How to Bring Your Stories to Life with Vivid Scenes and Sensory Details

Get and keep your readers hooked.

Marilyn Flower
Humor! Authenticity! Magic!
2 min readOct 11, 2024

--

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

You have a great idea for a story.

So you open Word or Google or turn to a fresh page on a yellow legal pad. And begin typing or scribbling. The words flow out. You’ve got a lot to say. It’s about your life, after all.

And the lessons you’re learning. You put them in there, too. As many as you can. Maybe even repeating some in various ways to make sure readers get it.

Your heart’s pounding as you press the green submit button.

And instead of getting published and boosted right away you get a note from one of the editors.

“Great story, Sis. Crucial lessons. Please show us the scene. We want to see and experience it with you.” Or some variation on that theme.

“Didn’t I do that?” Your heart sinks. “I used a personal example.”

What do we even mean, anyway?

Instead of telling us what happened, show us what happened.

We love telling stories. And we love reading stories.

We’re natural-born storytellers. It’s in our DNA. We can go on and on. We may naturally slow down, adding lots of juicy details, often because we’re building up to a punch line or surprise ending.

No one taught us to do that. We’ve done it since we were kids.

I’m picturing myself at about eight years old, my elbows on the Formica counter separating the dining room from the kitchen. I’m kneeling on a bar stool up against that counter, craning my neck for a big whiff of the pea soup simmering on the stove. Swiveling back and forth on the stool, I can’t wait to tell Mom what I’d just seen. “Hey, Mom?”

Click here to finish reading

--

--

Marilyn Flower
Humor! Authenticity! Magic!

Writer, sacred fool, improviser, avid reader, novel forthcoming, soul collage facilitator, prayer warrior and did I say writer? https://linktr.ee/marilynflower