Writing is hard. It takes practice, as do all forms of art. It’s difficult for someone who has never written before to pick up a pen (or keyboard) and write a story that is compelling and coherent. When I started writing, there were way too many “and then”-s, “she said”-s, and just overcomplicating my sentences with useless words. The biggest issue, though, was figuring out how to treat the reader as an inquisitive and intelligent being, rather than a mindless sack who needs everything to be told to them.

The first time I attempted to write anything substantial, I used an online writing site called QuoteV, which was a website where you could write and publish a novel chapter-by-chapter for anyone to read for free. This was years ago now, but I still remember having written three chapters of that ‘book’ and subsequently abandoning it.

It was bad.

A lot of what made it bad was that I didn’t yet know how to write. I would construct a scene in my head, for example – a scene of my character, shivering and robed in a fur cloak, trudging through the snow, his weighted boots sinking deep into the icy whiteness with each step while he pushed through a mighty blizzard in pursuit of a woman who’s face he’d never seen before. I’d then put fingers to keyboard, and write this:

“It was cold that night, and the snow was very deep. [character name] was following a woman he’d never met through the blizzard, eager to discover who she was.”

Yuck.

Putting aside my physical disgust at having written that sentence, you can see that it’s somehow turned the captivating situation I wrote up beforehand into an extremely boring one. Nobody wants to read that for hundreds of pages in a row. Why’s that, you ask? Because your reader wants to use their imagination – that’s why they’re reading.

The phrase “show, don’t tell” is probably one of the most important guidelines to stick to when writing. When we’re telling the reader something, we’re informing them about an event. We’re essentially giving them binoculars in order to watch something happen from afar. The reader doesn’t care, they’re just watching. They’re not invested in the characters or what they’re doing. If you tell the reader everything, there’s nothing for them to grow attached to, no feelings to experience besides what you’ve told them to experience.

When you show instead, you put the reader directly into the scene. They experience it with the characters, they walk alongside them, feel their pain and happiness, and they suddenly start caring about the world you’ve built around them.

So, if you’re writing, and you’re telling a lot, how do you stop doing that?

The first step, obviously, is to recognise you’re doing it. You can’t prevent or fix something if you don’t know, or refuse to believe, anything is wrong. The second step is to imagine yourself in the situation. What do you see? What do you hear or smell? What are people doing around you, how are they acting?

Let’s do an exercise. Your character is in a building, and suddenly, there’s an earthquake. How do you describe it to your reader?

By telling, it would be easy: Suddenly, a fierce earthquake rocked the ground.

Not much wiggle room for creativity, or for the reader to engage with the situation. Let’s improve it:

The ground beneath him start to shudder. The pens and pencils on the table rocked back and forth from the tremors, and the water spilled from his glass. The shuddering slowly got stronger and stronger, knocking books off of shelves, paintings off of walls, and George even lost his balance, falling to the ground.
“Earthquake!” Simon yelled, quickly hiding under a table to protect himself.

This is a vast improvement from the previous sentence, for sure. However, we can still notice that we’re telling the reader things. For example, if pens and pencils are rocking back and forth, we don’t need to tell the reader that it’s because of the earthquake – they can figure that out for themselves easily. If Simon is hiding under a table, we don’t need to tell the reader it’s to protect himself, the reader can figure that out easily too. Let’s improve it even more:

Suddenly, the ground beneath him start to shudder. The pens and pencils on the table rocked back and forth, and the water began to spill from his glass, soaking his documents. Books were being knocked off of shelves, paintings off of walls, and poor George even lost his balance, falling to the ground with a solid thud.
“Earthquake!” Simon yelled, and immediately cowered underneath a nearby table.

It’s difficult to get the hang of, but it’s important. Of course, you need to have an engaging story to begin with, but writing well like this makes all the difference between whether your reader thinks your story is as engaging as you think it is, or whether they think you’re full of baloney.