On Writing

Don’t Tell Me How to Feel

Make me feel it, instead.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

We are admonished, repeatedly: “Show, don’t tell!” It is good advice, if you know what the Hell it means. Ironically, too many writing teachers can’t follow their own advice — they explain what they mean, but they give and require too few examples of it.

Try this:

1. Write a paragraph telling me exactly what you had for dinner last night.
2. Now, write a description of the dinner hour: make me see your surroundings, smell the meal as it is being prepared, hear the conversation and the clattering of silverware against the plate, taste every dish — salty, savory, or sweet, and feel (emotionally and physically) the experience of the dinner you had last night.

As the famous Depression-era salesman, Elmer Wheeler, said, “Don’t sell the steak — sell the sizzle!”

In writing, theater, and film — it is essential to coax from the reader their willing suspension of disbelief. That is, we must get them to drop their guard and forget, if only for an hour or three, that they are reading a book, or sitting in a darkened auditorium watching actors move across a stage, or viewing tiny, pixellated people in an electronic box in their living room. We must convince them to drop their critical thinking skills, if…