Inside the Wonder World, Lesson 23

Show Don't Tell through Gesture & Sensory Detail

Welcome to my Friday edition of Substack, which features my paid posts: Inside the Wonder World.

Those paid subscribers who stick with me for a year will get a free copy of the book as soon as it’s out.

Inside the Wonder World is the working title of my developing craft book on writing and publishing for young readers. I’m bringing it to you in pieces, both to help you learn something more deeply (lessons and exercises included) and to push me to finish this lofty goal.

Here’s the next lesson!

Show Through Gesture

The second way to convey emotion through showing and not telling is through action. We can call action by a character “gesture”, because it can range from the smallest tic to the big behaviors.

We are hard-wired to take cues from body language. Just ask anyone who can’t take those cues – they have a hard time “reading what someone is feeling”. For most of us, however, reading body language is a matter of survival, so we need to be good at it.

As an example of using action to convey emotion, let’s go back to our guys Paul and Harry.