Absolute Attention is Prayer

Earlier this month I assembled—as a free gift to this community—a list of eleven urgent things I’ve learned about writing from reviewing thousands of manuscripts. Based on your wild enthusiasm (far beyond my expectations!) for that post, I’ve chosen to build on one of those eleven points for this week’s writing prompt. The result being an actionable, step-by-step writing exercise for you based on the point of craft in my essay that drew the most feedback and praise, as well as admissions of ongoing challenge: “Showing vs. Telling” (number four on the list, which—oddly for an essay I billed as a numbered list—I did not number).

Even if I had numbered the list, it’s not that simple. Is anything ever that simple? You see, I only placed showing vs. telling fourth of eleven because the three items before it (“Attention,” “Internal vs. External,” and “More on External Observation”) were foundational to the things I wanted to say about showing vs. telling. Therefore, if you haven’t read the E…