Show, don’t tell

A writer friend sent me an essay from the New York Time’s Modern Love column. The topic was devastating, yet I didn’t feel the emotions that I should have from such a tragic personal story—and neither did she. She asked me whether I thought it was because the author was telling her story rather than having the reader experience it for themselves. After I read the piece I agreed that it was exactly for that reason that the essay fell flat.

There was so much the author could’ve done to bring the reader into the story through sense-based descriptions for example. Rather than allowing us to think and feel, the author rhymed off a laundry list of things about her situation, robbing the reader of the flesh-and-blood immediacy of the story.

This is a good lesson for writers just starting out, to put this on your writing radar! Readers want to enter your story, to be part of it, so allow them to do so.