Good morning Christian writer friends! I hope you are well and have had a good weekend. I actually got round to doing some writing myself! Did you? Have you got a project on at the moment? If there’s anything stopping you, or if you need help with anything, let us know and let’s see if we can’t help in some way. 🙂
And so, on to today’s writing tip:
If a story doesn’t have emotion, it isn’t really a story. It’s a report.
All fiction will bring out emotions in our readers. There are lots of ways to do this, but one of the best ways to engage your readers is to show them how your characters are feeling, rather than tell them. This allows our readers to discover the emotion for themselves.
Here’s a quick writing exercise for you! Change the following “telling the readers” to a phrase that will “show the readers” the same emotion. For example, you could change Peter was cross to Peter pulled himself to full height and crossed his arms.
OK, go!
- Rosie felt sad.
- Olga was worried.
- Vinnie was excited.
- Eric was angry.
- Rashid felt crushed.
Please give your answers in the comments below or over on our facebook page . . . there is no right and wrong answer, so let’s see how many different answers we can come up with!
Yours, as always,
Janet
P.S. We go into “show not tell” in much more detail in the Write for a Reason course. The next one starts in April. If you’re interested you can find out more here.