Evoking Sensation In Your Reader

Today's poster could have used three words--Don't tell. Show. If you tell your readers that it is raining, they are not going to have any sensation of rain. Show it and their memory bank will be pricked and the thoughts of rainy days they've experienced will slip through.

If we've ever gotten caught in the rain without raincoat or umbrella, we know the feeling of raindrops on skin, the wind making us cold and wet and goosebumps rising on our arms and neck. We know the way our wet hair droops and falls over our forehead letting rain run in rivulets down our cheeks and nose. We remember how our wet clothes clung to our bodies and dripped down our legs onto our feet. We think about the way we splashed hurriedly through puddles to get home where it was warm and dry. 

Write that It was raining when Jill left the park. and all you think about is that it is raining, none of the above. 

Show me that a man named Jim has the flu and my own memories of times when I suffered through it are going to rise to the surface. Tell me that Jim had flu and felt awful and I will slide right by and not think about his feverish body, his runny nose, his throat that hurt so bad he kept rubbing his neck to make it better, that his eyes burned and watered and on and on. We all know how really crummy we feel when we have an illness like this. 

Yes, good writing should evoke sensation in the reader and good writing will almost always choose show over tell. Once in awhile, we can get away with telling but keep it minimal.

Why don't we forgo telling and choose showing in nearly every instance? That's not hard to figure out. It's ever so much easier to tell than to show. It's one more symptom of lazy writing. Your mind has to work harder to show but, create a habit to do so, and you'll soon find that you don't have to think about it, that you show as your way to write. It becomes automatic.