5 Daily Exercises to Practice Show, Don't Tell

This article extends Show, Don't Tell: 10 before/after examples to transform your writing style. The goal here is practical: five mini-exercises you can complete in ten to fifteen minutes, with no pressure to produce anything publishable. The idea is to train your eye and your hand to spot the emotional shortcuts you take out of habit.

You can practice them outside your novel on standalone scenes, or directly inside your story's universe in exploration mode. The second option has the advantage of feeding your manuscript while sharpening your technique.

Exercise 1: Translate a list of emotions into physical scenes

Take five fundamental emotions — fear, joy, shame, jealousy, and pride. For each, write a Tell sentence first, something like "She was ashamed" or "He was proud." Then rewrite that same emotion as a three-to-five-line vignette that shows it without ever naming it.

The work consists of looking for three types of signals. First, physical signals: a tight throat, sweaty palms, quickened breathing, shoulders that drop with relief. Then behavioral reactions: flight, compensatory aggression, performative humor, sudden silence. Finally, setting details filtered through the character's emotional state: a familiar room that suddenly feels too small, a light that seems aggressive or, conversely, comforting.

Concrete example for shame. Tell: "Marc was ashamed of what he'd just done." Show: "Marc lowered his eyes to his hands. A trace of dried sauce still marked his wrist. He rubbed the stain with his thumb, slowly, as if it were the only thing that mattered in the room. When Léa spoke to him, he answered without looking up, his voice so low she had to lean in to hear."

The advanced variant of this exercise is to write the same emotion from two different characters' perspectives. A soldier and a child don't show fear in the same way. An aristocrat and a craftsman don't express pride with the same gestures. This variant forces you to think about characterization at the same time as emotional register.

Exercise 2: Write a scene with zero emotion adjectives

Choose a simple but charged situation: a breakup, an argument between friends, a confession of wrongdoing, a reunion after a long absence. Write a short scene of ten to fifteen lines while strictly forbidding yourself emotion adjectives — "sad," "happy," "furious," "relieved" — as well as verbs like "feel," "experience," and formulas like "be + emotion."

What remains at your disposal is considerable. The body, first: the way a character occupies space, what they do with their hands, the direction of their gaze. Dialogue, next: what is said, what is left unsaid, interrupted sentences, abrupt topic changes. And finally, the character's concrete choices: leaving or staying, opening the door or locking it, extending a hand or keeping it in a pocket.

Once the scene is written, reread it and ask yourself: if you had to name the main emotion running through this scene, what would it be? If the answer is immediate and clear, your Show is working. If you hesitate or if the transmitted emotion isn't the one you aimed for, that's a sign that some signals are missing or sending contradictory messages. This diagnosis is as valuable as the exercise itself.

A frequent trap in this exercise is compensating for the absence of adjectives with heavy-handed metaphors — "his heart shattered into a thousand pieces" is disguised Tell. Stay in the concretely observable. What a camera could film is Show. What an omniscient narrator must explain is Tell.

Exercise 3: Show a change of mind in three micro-scenes

This exercise works Show over time, at the scale of a Character arc. Take a character with a strong, clear-cut opinion: "Rich people are all corrupt," "Magic is dangerous and shouldn't exist," "You can't trust anyone outside your family." Then write three micro-scenes of five to eight lines each.

In the first, the character expresses or embodies this conviction. This doesn't have to be a speech: they might refuse an invitation, treat someone with suspicion, or justify a choice through this belief. In the second scene, something cracks that certainty. Counter-evidence, an unexpected encounter, an internal contradiction the character can no longer ignore. The character resists, rationalizes, makes excuses — but the doubt is planted. In the third scene, the character acts as though their opinion has changed, without ever saying so. No "I realized I was wrong" monologue. Just a gesture, a choice, a door they open when they would have slammed it three scenes earlier.

What makes this exercise powerful is that it reproduces exactly the mechanism of a successful character arc in a novel. The reader doesn't want to be told the character has evolved — they want to see it for themselves through actions. If your third micro-scene gives the reader a thrill of recognition ("they've changed, and I watched it happen"), you've mastered the essential.

Exercise 4: Describe a place through a state of mind

Choose an ordinary place — a kitchen, a bus stop, a hospital corridor, a hotel room. Write two descriptions of five to seven lines of the same place, one through the eyes of a happy character, the other through the eyes of an anxious character. Forbid yourself from naming the emotions. Play only on three levers.

The first lever is the choice of details. A happy character will notice the golden light filtering through the window, the smell of coffee, the hum of the refrigerator that almost sounds like a melody. An anxious character in the same kitchen will see the knife left carelessly on the counter, the window open to a sky that's too dark, the faucet dripping with obsessive regularity.

The second lever is sentence rhythm. Joy lengthens sentences, makes them fluid and flowing. Anxiety chops them up, interrupts them, punctuates them with commas and silences. Ternary rhythm — three comparably weighted groups — is one of the most reliable levers for scanning a sentence on purpose, in either direction.

The third lever is the emotional charge projected onto objects. The same armchair can be "a nest" or "a trap." The same door can "invite" or "threaten." You'll find that the atmosphere changes radically even though the setting hasn't shifted an inch. That's proof that Show isn't in the facts — it's in the way a character looks at the facts.

To push the exercise further, try a third version with a character who's hiding their real state. A character feigning ease while terrified will produce a description where reassuring details mingle with subtle cracks — a gaze returning just a bit too often to the door, a smile described as "held" rather than "spontaneous."

Exercise 5: Rewrite an explanatory scene from your manuscript

This exercise is the most demanding because it works directly on your text. Find in your manuscript a short scene where a character explains what they feel or recounts what happened, and where the action is weak. Copy that scene into a separate document. Then rewrite it focusing on three axes: what the characters physically do, what they don't say (the unspoken, the hesitations, the averted gazes), and their bodily reactions to the other person's words.

Keep the old version next to the new one. Compare them honestly. Is the new version more immersive? More alive? But also: has it lost clarity? Have certain factual details become vague?

This comparison is fundamental because it teaches you that Show isn't an end in itself. The goal is never to turn every line into a sensory scene. It's to consciously choose the moments where Show strengthens emotional impact — and to accept that Tell remains the most efficient tool for transitions, summaries, and information the reader needs to grasp quickly.

A four-week progression protocol

If you want to turn these exercises into a routine, here's a rhythm that works well. In the first week, do a different exercise each day (Monday through Friday). In the second week, repeat the same exercises but vary the literary genre: fantasy, thriller, romance, literary fiction. You'll notice that Show changes radically depending on register. In the third week, apply Exercise 5 to three different scenes from your current manuscript. In the fourth week, reread your output from the first three weeks and identify your strengths and your persistent reflexes.

By the end of this cycle, most writers find that their First draft already contains more Show than before. The reflex installs itself gradually, without forcing, and revision becomes faster because you produce less Tell to correct.

How SagaScope extends these exercises

The more you practice this type of exercise, the more your scenes contain implicit material: recurring gestures, behavioral patterns, sensory details that characterize your characters without you needing to spell them out. This implicit richness is exactly what SagaScope's ingestion system knows how to exploit.

When SagaScope analyzes your scenes, it spots these patterns — a character's speech quirks, their recurring physical reactions, their way of occupying space — and automatically integrates them into its character sheets. The result is a character bible that builds itself alongside your manuscript, fed by the text as you actually write it, not by forms to fill out.

In the meantime, these five exercises give you a light routine to strengthen your writing a little every day, without needing to rewrite your entire novel.