Here is a sentence doing all the work and none of the feeling: Anna felt nervous as she waited for the results. It is clear, grammatical and completely forgettable. The reader is handed a conclusion rather than the evidence for it.
Showing is not a mysterious talent. It is a set of habits you can apply, sentence by sentence, to a draft you have already written. What follows are eight techniques, each with a before-and-after you can borrow the shape of. Take one scene you are not happy with and work through them in order.
1. Interrogate every flat sentence
Begin with the sentences that name an emotion outright: she was furious, he was embarrassed, they were bored. Do not delete them yet. Ask each one three questions. What caused this feeling? How would I know it was there if I were standing in the room? What would this person do with their hands?
Before: Marcus was angry about the meeting.
After: Marcus set his mug down hard enough to slop tea over the rim. "Fine," he said. "Do it your way."
The second version tells us nothing directly, and we know exactly how he feels. That trade is the whole craft in miniature.
2. Give the body a job
When a character is frightened, readers learn it through breath, temperature, balance and a sudden awareness of small sounds. Rather than listing sensations, choose the two details this particular person would notice. A woman who has spent her life in hospitals registers different things from a man who has never been in one.
The corridor smelled of floor polish and someone's reheated curry. Her coat was too warm. Somewhere behind her, a door clicked shut. Nothing in those lines says fear. Everything in them does.
3. Swap adjectives for action beats
Adverbs attached to dialogue are usually a confession that the dialogue is not carrying its weight. The word defensively is doing the acting for the character.
Before: "I'm not upset," she said defensively.
After: "I'm not upset." She squared the magazines on the table, edge to edge, until the pile was straight.
An action beat also controls rhythm. It gives the reader a pause, a beat of physical business, and the next line lands harder because of it.
4. Let objects carry the weight
Grief, guilt and love all leave traces on the physical world: a coat still on the hook by the door, a phone left face down, a box half-packed in the hall. Props are quiet, and quiet is persuasive.
He still set out two mugs in the morning. On Thursday he put one back in the cupboard.
Two sentences, no explanation, and the reader has done the emotional arithmetic themselves. That participation is what makes a scene stick.
5. Write the subtext, not the speech
People rarely say what is actually wrong. If a character is hurt that someone forgot an anniversary, the honest dialogue is not about the anniversary. It is about the weather, or the tea, or whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.
"Nice tea," he said.
She watched him stir it. "It's Thursday," she said.
The reader fills the gap. Be careful not to over-plant clues — one or two firm signals are enough, and the rest can stay in the dark where it belongs.
6. Try free indirect style
Free indirect style slips a character's thoughts into third-person narration without speech marks and without "she thought". It is the fastest way to replace summary with lived experience.
Before: She thought the flat was too big for one person now, and she missed her sister.
After: Three bedrooms. Two of them with the doors shut. She dried the same plate twice and put the kettle on for one.
The tense stays in the past, the voice bends towards the character, and the explanation disappears. Used sparingly, it brings a scene close without the claustrophobia of first person.
7. Cut the summary paragraph
Many scenes end with a paragraph that explains what just happened and how everyone should feel about it. Read the final two paragraphs of your scene and delete the last one. Often the scene simply stops, and that is where it should have stopped all along.
The instinct behind the summary is fear that readers will miss the point. They rarely do. Give them the room to arrive at it a half-second before you would have told them, and the scene feels intelligent rather than instructed.
8. Prune the sensory inventory
Three sensory details in a single paragraph is a crowd. Four is a furniture catalogue. Choose the one odd, specific detail that does the most work — not the generic scent of coffee, but the smell of coffee burned onto a hotplate since morning.
Precision beats quantity every time. One detail the reader has never quite thought of before is worth five they have read a hundred times.
When telling is the right call
Showing is not a religion. Explanation earns its place when speed and clarity matter more than immersion. Telling is the sensible choice for:
- Time passing between scenes — Three weeks later, the letters stopped.
- Minor characters and background detail the reader needs and will not linger over.
- Information the viewpoint character already knows and would not think about again.
- Transitions, so the reader arrives at the next scene oriented rather than confused.
The rule is not "never tell". It is "know which one you are doing, and why".
A ten-minute drill to try tonight
Pick one page of your own work, ideally a scene that feels flat but you cannot say why.
- Highlight every sentence that names an emotion or explains a motive.
- For each, write what a camera would see and a microphone would pick up.
- Replace the sentence with that, without using the emotion word. If you cannot, add one physical beat instead.
- Read the scene aloud. Where do you stumble, or where do you get bored? That is usually an explanation doing a scene's job.
- Delete the original sentences properly — no hedging with "as if" or "somehow".
- Do it again tomorrow on a different page.
Eight techniques, one page at a time. Within a fortnight of steady practice, the flat sentences will start to announce themselves while you draft, and the rewriting gets quicker from there.
Photo: Dieter_G / Pixabay
