On Writing
Don’t Tell Me How to Feel
Make me feel it, instead.
We are admonished, repeatedly: “Show, don’t tell!” It is good advice, if you know what the Hell it means. Ironically, too many writing teachers can’t follow their own advice — they explain what they mean, but they give and require too few examples of it.
Try this:
- Write a paragraph telling me exactly what you had for dinner last night.
- Now, write a description of the dinner hour: make me see your surroundings, smell the meal as it is being prepared, hear the conversation and the clattering of silverware against the plate, taste every dish — salty, savory, or sweet, and feel (emotionally and physically) the experience of the dinner you had last night.
As the famous Depression-era salesman, Elmer Wheeler, said, “Don’t sell the steak — sell the sizzle!”
In writing, theater, and film — it is essential to coax from the reader their willing suspension of disbelief. That is, we must get them to drop their guard and forget, if only for an hour or three, that they are reading a book, or sitting in a darkened auditorium watching actors move across a stage, or viewing tiny, pixellated people in an electronic box in their living room. We must convince them to drop their critical thinking skills, if only for a brief time, and be willing to believe that these characters and the stories they live out upon the page, stage, or screen are real.
In order to do this, we must make our audience into willing partners — even actors, in their own imaginations. We must set the stage, shove the actors and the audience out onto it, and give them props and situations that move the story forward. Always forward.
Emotions play a crucial role in this.
Never yank the reader out of the reverie by giving them reason to shout, “The Hell I do!” This is what happens when you tell them how to think or how to feel about what you’ve written. That’s not your job; your job is to make it impossible for them not to agree or to feel it.
This also applies to non-fiction writers and advertisers. Don’t tell me I’ll be “happy” that I chose to read your articles or subscribe to your blog; show me, through your writing, the ways in which you’ll enrich the time I spend reading your work or watching your videos. In other words, hush — just prove it. You might tell me what sort of topics you write about, and what your expertise is — that adds weight to whether I should believe, or should at least suspend my disbelief, long enough to read and consider your arguments.
Logical fallacies may sometimes be effective, when skillfully employed. All writers are propagandists, up to a point; not all propaganda is evil. It’s our job to persuade and to convince, often by plucking the reader’s heartstrings. Twing! Plunk! Ziiiing! But rely too heavily on logical fallacies, and you will wake the conscious, critical mind; and a heavy-handed appeal to emotion may destroy the carefully crafted “reality” of the heart-wrenching tale — fiction or non-fiction — and drive the reader to roll their eyes or yell, “The HELL I do!” and click on to the next thing, rather than to respond to your call to action or share your work with friends.
