: Re: How do I write "Show, Don't Tell" as a person with Asperger Syndrome? I have been told by my friends that my writing seems a bit blunt in the sense of I rarely practice "Show, Don't Tell"

@Ravi5107385

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I also have Asperger Syndrome. Before I explain how I "write around it", let me talk a little about showing and telling.

Writing isn't what it used to be, and I don't mean that in a bad way. In competing with film and TV for people's attention, novels have started to mimic the way such media tell a story through what can be seen and heard. True, good writing mentions other senses too; but the lesson has been that revealing inner mental states is unnecessary in good story-telling. I won't rehearse the arguments for why you should show rather than tell; this question wasn't about how good such advice is.

OK, so how do we do it?

Modern writers have grown up in an environment where most of the stories they consume are from film and TV, where characters' visible and audible mannerisms show us what they're feeling. As an Aspie, I can understand such inferences don't come easily in real-life interactions. But with fiction, several factors make it easier: the fact that there's a plot with a well-defined beginning, middle and end, providing enough context to infer mental states another way; the fact you can rewind and replay as much as you need to notice little details; and the fact that fictional characters have authors behind them, trying to make their mental-physical correlations as clear as possible and, in particular, as close as possible to the rest of the fiction they and their audience has consumed.

Does this mean I'd expect you to pass a written exam on what each kind of body language means? No, I understand your situation better than that. Even if you "know" the right answer, it can be hard to put into words. But don't worry! You don't actually need to be able to do that. All you need to do is visualize the scene. You can do this whether you're writing a script intended for TV, or a very different format you can imagine getting such an adaptation.

When I visualize my characters doing things, I'll be honest: my brain doesn't invent their appearances ex nihilo. Usually I take fictional characters I know from other visual works, then "recast" them. (The characters I choose might actually contradict how I said my own characters look; it doesn't matter.) But in my mind, I can see new footage they've never been in before, where they do what my plot says they do. OK. What's their body language like when I do that? Unsurprisingly, roughly what other writers would make it, because I've seen so much of how that turns out. My brain has become ingrained with some patterns, even if I don't know what they are, just as I don't need to solve equations to throw a ball.

So before you write the next minute or so of your characters' interactions, close your eyes and try to see them doing it. I'll let you decide whether you need to say their dialogue out loud, and if so where you'll quietly do it. Maybe you'll find this easiest to do at night in your dreams. That's not important: you do you. But as you see it all, your brain will invent body language. It will; it can't help it. So no matter how little you understand that body language, write it down. (If a reader can double-check that it seems natural, that's all the better.) Saying what a character did in one sentence and what they said in another is a popular, and these days arguably indispensable, alternative to traditional dialogue tags, where dangerous telling most frequently arises with writers who know they'll need to work on it.

Now, you may find you see too much body language to remember it all, or to feel it should all be there. Yeah, that's fine too. If you tell me in one example what eyebrows did and in another what hands did and in another where a character's gaze went, that's rich; if you tell me all of them every time, that's boring, like you're filling in every column of a spreadsheet. Note what strikes you most.

A few years ago, I came across Stephenie Meyer's characters' tendency to sigh. I realized one of my novels had a lot of sighing. So I re-read those sections and tried visualizing the scenes again, and noticed every sigh meant something different. Then I visualized them yet again, with the meaning first and foremost, and found the body language changed to something different each time. (Well, OK; I think I visualized each scene twice before moving onto the next one, rather than going through the whole sequence twice, but still.) That did my writing wonders. But you can save this sort of tactic to your redrafting.

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