“Your job is not to REPORT what happened. Your job is to make the reader EXPERIENCE what happened. There’s a universe of difference between ‘she was sad’ and ‘she stared at the cold coffee she’d forgotten to drink.’”
— L.A. Walton, The Book Maven
If your writing reads like an incident report—‘Subject was angry. Subject entered room. Subject confronted partner’—we need to talk. Stories are not summaries. They’re immersive experiences. And the difference between a summary and an experience is the difference between ‘telling’ and ‘showing.’
The Overwriting/Underwriting Spectrum
| Underwriting (Police Report) | Just Right (Goldilocks Zone) | Overwriting (Purple Prose) |
| “She was sad.” | “She traced the rim of her cold coffee, watching the cream swirl like a tiny galaxy going nowhere.” | “The abyssal depths of her sorrow cascaded through her trembling soul like an endless waterfall of crystalline despair.” |
| Too little detail. | Specific, sensory, emotionally resonant. | So much detail the meaning drowns. |
| Reader feels nothing. | Reader feels everything. | Reader rolls their eyes. |
Finding the Balance
- Use specific, concrete details. Not ‘a flower’ but ‘a wilted daisy in a chipped glass.’ Specificity creates intimacy.
- Engage at least two senses per scene. Sight plus sound, smell, touch, or taste. Multisensory writing = immersive writing.
- Let actions reveal emotions. Instead of naming the feeling, show the behavior the feeling causes.
- Cut adjective stacking. Two adjectives max per noun. More than that and you’re decorating, not describing.
- Read it out loud. If a passage makes you cringe with its melodrama, it’s overwritten. If you skim it, it’s underwritten.
Your Move, Creative
Find five ‘telling’ sentences in your current draft. Rewrite each one as a ‘showing’ moment using specific sensory details and character action. Then check: did any of them tip into purple prose? Adjust until they sit in the Goldilocks zone.
Stop letting your stories stay stuck.
