The idea of storytelling seems easy enough on the surface.

You explain events as they happened (or as you picture them happening) in a way that makes sense to your audience.

We engage in this kind of storytelling every single day. We tell our spouses about the drama at work by rehashing the action as it happened. We recite scenes from our favorite movies by describing each detail in order. We muse with our friends by walking through the events of our pasts.

We tell stories just as we would share our favorite recipes or writing exercises: by giving the play-by-play.

While this tactic works well for describing an experience, it is not the best approach for writing a novel.

If you want to elevate your prose beyond basic play-by-play storytelling, you need to provide your reader with more than just an explanation of what happened. You need to immerse them in the action and the emotion of your story.

In this article, we’ll show you five simple ways to make your writing more immersive. It won’t happen overnight. But with practice, these tips will help you transform boring play-by-play into engaging prose that will grab your reader and never let go.

How to Elevate Writing Beyond Simple Play-by-Play

When it comes to reciting a story about your day or sharing your favorite brownie recipe, play-by-play storytelling is exactly what you need. It is simple to follow and tells your audience everything they need to know.

But writing an entire novel using play-by-play tactics is boring. It doesn’t matter how much action or drama your plot contains, no one wants to read three hundred pages of “this happened, then this, then he did this.”

Why?

This type of writing fails to engage the reader. You can’t expect someone to be sucked into your world when all you’re doing is explaining what is happening.

Instead, you need to paint them a picture of what is happening. You need to make them feel the action and the sorrow and the joy. You need to put your reader inside your character’s mind and at the center of the scene.

Before we get into how, exactly, to accomplish this, let’s first take a look at an example of the typical play-by-play style writing used by many aspiring writers:

Alda grabbed her hat and put it on before stepping outside. She raced to the car as her mother yelled at her from the window. Ignoring the threats, she jumped into the driver’s seat and tore off in the direction of Justin’s house. Tears rolled down her cheeks as the old jeep rumbled down the empty street.

Clearly, something very emotional is happening to Alda. We get that from the description of the scene, but we don’t necessarily feel it. If this kind of “removed” writing went on, most readers would lose interest after only a few pages.

Now let’s look at a some ways to pump up this prose to make it more engaging.

1. Add Detail

Adding detail is one of the most straightforward ways to engage you reader.

In basic play-by-play writing, you are telling the reader what is happening. But you aren’t telling them much more about the world. This makes it hard for your audience to connect with the action.

Describing the scenery, objects, and your character’s actions in more detail can help pull your reader into the story.

Alda grabbed her stained baseball cap and slid it onto her head as she crashed through the front door. Her mother’s screams echoed from the open bedroom window, her voice cracking on every vowel. Alda ignored the cutting threats and slid onto the sun-warmed driver’s seat of the old jeep. She jammed the key into the ignition and spun out of the driveway. Tears poured from her eyes, blurring her vision as she drove down the deserted street.

When coming up with descriptive text, consider all five senses. Don’t just talk about what your character sees and hears; describe what they might be tasting, smelling, and feeling.

Keep in mind the mood of the scene as you choose your descriptors as well.

Describing a flower as “buoyant” or “jovial” in the middle of a funeral scene doesn’t give your audience an impression of the loss and sorrow your characters are feeling. It may help to make a list of mood-appropriate adjectives for each scene before you write it.

2. Use Varied Sentence Structure

Sucking your reader into the world you’ve created isn’t the only way to keep them engaged. Often, you can retain your audience’s interest in the text simply by breaking up the rhythm of it.

Play-by-play writing inherently takes on a repetitive and balanced rhythm. Each sentence tends to be of a similar length–kind of like a lullaby.

So if you don’t want to put your reader to sleep, you need to vary your sentence structure.

Use short sentences and fragments to increase your pacing and depict fast-moving action. Use longer sentences to slow the pacing down. Use both to break up the monotony of boring play-by-play writing.

Alda grabbed her hat and put it on as she crashed through the front door and raced to the car. Her mother’s voice echoed from an open window. Harsh threats. Alda ignored them with ease and slid behind the wheel of the old jeep. The engine rumbled to life. The tires squealed. She’d make it to Justin’s in no time. Assuming she could find her way through the veil of tears that blurred her vision.

Lean on short sentences and fragments during high-intensity scenes and those that contain a lot of action. But be sure to slow things down with longer prose as the action ceases and during scenes when your character is feeling bored, sad, or content.

3. Bypass Unnecessary Steps

One thing that makes play-by-play writing boring even with details and varied sentence structure is the inclusion of unnecessary steps.

Your reader knows what’s necessary to start a car and back out of a driveway. Unless you are writing an instruction manual for driver’s ed, you don’t need to include these steps in your scene.

If a scene sounds awkward because you’ve skipped over a time-consuming step, try changing your focus to fill that gap.

Instead of describing how Alda pulls the keys out of her pocket and starts the car, move your focus in and show the reader how her hands are shaking as she turns the key and grips the wheel.

Don’t tell the reader that the jeep backs out of the driveway and onto the street. Instead, move the focus out and describe how her mother’s screams and the roaring engine echo off the houses of the quaint suburban neighborhood as she drives away.

4. Filter the Text Through Your Character

One thing almost all play-by-play writing lacks is a strong voice.

Voice is the combination of tone, point of view, vocabulary, and context that makes each book sound different from the next.

Voice has just as much to do with you and your writing style as it does your characters.

All books should use a coherent voice throughout (that’s the part that comes from you). But voice should also be influenced by the characters themselves. Meaning, the voice of your book should shift as your character’s mood shifts and as you jump from one character to the next.

You wouldn’t expect a spoiled brat from the city to see the world the same way as a weather-worn cowboy from the plains.

These different perspectives should be apparent in the way you write scenes from each character’s point of view. This is true whether you are using first or third person.

Play-by-play writing will always contain some traces of your voice. But it lacks the stronger voice of your character. By filtering your voice through your character you will add another dimension to your writing. And, more importantly, engage your reader in your character’s plight.

Alda pulled the old ballcap on as she crashed through the front door. She ignored her mother’s weak insults and weaker threats and headed for the mudder at the end of the driveway. The scalding leather never felt so good on the backs of her thighs. The rumbling engine felt better. She drove the pedal into the floorboard and reveled in the squeal of the tires as the old jeep lurched onto the road. She had made it halfway to Justin’s before she realized she was crying like a little baby.

5. Include Internal Action

Adding your character’s voice to a scene simply means using vocabulary, syntax, and tone that makes sense given their age and world perspective. But you can go beyond this to help your reader identify and engage with your character.

You do this by adding internal action to each scene.

If you are writing from first-person point of view, this is easy and hard not to do. Your character is telling the story, so of course, they are going to add their thoughts and feelings to the narrative.

But this can also be done from third-person perspective.

By breaking up your play-by-play with insight into how your character is feeling and what is running through their mind, you help break the monotony. It also gives you a tool to explain steps without sounding like an instructional guide.

Consider not just what your character would do in reaction to some event, but how they would feel as they do it. Now use description and variable sentence structure to insert these thoughts and feelings into the text.

Alda ripped her old ballcap from the hanger next to the door and charged into the blinding afternoon light. Mom was screaming from the bedroom. She didn’t care. The old hag could spew as many threats as she wanted. Alda was done. Done for good this time. She hopped behind the wheel of the old jeep and shoved the keys into the ignition. The sunbaked leather bit into the backs of her thighs. Just more pain to add to the heaps already swelling in her chest. She set off in the direction of Justin’s, the squealing tires and rumbling engine bringing a smile to her lips despite the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Elevate Your Writing

If you frequently find yourself writing in play-by-play style, don’t expect to be able to overhaul your prose overnight.

It takes practice and patience to learn how to describe a scene you can see in your head in a literary way, rather than a logical way. This is especially true when you are penning your first draft of a story.

But once you get the bones of the scenes on paper, it is much easier to pick back through your work to add and takeaway text to make your story more interesting.

Adding detail, varying sentence structure, skipping unnecessary steps, and filtering your prose through your character while including their internal thoughts and feelings will all help your reader engage more with your story.

Have questions or other pointers to share? Drop a comment in the box below.