How To Show Vs Tell With The 6 Senses.

You’ve all heard about showing instead of telling about a million times. But have you heard of the 6th sense? You know what that is, we humans can gage what’s going on with someone without asking, we do this by picking up on body language and tiny signals we haven’t consiously picked up.

What I mean by the 6th sense in writing is what the character thinks. Not so much “‘Wow, the house is made of brick’ she thought” but more ‘She felt the wind on the left side of her face, she turned away not wanting to see the storm that was brewing.’ What the character thinks doesn’t have to come from inside their head but the actions they do can reflect what is going on inside their brain.

Another term used for this is called Introspection.

Introspection is where you tell the story from the character’s point of view. You tell the story as if you are a bug living inside the character’s brain and you get to see, touch, smell, taste, hear, and think everything that they do.

Some people have trouble with this especially if they are new to writing and they are writing in third person.

My suggestion to these people would be to write the story in first person and then change the ‘I’ to the character’s name when the story is finished.

See if it works for you next time you are struggling with introspection for your characters.