There are 5 tools for showing.

• Dialogue
• Action
• Interior dialogue
• Interior emotion
• Description-Sensory

If you’re doing anything that’s not one of these 5 things, you’re not showing you are telling.

Why is it so important to show versus tell? Showing provides your reader with a powerful emotional experience. If you want to be a best selling author, that’s what you have to do.

It doesn’t matter how great you do everything else in that novel, if you’re missing that emotional experience, you lose. If everything you did is bad, but you have a great emotional experience, you may still win.

Every great novelist will tell you; you have to give your reader that powerful emotional experience, or they won’t be coming back.

-Something to think about 🙂

-Jan R