Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling

By David Brown and Michelle Barker

A great novel is honed, not hatched.

There are two pillars to effective storytelling: immersion and emotional draw. Immersion is what transports readers into your story world. Emotional draw is what keeps them there.

This book will take you deep into the craft workshop of the Darling Axe's two senior editors. Michelle and David's core editorial philosophy is simple: every element of a story must serve the reader's experience.

First Pillar topics include: the writer's maxim of "show, don't tell", intersections of voice and POV, head hopping, setting, world building across genres, crafting a strong hook, backstory, immersive description, body language, dialogue, filter words or filter verbs, and pacing at the level of scene and chapter.

Second Pillar topics include: intersections of plot and character, finding a narrative goal, the psychology of characterization, plot complexity or secondary plotlines, the art of narrative structure and the power of plot points, the hero's journey, the connection between inciting incident and climax, causality in fiction and narrative nonfiction, symbolism, theme, and crafting the perfect ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darling Axe Publishing
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738076611

David Brown

David Brown has 40 years of experience as a pastor and church planter in France, with a dozen books published in French. He is leader of the Church Revitalisation Network run by the European Leadership Forum, teaching seminars and mentoring pastors across Europe.

Book preview

The First Pillar: Immersion

Sinking Readers into Your Story World

Immersion is the quality of a piece of fiction that transports readers into the story world, making them feel as though they’re actually there. Stephen King refers to this as an act of telepathy—you, the author, have an image of a scene in your mind that you need to reproduce in the minds of your readers. To create and maintain immersion, you must provide consistent and persistent sensory details, especially as they relate to the protagonist’s moment-to-moment experience of each scene.

What Breaks a Reader’s Immersion

There are many elements that can pull readers out of the story and break immersion. Some of these include:

Expectation gaps: A lack of sensory details about a scene or setting can cause readers to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, only to have their expectations shattered when a significant detail is revealed later. For example, when a scene opens with two characters speaking, and then on the next page it’s revealed that there’s a third person in the room.

Ineffective handling of point of view: If the reader is unsure whose head they’re in or unconvinced of the authenticity of the POV character, they won’t stick around to find out what happens to them.

Lack of detail when describing action: If readers can’t follow what’s going on, they will quickly lose interest. What’s happening in a scene, where it’s happening, and who is involved should all be clear. On the other hand, why something is happening can often be left as a question mark for readers to figure out as the story unfolds.

Overly long descriptions: Sensory detail is crucial to immersion, but if descriptions go on and on, readers get bored.

Showcasing narrative context over the protagonist’s moment-to-moment experience: When exposition shifts into explanations about context (which can include backstory, world-building, or author research), it means you’ve left your characters and what they’re doing in the story behind. A reader can’t visualize information. Try not to take them too far away from the scene. An especially large chunk of context is referred to as an infodump.

Minimalist dialogue: If there are few dialogue tags, actions, or descriptions, readers can lose track of who is speaking. The moment they stop to wonder who a line belongs to, they’re no longer in the story.

Language: If the prose is too flowery or the vocabulary too difficult, readers might start thinking about the prose more than about what’s happening in the story. This, however, relates to the target audience. You can get away with more poetic prose in literary novels and if the narrator has a strong and consistent voice.

Pacing: If things are moving too quickly or too slowly, readers might feel either left behind or bored. Again, whatever causes a reader to think about anything other than the unfolding story will impact their immersion.

Mistakes: Typos, grammatical errors, and word repetition can pull readers out of the story, which is why line editing and proofreading are crucial to a novel’s success.

Building and Maintaining Immersion

To build and maintain immersion, you must focus on the protagonist’s moment-to-moment experience of each scene. This means making sure that the setting, characters, and actions are all well described, with consistent and persistent sensory details.

Adding asides that develop character and give readers the protagonist’s thoughts or feelings on what has just happened, what is happening, or what might happen next are also helpful. The most important thing is to make sure that what is happening is clear above all else.

But what is the best way to bring clarity to the reader’s experience? Aha! Glad you asked. The answer is most frequently summed up with an axiom that drives many writers to tears: show, don’t tell. Often misunderstood. Often poorly explained. Sometimes overstated. And quite possibly a contradiction in terms.

Let’s take a closer look.

Chapter One

More Show, Less Tell

Show, don’t tell may be the most often cited piece of advice given to writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction—and yet it may also be the most commonly misunderstood.

For most writers, the default setting is to tell a story rather than show it. You’re a storyteller, after all. But it’s a misnomer. It might be more helpful to think of writing along the lines of John Gardner’s fictional dream. You’re a dream-weaver, and the one thing you don’t want is for your dreamers (readers) to wake up. You want them to be so caught up in the dream of your fictional world, it’s as though they’re living it themselves.

The problem is, writers tend to want to write about their story rather than diving in headfirst. You want to explain your way around it. You want to present information about a character rather than demonstrating how they behave and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

How do you show instead of tell? By dramatizing. That’s what showing really is. You don’t tell your readers that Adam is jealous. You describe that sideways glare he’s giving his girlfriend. You allow him to make a snide remark. You describe the bitter taste in his mouth. The word jealous might never even appear in the passage, but your readers will know without a doubt what affliction Adam is suffering from.

Telling is the delivery of context as flat information—explanation rather than dramatization. You tell the reader Adam was jealous and then you move on, thinking the job is done. In more extreme examples of telling, you might stop the story completely to give a full description of how your world works or provide a life history of your protagonist because you think your readers need this information before they can read on. (Hint: don’t do these things.)

When an editor says they want you to show something rather than telling it, they are asking for more scene and less context.

What is a scene? It is two or more characters interacting right in front of you as though they were up on stage. They will be talking to each other in a specific setting (the details of which you will have provided), and they will probably also be doing things (which you will make sure are relevant to the plot and fit with their character). Gestures will be involved, as will sensory detail. Depending on the point of view you’ve chosen, readers might learn what one of them is thinking. Their feelings will probably be transmitted through their behavior. And, most important of all: there will be conflict. These are characters who do not get along. Conflict is the lifeblood of story. Without conflict, your readers will have no impetus to find out what happens next.

Writing in scene keeps the story moving and creates a vicarious experience for readers. Rather than telling readers what to think, you present the scene to them and allow them to draw their own conclusions.

Simple enough? Not quite. There is an inherent contradiction in the show, don’t tell rule, so it’s no surprise that the concept baffles many writers.

Showing versus Telling: The Contradiction

Truth? Something had been bothering us about this rule for years.

When you think about it, David said to Michelle one day, "isn’t everything other than dialogue a form of telling?"

Yes! That’s it exactly. Take a closer look at passages of description or action: how is that not actually telling? Either you tell readers that Adam is jealous, or you tell them about his glare and snide remark. Where is the boundary between showing and telling? Is there one?

Well, there is, but it’s fuzzy, and like all rules of fiction, it can be bent to the breaking point if done well.

Telling versus Showing—some examples

Telling: She felt nervous about the test.

Showing: She clutched her pencil and took a shaky breath as she flipped over her exam.

Telling: The dog was playful.

Showing: The dog bounded across the yard and pounced on its favorite ball.

Telling: The town was quiet.

Showing: The only sounds were a faraway highway and the distant hooting of an owl.

Telling: The old man was sad.

Showing: The old man slouched into the seat, blinking back tears.

The Artful Way… and the Other Way

As we’ve said, authors are storytellers. That’s what you’re doing when you write a novel. You are telling a story. But there’s an artful way to do it and then there’s the other way: the way that will annoy a reader and take them out of that full immersion state you’re aiming for. You’ve probably read at least one novel that has swallowed you whole. Hours pass, and you suddenly realize it’s lunchtime and you still haven’t showered. Again, John Gardner’s fictional dream is a helpful barometer in determining whether you’re engaging or annoying your readers. You want to do everything possible to keep readers in that trance state. Think about what happens on a theater stage. Actors in a specific setting are doing things and speaking to each other. They gesture. They behave and speak in certain ways that allow you to draw conclusions about who they are as people. Perhaps most importantly, they are in a state of conflict nearly all the time. Sounds a lot like our description of a scene, doesn’t it?

Here are some things that don’t happen on a theater stage:

The actors don’t stand there and announce, I’m feeling happy.

They don’t sit down in a room by themselves and think out loud for half an hour.

They don’t stop the play to say, Hold on. Let me summarize the history of Copenhagen, or whatever the play happens to be about.

They don’t sit down in the middle of the play and tell the audience their whole life story.

That’s the sort of telling that thwarts the reader’s experience. It breaks the trance. That’s the storytelling you want to steer clear of.

If your narrator has a particularly engaging voice, you might be able to get away with more telling than usual. But sooner or later, your readers will crave forward momentum. They might not express it in editorial terms—that’s us scribbling in the margin of your manuscript, Where’s the scene? This is all telling. Your readers will experience it as a realization that they’ve read the same paragraph four times, and guess what? Netflix is looking pretty good right about now.

Here are some guidelines to consider when you’re mulling over how to turn telling into showing:

Character traits: Rather than telling your readers that a character is brave or timid, show these traits through the character’s actions, decisions, and reactions to different situations.

Skills: Don’t tell the reader that your character is a plumber. Show them in action, fixing a sink.

Relationships: Instead of stating that two characters are best friends or bitter enemies, show their relationship through their interactions, the way they speak to and about each other, and how they treat each other.

Setting: Don’t tell the reader it’s a hot summer day. Show the sweat beading up on a character’s forehead, the parched grass underfoot, the relentless sun overhead. Make the reader feel the heat.

Backstory: Instead of telling your readers that a character has a troubled past, show it through their behavior, choices, and perhaps through well-placed, subtle flashbacks or references to their past.

Conflict and tension: Show conflict and tension through dialogue, actions, and internal thoughts. Instead of telling your reader that the room was tense, show characters avoiding eye contact, fidgeting, or arguing.

Physical appearance: Rather than rattling off a long list of a character’s physical attributes, show them through the character’s actions—how they use their appearance, or how other characters react to them. And don’t forget to reinforce these descriptive actions and reactions from time to time.

Foreshadowing: Instead of bluntly telling the reader something will happen, show it through small, subtle hints woven into the story.

Sensory detail: Immerse the reader in the scene by appealing to their senses. Show the crunch of gravel, the sour smell of trash, the whisper of the wind, the taste of salty tears, or the rough texture of an old wooden table.

Sensory detail goes a long way toward creating that immersive experience you’re aiming for. It brings the reader directly into the scene. A scene needs to take place somewhere, after all, and you don’t have the benefit of a theater stage with a set behind you. As a novelist, you must do that job and let the reader know what the setting looks like.

But are you going to simply load all this detail onto the page? No. That would be doing things the other way. You’re going to do it artfully.

Think about who your character is and how they’re feeling at that moment, because that will dictate what they notice and how they describe it.

Think about the timing of this description to make sure it’s appropriate.

Focus on the unique aspects of the scene, things a reader might not imagine on their own.

Focus on what’s important