Everything You Need to Know about Writing You Learned in Kindergarten (A Seriously Write Blog Post)

Show & Tell.

Remember those days? Girls holding stinky, pet rabbits named “Fluffy”? Boys opening shoe boxes only to have their pet frog jump out and terrorize the class? Each stood before the class, giving you all the pertinent data, like how old the animal was, how much they ate, and where they got it.

In each case, you were TOLD all the details. You never saw the frog eat. You didn’t witness the birth of the rabbit, so its age was suspect. You just had to believe them.

We, as writers, are often guilty of Kindergartenitis. We TELL our readers what’s happening instead of SHOWING. It’s a common mistake. We TELL the reader the character’s age, her nationality, and what she’s driving down a crowded interstate. We leave little to the imagination.

Why do we do this? The answer is two-fold. First, we don’t trust our readers to “figure it out.” We’re afraid they’ll get it wrong. That’s why another common mistake follows closely: Detail overload. We feel we have to “make sure” they get it, so we go on and on explaining the diameter of the rivets on the airplane.

Boring.

Second, we get lazy. It’s easier to say, “The grungy, treacherous man sat at the table playing Solitaire, waiting for the ill-kept boat to rendezvous with the human traffickers.” We add the ten-dollar adjectives to spice it up. “That makes it real,” you say?

Yeah. Real boring.

SHOWING versus TELLING is subtle, but powerful, if done correctly:

On the other side of the table, playing cards, sat a skinny, tanned man. He wore a thin, white tank top t-shirt, blue jeans, and a filthy, diseased-looking ball cap. His sweaty, unbathed body exuded a raunchy, rancid odor which reminded Jacob of the locker room at the gym his dad took him to from time to time. But this stench was much worse. A hand gun rested on the table next to an open can of soda. The man hummed some Latin tune as he flipped card after card, occasionally shifting some once in a while from one pile to another.

 

Did you notice the game being played? Can the reader figure it out from the details? Sure can. This adds the tension to reading most readers crave. What do I mean by that? Not only do readers want the overall storyline to be engaging, but they want the mystery of the words to be engaging as well. They want to figure out the little details as much as “Whodunit” in the end.

Did you get a sense for the character of the characters? Smelly man’s the bad guy, right? What’s his profession? Can you guess it? Jacob is young, right? Goes to the gym with his father…

Can you smell the smells? See the scene in what I like to call “the movie screen of your mind”?

I’m not saying this paragraph is perfect. It comes from the third book in my Blake Meyers series, tentatively entitled The Tide of Times, which is presently in manuscript form and has yet to be edited fully. So, it may look different once published, but you get the point.

Don’t short sale your readers. Give them credit. As a writer, don’t forget what it is to be a reader. The things that other authors do which tick you off royally as a reader are probably the same things you should avoid when you write.

Now, go catch that frog!

To see this article on the Seriously Write website, click on the link below:

Everything You Need to Know about Writing You Learned in Kindergarten