shivver13 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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tenminutesaday2023-04-05 10:43 pm
shivver) wrote in tenminutesaday2023-04-05 10:43 pm
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Challenge #196
Today's an exercise in "show, don't tell". We're going to look for instances of telling and turning it into showing.
Take one or two paragraphs (no more) of something you've already written. Or, take a character and have them react to something - write only their reaction to it, not what the something is. Read through it and look for words that are entirely invisible to an observer, such as emotions and internal actions like thinking, and circle them. For example, you can't see that a person is happy - you can only see that they're smiling and you are inferring from that that they're happy.
Now, rewrite those phrases and sentences that you've circled by describing what the observer actually sees, hears, etc. that character do. Examples:
Old: "That's just what I wanted!" she cried excitedly.
New: "That's just what I wanted!" she cried. She leapt from the chair and snatched it from his hands, hugging it to her chest.
Old: He paused for a moment, thinking.
New: He paused for a moment, a hand clasped to his mouth as he gazed off into space.
Take one or two paragraphs (no more) of something you've already written. Or, take a character and have them react to something - write only their reaction to it, not what the something is. Read through it and look for words that are entirely invisible to an observer, such as emotions and internal actions like thinking, and circle them. For example, you can't see that a person is happy - you can only see that they're smiling and you are inferring from that that they're happy.
Now, rewrite those phrases and sentences that you've circled by describing what the observer actually sees, hears, etc. that character do. Examples:
Old: "That's just what I wanted!" she cried excitedly.
New: "That's just what I wanted!" she cried. She leapt from the chair and snatched it from his hands, hugging it to her chest.
Old: He paused for a moment, thinking.
New: He paused for a moment, a hand clasped to his mouth as he gazed off into space.
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If you'd like to take this a step further...
Write a few paragraphs of an interaction between two or more characters, or use one that you've already written. Determine who you want to be the point-of-view character. Now, do the above exercise, but only for the actions of the non-POV characters.
The idea here is that the narrator is in the head of the POV character, so it's okay to say something like "Donna smiled to herself, recognizing the absurdity of the Doctor's statement." However, the narrator should be trying to stay out of the heads of the other characters, so the prose should be saying what the POV character (or the narrator) sees. "The Doctor rambled on with no acknowledgement of the confused stares and muffled laughter from the ship's crew."