Sometimes the best edit you can make to an emotional scene is to delete the sentence that explains why it was emotional.
In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I’m looking at a habit I see surprisingly often in manuscripts: a writer creates a strong emotional beat through behaviour, dialogue, silence or physical detail... and then immediately explains what the character is feeling.
The trouble is, that explanation can rob the original moment of its power.
We’ll explore why writers often don’t trust what they’ve already put on the page, how emotional over-explanation stops the reader from participating in the story, and why your characters don’t always need to understand their own feelings with the precision of a trained therapist. We’ll also look at why “show, don’t tell” isn’t really the rule you need. The more useful question is: are you telling the reader something you’ve already successfully shown them?
Choose an emotional scene from your manuscript and look for places where you’ve written:
behaviour → explanation
dialogue → explanation
physical sensation → explanation
image → explanation
Temporarily delete the explanation and read the passage again.
Does the reader still understand enough?
Not everything. Enough.
You may discover that the behaviour, dialogue or image was already doing all the work - and that the explanatory sentence was simply getting in its way.
If this episode helps you with your writing, please like the episode and subscribe to Master Fiction Writing so you don’t miss future episodes.
And if you’d like some expert help figuring out what’s working in your story, what isn’t, and what to tackle next, you can find out more about working with me as your book coach at:
The Book Coach — Less Stress. More Story.
