As some of you know, when I’m not writing, I work as a materials engineer at an aerospace company. I recently had a conflict with one of my coworkers—I’ll call him Mr. Antagonist. Although it made my job very stressful, it ultimately taught me something about writing.

Mr. A and I used to get along okay, until he assigned me my latest project. It was a materials-related project, and I’m the materials engineer on his team, so it made sense for me to take ownership of it. Mr. A knows nothing about materials engineering, and for most of the project, he sat back and let me do my job. Then, when all the work was done, he swooped in and essentially took credit for it. He disinvited me from the meeting where he would be presenting my results to our customer. He took the report I’d written about the work I’d done and rewrote it in his own voice and style.

As you can imagine, this did not make me happy. In fact, I was so upset by Mr. A’s disrespect, I told my boss about it. He offered to talk to Mr. A and help him see things from my perspective. At our next team meeting, I could tell my boss had done this, because Mr. A spent several minutes trying to reassure me that I had played a major role in this project and my contributions were valued.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t buy it. Why? Because actions speak louder than words, and all of Mr. A’s actions had involved disrespecting me, taking advantage of me, or micromanaging me. He could have spent hours instead of minutes telling me how much he respected me, and it wouldn’t have made me believe him.

This is the cardinal writing rule “show, don’t tell” in action. You can tell readers how a character feels for pages on end, but you won’t really convince them—and thus get them emotionally invested in your story—until you show a character’s feelings through his actions and internals.

For example:

“Despite my disrespectful actions,” Mr. A said, “I really do respect you, Rachel.”
Rachel felt angry.

In this case, the reader can’t feel Rachel’s anger along with her because her feelings are told rather than shown. Let’s try this instead:

Rachel’s cheeks burned, and her fists clenched beneath the conference room table. The nerve of this guy! “Okay,” she said, resisting the urge to spit in his flabby face.

Isn’t that better? Let’s break it down. In writing, an effective emotional response has four components:

• Stimulus: the event that elicits the POV character’s emotional response (in this case, Mr. A’s line of dialogue)
• Emotions: a show of the POV character’s emotions through body language or internal sensations (cheeks burning, fists clenching)
• Thoughts: the POV character’s thoughts in reaction to the stimulus (The nerve of this guy!)
• Actions: after going through the emotions and thoughts, how the character acts to move the story forward (Rachel manages to stay polite, but another character may act differently)

As much as I hated working with this real-life antagonist, the experience improved my writing. It made me see “show, don’t tell” from a new perspective, and it helped me implement this age-old writing advice in my work-in-progress. I hope it will help you, too.