Writing teachers and coaches love to say “show, don’t tell.” Maybe this was obvious to everybody else, but when I heard it, I was a little baffled. Words are my medium, not pictures. I have to tell. If some words are showing and some are telling, how do I know when I’m showing?

These days, I rephrase it this way: choose the concrete over the abstract.

It’s a philosophical axiom that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. That is, everything we know, we know because we have sensed it somehow. We can later abstract from the senses: say, after seeing hundreds of smiles from a friend, you can think, “It makes my friend happy when I’m around.” But you can’t get there purely from abstraction. You have to have seen or heard something that makes you know it.

For that reason, concrete, sensory knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s most immediate. Things hit us more when they come in a form we can picture. That’s one of the reasons fiction is often more gripping than nonfiction: we have a whole array of mental images running across our minds as we read, something hard to imitate in a book about, say, the World of the Forms.

When writing, I always try to use the most concrete language I can.

Say what you mean

The most basic way to do this is simply to replace abstractions in your writing with physical realities. Abstract language allows readers to distance themselves from reality, while making it less clear what you mean. Because if you say unethical behavior, you could mean anything, whereas if you say “he shot a guy,” well, now we know exactly what you mean, and furthermore we probably feel more strongly about it.

Very abstract terminology is a popular way for propagandists to waffle what they’re saying. George Orwell put it this way:

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Consider terms like collateral damage or enhanced interrogation. Politicians say that because if they said, “I think it’s okay if kids on the sidelines of a war get killed,” or “I support half-drowning and beating people who haven’t been charged with any crime,” people would have a much stronger negative reaction.

When writing fiction, we want to do the exact opposite of political waffle words. We want realities to hit with all possible force. I do not want you to feel vaguely disapproving of the bad guys. I want you to be horrified by them. So I go through my drafts taking out the injustice of the system and putting in good people getting thrown out of airlocks; taking out I loved her and putting in I wanted to hold her in my arms again.

The rule of thumb here is not “words of one syllable” or anything like that. I want to bring these ideas into a form you can picture in your mind with at least one of your senses.

Replace summary with action

It’s very easy, especially in a first draft, to fall too much into summary. This is when you detail in a few paragraphs what happened, but without actually setting a scene. A similar issue is when you go on for several paragraphs of the main character’s thoughts. These sections aren’t very vivid.

Instead—at least when the material is important—you should take the time to set a scene and show us what happens. Replacing exposition or reflection with dialogue helps a lot.

Compare these two excerpts:

Alice always got depressed on Christmas. This year, they planned to go to her mother’s house, but she didn’t want to. She would have been happier staying at home. Now Christmas was only three days away.

With dialogue, we can do it like this:

Bob came into the kitchen, smiling. “Only three days till we go to your mom’s!”

Alice sighed. “Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”

“Why not?”

“I always get depressed on Christmas. To be honest, I’d rather stay at home.”

There’s no new information in the dialogue that wasn’t in the paragraph. But now it comes in a form you can picture in your mind. We’re in a kitchen now. You can play the voices in your head. We could pep it up further by describing the kitchen, by making it an argument, and so on. But even this little change makes it more vivid.

Now, you shouldn’t always do this. Some things just aren’t very important and can be shoved into a paragraph of exposition. But if something is important, and especially if it’s extending to paragraphs of material without any sensory details, it’s worth writing a whole scene for it. That tends to be a major part of turning a first draft into a second draft for me: taking things I rushed to get down any old way, and turning them into scenes the reader can visualize.

Metaphor

Some things simply don’t have concrete versions. If I say I’m depressed, that’s not really a euphemism for anything; you know what depression is. But it’s still not as vivid as it could be. That’s why readers resort to metaphor: depression is a dark cloud, it’s a heavy weight, it’s an unending drizzle of the soul. These are things you can see and feel.

Metaphors make it much easier for readers to have a sensory, visceral reaction to what you have to say. I really enjoy thinking up new ones. Remember: a metaphor can be used so often that readers gloss over it and don’t get the sensory image you want. So a fresh one will have the most effect.

One fun technique with metaphors is to consider how your point-of-view character thinks, what metaphors they might readily use. A botanist might compare his relationship to a well-tended garden; a soldier might say an idea hit her like a cannonball. This is especially important when writing a non-human or non-Terran character, who perhaps doesn’t use any of the metaphors that come most naturally to you. You can’t say “that man had all the grace of a newborn giraffe” if none of the characters present have seen a giraffe. That’s a great opportunity to branch out, to think about how your character lives their life. Maybe to them, the man has all the grace of a broken agricultural bot.

Characterization

Character development is one point when editors are most likely to say “show, don’t tell.” What they mean is, instead of telling us a character is shy, write us a scene in which the character demonstrates shyness in a way the reader will picture.

After all, there are a lot of different ways to be shy. We want the concrete version of this person being shy. We also are familiar with people lying about their character, so unconsciously, we tend not to believe what we’re told about people. We want to see their actions so we can judge for ourselves. Therefore, if we are really supposed to know that a character is honest, it’s not enough to say so, or even to have other characters say so. There has to be an example of them being honest at personal cost, in a situation other people would be tempted not to be.

A book can get bulky if you have all these scenes in there to show what the characters are like. So, to the degree possible, these character development scenes should also be doing another job in the book. Can the moment he’s being shy also be the inciting incident? Can the moment she’s being honest also introduce the antagonist? As the book goes on, with scene after scene, you’ll want to put in lots of examples of your character behaving in characteristic ways. That way, later in the book, when the character behaves uncharacteristically, we’ll recognize it: either as a sign that something is badly wrong, or that the character is growing as a person.

A rule of thumb, not a commandment

So: go out and write, and when you notice you’re slipping into a lot of abstract verbiage, try to think of a concrete way to say it instead, one we can imagine feeling with at least one of our senses.

That said, abstract words aren’t forbidden. I don’t think anything’s forbidden when you write, so long as you do it the right amount. You can introduce the idea in an abstract way, like “The people of the valley believed in a simple life, close to nature,” and then follow it up with, “Wagons creaked along the dirt roads, bringing goods to market. The farmers leading the oxen never raised their eyes to the trails of hyperships cruising by far above.” Now the reader sees what you mean in concrete terms. Both parts of the description are doing a job.

The important thing is making sure the ideas in your book are hitting the way you want them to: sometimes like a flick of cold water to the face; sometimes like a fist to the solar plexus. Did you feel that punch, just a little bit? That’s what you want to do to your readers once in a while.