do any of you uh the um rioting yeah writing um it's really important to um part three show and not tell yes we are here at last lyra clenched herself but relaxed almost at once as panteleimon thought to her we're only safe as long as we pretend she opened her eyes and found that they'd been containing tears and to her surprise and shame she sobbed and sobbed philip pullman could have told us that lyra was anxious and afraid but he didn't instead he showed us by physicalizing these emotions lyra clinched herself she shut her eyes she sobbed and sobbed it brings those emotions to life and it is a pretty simple and easy way to improve your writing if you control if your story for words like happy sad anxious afraid you'll find plenty of places that you can hug your cat you can go and pick them up right now give them lots of love maybe a treat and they'll be very happy for it you'll find places that you can spice it up but as said describing your emotions in the abstract or physicalizing them too much can grind the pace of your story on a line-by-line basis to a halt because you're forcing the story to stay in the same moment even if it doesn't feel natural to and that's why character action is sometimes a better way to communicate emotion leslie dead girl friend rope broke fell you you you the words exploded in his head like corn against the sides of a popper god dead you leslie dead you he ran until he was stumbling but he kept on afraid to stop knowing somehow that running was the only thing that could keep leslie from being dead it was up to him he had to keep going he leaned his weight upon the door of the pickup and let his head thud thud against the window his father drove stiffly without speaking though once he cleared his throat as though he were going to say something but he glanced at less and closed his mouth when they pulled up at his house his father sat quietly and jess could feel the man's uncertainty so he opened the door and got out and with the numbness flooding through him went in and lay down on his bed um that was um catherine it was catherine patterson's uh british terabithia which um i i don't have any i don't have any unresolved feelings about we do get a little bit of him describing these emotions in the abstract with the numbness flooding through him but unlike in the testaments or the northern lights the emotion is primarily communicated by what jesse does here we have him running till he stumbles refusing to stop leading his head third third against the window we are shown his frantic panic and fear and denial and giving up that crucially keep up the pace of the scene because this is meant to feel like we're falling a rush of emotions in the worst way possible so if you've got fast paced scenes we're stopping to describe emotions in the abstract or physicalizing might undermine the tension that it relies on characters doing things in the moment or that you want this moment to be a whirlwind then character action might work better though the fact that these different strategies create different paces in your writing can be really useful can be used to mark a shift in the narrative pace following an emotional beat if you want to suddenly speed it up or suddenly slow it down finally show narrative consequences to your big emotions simply having characters do things or feel things isn't always enough if what they do or feel doesn't really matter you know jesse's actions drive the story forward here by forcing other characters to react his father has to come get him it shows us how their emotions fit into this world in a real tangible way it makes them more real especially in character-driven stories being able to identify the emotion that your characters end up with at the end of a scene and how that emotion affects the following scene even if it's in just a small way is a really great kind of thing to be able to do it just lets you see the emotional connective tissue throughout your story feelings lead to action lead to feelings lead to action lead to feelings later blah blah blah until those feelings are resolved and it deepens the emotional experience bringing us closer to the character see if you're just describing a lot of emotions you know they're just feeling bad and depressed and horrible all the time but this doesn't really affect what they do that much people just kind of blur over it you know you want a variety of all of these tactics of course but the golden rule with showing is generally describe the symptoms of the emotion not the emotion itself whether those symptoms are actions or physicalization or dwelling in their head but here is the weird thing i found when researching most and yes i mean most of the really good emotional writing in all of these stories doesn't come from physicalization or describing in the abstract or even character action a lot of the time see it's a lot deeper than that and this is part four the big mistake writers make i have seen this so many times i cannot even tell you but it's particularly common i feel in science fiction and fantasy because a lot of writers kind of fall into this pattern this trap where they will one describe the setting two describe the conflict in the setting and three describe the emotion that comes out of that conflict you know rinse and repeat scene to scene it is an easy formula to fall into that is the place that people naturally are most inclined to think about emotions but i want to challenge you here i want to challenge you to use emotions more complexly in all parts of your writing too all three of these kind of beats you've got here the paper menagerie is a beautiful magical realist story about a chinese-american boy who grows up to resent his chinese heritage and mother if my mom spoke to me in chinese i refused to answer her after a while she tried to use more english but her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me i tried to correct her eventually she stopped speaking altogether if i was around mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something she tried to hug me the way she saw american mothers did on tv i thought her movements exaggerated uncertain ridiculous graceless she saw that i was annoyed and stopped every once in a while i would see her at the kitchen table studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper later a new paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to me i caught them squeezed them until the air went out of them and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic emotions here in kinlyu's writing aren't just things being experienced inside scenes in that third beat after a lot of build-up they're the connective tissue between scenes liu doesn't describe the embarrassment in the abstract or with body language he instead moves the plot forward by describing a chain of emotional decisions trying to correct her getting annoyed with her hugs strangling her origami pieces they slowly escalate and build on one another in this kind of transition or summary that sets up the next scene where his mother dies and leaves him a letter in chinese that he cannot even read because he refused to learn the language for her so this is kind of that first beat and those beginning scenes alan brock a traditional professional editor has a second point that i think is really valuable to consider here most writers do not need to get better at describing emotion they need to get better at introspection i think all of haruki murakami's stories and mean without women do this really well lesha khan's goodbye takasuki's hand was soft with long slender fingers his palm was warm and slightly damp as if he had been sweating perhaps he was nervous after he left kafuku sat down on a chair in the green room opened his right hand and stared at his palm the sensation left by the handshake was still fresh that hand those fingers had caressed his wife's naked body slowly and deliberately exploring every nook and cranny he closed his eyes and breathed deeply what in heaven's name was she trying to do he felt that whatever it was he had no choice but to go ahead and do it now this story is about a man meeting the guy who his dead wife slept with trying to figure out what this guy had that he didn't there are complicated emotions at play right resentment pain loss self-blame but instead of describing or physicalizing any of these he captures them through this introspection here that is layered with emotional subtext and to really look at how he does this we've got to look at what murakami focuses on in his prose here because when we are happy or sad we don't think oh i'm happy or oh i'm sad we think about the things that make us feel that way so murakami doesn't write he had never been so jealous he thinks about the feel of this man's hand that his wife would have once felt too sensually he doesn't describe the bar or the man's hair or his eyes because sex is a very physical act that is brought out through the hands in a way you know and this is almost a way of getting closer to understanding that and what you focus on in your prose applies everywhere in your writing not just in your character's introspective thoughts when you describe a setting a person an event if your character is in a forest do they focus on the shadows or the pretty mushrooms these have different emotional connotations have a look at how a town yeah just a town is described in frederick bachmann's beer town maya wakes up and stays in bed playing her guitar the walls of her room are covered in a mixture of pencil drawings and tickets she's saved from concerts she's been to in cities far from here beartown isn't close to anything it's as if nature and man were fighting a tug of war for space more high-minded souls might suggest either way the town is losing it has been a very long time since it wanted anything more jobs disappear each year and with them the people and the forest devours one or two more abandoned houses each season this here isn't stream of consciousness it's not thoughts like in the paper menagerie or in drive my car but the focus here on her posters of the outside world and of the forest devouring the abandoned houses tells us about this girl's emotional state this town is dying and she wants out she longs to see the rest of the world and it's all done without physicalizing describing or even really any introspection and part of all of this the focus of our prose how we capture things is really about the metaphors and similes that we use something that i think that helmer woolitzer is absolutely fantastic at sometimes i made use of the fathers of friends not that those selfish girls were really willing to share but there were times when i sat next to real fathers in movie theaters with the exquisite texture of a man's coat brushing my arm and i listen to the sound of their voices with the happiness of a dog that has no use for words and is desperately alert to tone and pitch and timbre this comparison hilma woolitzer makes to a dog here and waiting for daddy gives us this feeling of wanting to impress of admiration even adoration and remember how we talked about descriptive focus well highlighting the texture of the man's coat here makes something really precious for her out of something that would be entirely ordinary for anyone else this feeling of deep longing arises from every line here now you might be thinking that this is only really going to work in first person or third limited because those tend to have a lot more character packed into how they tell the story but no absolutely not beartown is written in third person omniscient and it is packed with emotional subtext on every level every description all the time a lot of people especially in fantasy and science fiction circles right in third person omniscient if we go back to those three beats i think a lot of people feel that one and two kinda have to be done in this objective standoffish way particularly in regards to metaphors they they go for the thing that is necessarily the most beautiful the most accurate but that really doesn't have to be the case and it's a place right for you building in a lot more emotion but be creative in transitions and summaries and descriptions all sorts of stuff having a variety of all of this all these different ways to capture emotion from moment to moment is super important and it helps part five avoiding melodrama writing powerful emotions without coming off as george lucas trying to convince me he knows what sadness is is hard now the reality is that sometimes people will think your writing is melodramatic because you haven't sold them on the conflict or the stakes or the characters meaning the problem is chapters back and they're getting to this point and they're thinking oh the characters are being melodramatic i don't really care about this but that doesn't mean that you can't do certain things to avoid melodrama in the moment have a listen to this so where do we go from here he whispered i don't know she cried throwing her arms up the man spun on his heel to face the window slamming his fist against the glass he wasn't meant to be like this we he stole a breath we were meant to be happy and fall in love and die all together she rolled her eyes fingers scraping through her hair then wailed intensely you you never saw us for what we really were us he whimpered he stormed up to her gritting his teeth there never was any us clearly just you and him she fell to her knees before her hands clasped please she pigged give me another chance i'll i'll try better there are a bunch of things that i would not do with this passage and it's kind of similar in those ways to some of the writing that i've encountered in the past firstly every line is treated as this big physical moment throwing arms up spinning on his heel wailing intensely slamming his fist storming up to a beginning on her knees but not everything we feel comes out in physical reactions especially dramatic visceral ones like these i know this comes from a place of trying to communicate the emotional importance of these lines but this many this close together isn't relatable for a lot of people and it feels melodramatic and it doesn't help that secondly you get emotional whiplash in the scene what i mean is that she goes from rolling her eyes to wailing intensely in an instant falling to her knees before him we don't get build up to these big physical moments they just happen suddenly capturing emotion is just as much about the times that people try to control and hide or not feel things it creates an emotional tension that eventually comes undone but there's none of that here there's no subtext it's all on the surface big physical moments can work like characters falling to their knees and begging but we tend to want to build up to these thirdly dialogue tags and grammar we've got cried whispered whaled whimpered begged all in this short moment now i've talked before about dialogue tags and how we use them go check that video out but again it comes from trying to communicate the emotional importance behind these lines but here's the thing the word said encompasses a lot of the ways we talk people naturally read intensity and pauses into dialogue on their own so these verbs wave a little red flag to us then say hey this is a lot more dramatic just remember that and the same is really with the exclamation marks and ellipses and capitals this many this close together make it feel very dramatized it's hitting you over the head with a baseball bat be emotional be sad this is bad things when a lot of this emotion really would have come out pretty naturally without it and the reader's just begging you to stop bludgeoning them they're like yeah i know it's meant to be dramatic please stop fifthly just like we discussed i think that the constant bodily expressions really undermine the pace and what should be a fast-paced scene it's like there's these giant gaps between all their lines what they're saying now we don't see it here but the last thing that is a really common marker of melodramatic prose is excessive poeticism and i am very guilty of this because you know so often we fall down this rabbit hole of similes and metaphors and poetics to describe emotion but it can become really ungrounded detached strange to this person as being so esoteric and lofty and up in the air so when i read it was a deep abyss a hole inside her that never ended where all the wind went dead and the stars were black and the leaves of fate fell where they may casting her down and leaving her a discarded rag of fear and hopelessness it just doesn't feel grounded right now i know again that this comes from trying to deepen the emotion in stuff that we cannot easily describe that we feel like we can't really capture any other way so we turn to big metaphors but hey look at that passage from the testaments it has four distinct poeticisms but edward made sure that they were still pretty grounded relatable and it's mixed in with a bunch of introspection that balance and variety is really important to make those metaphors land and if your poeticism isn't communicating what you hope to readers if they just feel a little bit detached after reading it then it might be coming across to readers as melodramatic so instead i want to show you a passage that does have a big physical emotional reaction but it isn't melodramatic instead mew me drifted upstairs to hoshiko's old room glass in hand the moment she set foot inside she tripped on an old power cord hit the ground the red wine spilling everywhere a blood stain soaking into the floor of a dead girl's room she seized a rag to scrub it out but it only spread fainter but more permanent the carpet was too far gone already but she refused to stop scrubbing more vigorously violently because a stain was allowed anywhere in the house but there the moment she stopped trying was the moment it'd be there forever she worked till her knuckles were red and sore until she broke mumi slid to the ground tears came whether she wanted them or not silently at first then sobbing into the puddle of soap and alcohol squeezing the rag as if to strangle it when she brought herself up she sat back against what used to be hoshiko's bed what used to be hoshiko's old wooden carving of aminocaku lay discarded beside her it was sporting a new layer of dust she wiped it away with the edge of her dress and put it back up on what had once been hoshiko's bedside table but the room didn't belong to miyumi either it wasn't hers to peck away it all existed in some limbo of ownership left in the small print of life she wanted to wretch throw up and rid herself of whatever was inside her but her body refused after wiping her face she downed a sleeping pill and collapsed onto her bed miumi here is sobbing into a puddle of soap and alcohol in her grief but she doesn't start there we see her trying to hold the emotion back there's that emotional subtext before it gets the best of her it's a lot more relatable with a real build up we kind of anticipate this moment it goes from drifting to tripping to scrubbing to sobbing there's no real emotional whiplash there's also no ellipses or exclamation marks because i think the dramatic tension stands here on its own there's a little poeticism yeah but it's balanced out with introspection and grounded descriptions of real things and that my children is actually from the sci-fi novel that i am writing at the moment i'm about 60 000 words in and i want to have it out with beta readers before the end of the year but if patience is not your virtue then i would love to share with you a story i published with a ryan's belt magazine i'm very proud of it it's called a catalogue for the end of humanity and you can find it totally for free down in the description below describing the same emotion over and over can also come across as melodramatic to readers because they tend to get numb to it like you could be writing the same thing and they would feel it's just being a bit overdramatic because they're used to it they feel like oh i wish they were doing something else right especially though if you're just increasing the severity and not the complexity you're not deepening the emotion oh they're depressed but now it's depression 2 electric boogaloo and depression three loneliness comes for free as someone who reads a lot of mental health focus fiction i am no stranger to this my book has a character dealing with grief over and over and i took a leaf out of these books in learning how to do that because it wasn't just about increasing the severity of the emotion it was about giving the emotion a new context to explore deepening it so at the start of my book miumi is grieving for her dead child she feels lost isolated stuck in this depressive loop then as she begins to heal she starts to reconnect with her husband who she kind of separated with in the wake of it but slowly realizes that the more time she spends with him the more she is reminded of the past and feels trapped back there all that pain finally starting a new life of sorts she is racked with guilt over letting herself be happy because it's like she's forgetting her daughter these are all grief right but they're different expressions that arise from and change the direction of the story emotional journeys stories heavily dependent on this kind of emotional change really need this exploration of what the emotion actually is so ask yourself what new aspect of that emotion or what question is your character faced with every time that they fall back into that same emotion give how they feel or deal with it a unique consequence that doesn't just feel like the story is going in circles of course sometimes going in circles is the point bojack horseman repeatedly has bojack fall into the same self-destructive self-loathing state and that's kind of the tragedy it feels like a cycle it feels inescapable because it's trying to capture that experience for a lot of people so emotion comes out in prose it comes out in introspection it comes out in description in transitions but there's a whole big part of it that we haven't discussed a huge chunk of it comes out in part 6 dialogue comrade i did not want to kill you if you jumped in here again i would not do it if you would be sensible too i see you're a man like me i thought of your hand grenades of your bayonet of your rifle now i see your wife and your face and our fellowship forgive me comrade we always see it too late take 20 years of my life comrade and stand up take more if i do not know what i can even attempt to do with it now i will write to your wife she must hear it from me i will tell her everything i've told you she shall not suffer i will help her and your parents too and your child a ton of emotion comes out in how people talk their speed the tangents they go on the amount of words they use stuttering ellipses interrupting and you know all this right you use this in your writing this is emotion that's coded into the text without even naming it and just like with the focus of our prose we talked about before people typically don't say i'm sad or i'm happy they say oh it was the worst day at work there was this karen who had this expired voucher and wouldn't leave the store no matter what i said and i was meant to be closing but oh they wouldn't let me go and i was just trying not to cry but she kept yelling at me they what is making them feel which is also what makes this dialogue here so damn good he's feeling guilty and ashamed and sorrowful but he describes the reasoning behind his decisions what he sees the things that impacted him most as a way of almost convincing himself that he's an okay person that's what this is he's not talking to anyone else not really watch my video on subtext in dialogue which covers a lot more of this in more depth secondly contradictions between body language and dialogue can reveal emotional subjects she relaxes and pushes my bangs from my face what did he do he didn't do anything maya i don't know what happened i stare at the rusted brown mixing with the bright red on my fingertips meyer insists that she doesn't know what happened but the way she avoids her mother's gaze tells us that she does and she's just not ready to talk about it the contradiction here gives a secondary emotion to the dialogue without saying maya felt anxious or she shifted uneasily thirdly differences in their usual speaking patterns in all quiet on the western front the main character is largely pretty short spoken throughout the novel and this massive ramble tells us that he's feeling lost he's vocalizing this internal mess of emotions it's spilling out of him in a way that it hasn't before really disproportionate responses you know characters exploding at the smallest thing can indicate hidden emotions both in dialogue and action and lastly implication that is a huge part of how we speak passive aggression flirting being diplomatic in difficult situations in these moments you can enrich your dialogue with emotional subtext especially if you think about what their goal is in any given scene watch the video again on subtext and dialogue it's linked in the corner of the screen but sometimes people do really cool things with emotion they think outside the box because part six who even needs words i want to give a quick mention to house of leaves by marxist danielski and turtle's all the way down by john green we've looked at how grammar and formatting can undermine the emotion you know it can make it melodramatic but both of these guys use grammar and formatting to represent the emotions and experiences of their characters john green has intrusive thoughts show up in capitals to represent them being louder than the rest of her mind there's no commas or full stops or semicolons to represent this spiraling mess and panic of thoughts there's no structure to them it's all feeling inside her mind likewise danielewski begins to spread his words across the page to represent a character feeling themselves shrink getting more lost than ever they are just a flicker in the dark these might not fit your book i mean sometimes it just doesn't right but these are other ways of showing emotion that you shouldn't be afraid to be creative with and also i'm having to show you like pictures and videos of other people's copies because i linked this out and i don't know who and my copy is missing so if you have my copy of house of leaves please do let me know in the comments and you know that'd be that'd be great and so having learned all of this this is a great time to go and pick up your cat and give them a cuddle but we are not done here i have created a companion video to this where we go through 10 more examples of great emotional writing that i couldn't really fit into this video like crime and punishment by dostoyevsky some game of thrones stuff get access to the series with a curiosity nebula stream bundle which is linked down below it barely costs anything for the entire year plus everything i make ad free a ton of other creators who are all amazing their exclusive series as well plus curiosity stream itself comes with a whole host of educational documentaries like ones with david attenborough all on its own which are just great for world building my link is down below please do let me know what you think of the beyond writing series what you would like to see there thank you by the way for making it possible for me to sponsor my own videos with my own stuff that is cool ah you know what i'm feeling tired every step is me lifting a lit block so i'm gonna take some character action and we're gonna bring this together into a summary number one it's okay to tell rather than show in small moments or to keep up the pace or during transitions two being specific when describing emotion helps ground the reader in a unique immersive experience think carefully about the secondary meanings of words and avoid vary and extremely adverbs people tend to glance over cliches right three show emotions by physicalizing using character action giving narrative consequences that connect the scenes by their emotions four don't restrict emotional writing to the aftermath section of any story or scene look at how you can use them in transitions and summaries and descriptions of people places or events this includes in third person omniscient it doesn't need to be objective 5. introspection is crucial to deepening emotional experiences beyond showing keep in mind what the character would focus on in describing or which poeticisms they would use 6. avoid melodrama by building up to big physical reactions showing people trying to hide control or moderate emotions using dramatic tags and grammar sparingly and avoiding excessive poeticism seven emotion and dialogue comes from people describing the things that make them feel contradictions between what they say and body language differences and speaking patterns disproportionate responses and implication and eight grammar and formatting can also be used poetically to represent emotional states stay nerdy and cuddle your cat for the future so so you

Channel: Hello Future Me

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Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, doctor who, tenant, return, episode, bridge to terabithia, short story, writing, author, booktube, booktok, authortok, show don't tell, haruki murakami, neil gaiman, stephen king, misery, it, house of leaves

Id: UUjUs5hAMHQ

Length: 40min 24sec (2424 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022