It’s my pleasure to introduce Author Michelle Sutton, from Healing Hearts blog, to my humble little blog.

A number of years ago I struggled with the difference between showing a scene, and telling readers about it. As a novice, I told a lot. Then I read a book called Stein on Writing that overhauled my view of what it meant to show and not tell in a novel.

For example, instead of telling that a character was looking for a glass of wine on New Year’s Eve and loved to drink alcohol, I could show it in a scene. The character licking their lips, scouring the room for a table with beverages, and then sulking when all they could find was grape juice. I could even give them an internal thought about how they needed some Merlot to calm their nerves. It is so much more effective to show something.

The first book I sold has a lot of showing in the story. In It’s Not About Me, I write about the damage that pornography does to dating relationships. I never once tell the reader that it’s wrong. I just show the hold it has on the boyfriend and how it changes his personality. His girlfriend doesn’t understand his sudden desperation to get her in bed. He is no longer a caring boyfriend but driven with one thing in mind. Did I need to tell the reader that pornography was bad? I think it makes readers feel smarter when they are left to draw their own conclusions. They also invest more emotion in the story.

The other effective thing I gleaned from Stein on Writing that overhauled how I wrote fiction was the concept of creating an envelope and letting the reader fill it. I started trickling in little things instead of dumping the facts onto the readers lap from page one. It seems to have worked because by giving readers the bare essentials in a story, their minds decide to fill in the rest of the details. For example I might show a character is very tall by having him hit his head on the doorframe while walking in a stranger’s house. Then in the next chapter I might describe his hair and compare it to the color of grandma’s mink coat. In the third chapter I might toss in something about his teeth and his voice. Do you get what I’m saying here? Try it, and I think you’ll find it makes a big difference in your work.

Thanks, Linda, for having me on your blog today.

Michelle Sutton is the author of over a dozen novels, a member of ACFW, an avid book reviewer and blogger, the mother of two awesome young college students, the wife to wonderful man for over two decades, and a follower of Jesus Christ.