# Evocation
Now that the basic questions of story are out of the way, lets hone in on the craft of writing itself. How you tell a story is as important as the story contents itself. A dry telling of an awesome moment will fall flat. A dramatic telling of a mundane event, on the other hand…
## Show don't tell
The advice you'll hear in every Creative Writing workshop and 101-level class is "show, don't tell". It's painful to hear, and groan-worthy to repeat, but it's absolutely the truth. Is your character sassy and bull-headed? Well that's awesome! Don't tell me that, though. And yes, "don't tell," includes having another one of your characters tell us in dialogue. Instead, give your character a scene where those qualities show up and affect the outcome or reactions from others. If you do it well you'll never need the words "sassy" or "bull-headed" at all.
There's a million-and-one examples of this online. If you find yourself struggling with it, give a little web search.
## Make the characters active
Your characters should drive the story events, not just respond to them. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. If you have events occuring in the world and your characters aren't either: a) directly impacting their outcome, or b) somehow causing them in the first place, something is wrong. Either you're telling the wrong character's story or this isn't the story you should be telling. Get them in there, get dirty, and change things.
A mental exercise you can take is to imagine your story if your characters didn't exist. What happened differently? Hopefully quite a bit! Now, zoom in. In this SCENE, what if your character wasn't there. What happened differently? The answer should still be quite a bit.
## Break the rules
Finally, as with any writing "rule", it's important to acknowledge that there's good reasons to break them. Like any art, though, don't go creating new avant garde styles before you can practice the basics. If you're new to this, then show-don't-tell. If you've got that down, then maybe you have the know-how to decide when telling is okay. Here's some further reading!
https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/balancing-showing-telling/