การแสดงให้เห็นภาพ (Show Don’t Tell)

Showing requires readers to participate by using their imaginations to come to their own conclusions based on the writer’s words. Writer are not telling readers. Readers are being shown what going on and are pulled into the story because they have to interpret the writer’s meaning themselves.

Doesn’t this sound like real life? In real life, we see and hear scenes, and we have to interpret them ourselves. Most of us don’t have a narrator who tells us what is going on in our daily lives. We have to make up our own minds, given what we see and hear.

When we interpret information ourselves, we bring our own experiences and personalities to a story. We add to the story and make it our own. We personalize it. We know how we’d feel in similar situations, and we bring these thoughts and feelings to the story. Through this participation, we have drawn or pulled into the story. We’re involved.

… If you watch a horror movie, the director wants you to feel scared - horrified, even. If you watch a romance, the director wants you to feel love, happiness and hope for the future. If you watch a drama, the director wants you to feel the drama.

As a writer, your job should be to create images within your own readers’ minds that invoke  a prescribed response from your readers i.e. which elicit emotions. You want your readers to feel the emotions your characters experience during each situation or scene. The difference is that you’re using words, and not film to create the images.

… Here are some examples of telling:

• She felt tired.
• He was worried
• It was stormy.

Here are the same examples using show instead of tell:

• She fell into a chair. Her feet ached and she thought about removing her shoes but she couldn’t muster the energy.
• He closed his eyes, frowned and rubbed his forehead. What was he going to do?
• He looked out the kitchen window. Rain splattered against the glass and drilled a staccato beat on the iron roof. Thunder crashed overhead. His dog whined.

And so on.

In your copywriting, let your readers take a stroll down a path with you or let them smell fragrance through your nose or let them experience some of emotions you are feeling by forming a mental picture from your description.

If I were writing an advertisement for Corvette sports car,  I might say, “Take a ride in the new Corvette. Feel the breeze blowing to your hair as you drive through the warm evening. Watch heads turn. Punch the accelerator to the floor and feel the burst of power that pins you into the back of your contour seat. Look beautiful display of electronic technology right on your dashboard. Feel the power and excitement of America’s super sports car.”

I would still explain all the special features of the car --- the logic upon which to justify its purchase --- but I would really play up that feeling of involvement and ownership.

… The feeling of ownership is a concept that is pretty close to the feeling of involvement, but here you are making readers feel that they already own the product and you letting them use their imagination as you take them through the steps of what it would be like if they already own it. An example might be, “When you receive your exercise device, work out on it. Adjust the weights. See how easy it is to store under your bed ...” In short, you are making them feel that they have already bought the product.

… By using specific visual words, you can give your audience a sense of what it’s like to actually interact with your products or enjoy the benefits of your service --- to demonstrate its use inside their minds --- long before they actually buy it. This vicarious pleasure is where persuasion begins, because the first use of any product is inside customers’ minds. (Stop. Read that last sentence again.) Imagining the use of something that appeals to you increase your desire for it.

For example, let’s say you love ice cream. If you spend all afternoon thinking about ordering a giant hot fudge sundae at dinner with three giant scoops of Guittard mint chocolate chip, two big ladle of streaming, extra-dark hot fudge, chopped wet nuts, all blanketed in a cloud of fluffy whipped cream with a maraschino cherry on top, you’re naturally going to want it more than if you hadn’t thought about it.

And ultimately --- if that desire is strong enough --- you will take some form of action that results in your having mint chocolate chip ice cream, hot fudge, chopped nuts, and a maraschino cherry floating around in your stomach. (And perhaps some in your lap, too, if you’re particularly exuberant while eating it.)

Again, notice how my choice of words causes you imagine ice cream, nuts, streaming-hot fudge and a bright red cherry floating in  your stomach. If I instead said, “you’ll take some form of action that result in your having eaten it,” your mental movie screen would have --- POOF --- gone blank. And --- this is critical --- The less imagery you convey, the less your message occupies consumers’ brains, the less likely it is that you’ll influence them. Let me drive this point home with another example.

Let’s look at transforming a bland sentence with no imagery power into Hollywood blockbuster. The bland sentence is: “Go somewhere and do something.” Yawn. Each successive variation of this sentence will build in visual intensity, not simply because we add words and sentences, but because the words I use are intentionally selected to install mental movies --- visual --- in your head.

• Go somewhere and do something. (This is a blank movie screen. No Imagery.)
• Go somewhere and get something. (Do can mean anything. Get is more specific.)
• Go to the kitchen and get something. (Still vague, but now you know where to go.)
• Go to the kitchen and get some food. (Ahh, now we’re getting somewhere. Do you see how filling in the detail creates imagery?)
• Go to the kitchen, open the oven, and get food. (Notice how you picture yourself opening and oven. Specific wording implants images. Action words create moving pictures.)
• Go to the kitchen, open the oven, and pull out the pizza. (Very visual. A picture of pizza pops into your head, whether you want it or not! See the power of this? You can’t help but picture what I write about, if I use specific words.)
• Go to the kitchen, open the oven, and pull out the freshest, crispiest, most delicious hot pizza you’ve ever eaten. Go on, cut yourself a big, hearty slice. Careful, it’s hot! Now take a big bite. Talk about crisp! The dough was made fresh this morning and bake in a virgin olive oil-coated black pan for a thick, deep-dish Chicago style crust. The sauce? Prepared from scratch, of course, from juicy plum potatoes picked this morning, and blended with select fresh herbs from our garden. Cheese? You betcha! Lots and lots chewy, whole-milk mozzarella, made from the finest buffalo milk, of course, and the entire pie baked to bubbling perfection in a 750-degree wood-burning brick oven imported from Genoa, Italy. (Okay, I really maxed out this one to prove my point. And chances are you experienced a rich and detailed series of images by simply reading my words.)