Most people aren’t used to—or comfortable with—active writing and what I call story-showing. They’d much rather recount a sequence of events rather than chronicle them in a way that a reader can vicariously experience.

“I don’t know how to write that way,” most of my writing coach clients tell me.

“Sure you do,” I answer.

Think back to the last time you told a friend or family member about something that happened to you. Did you sum up the event in a couple of sentences? Or did you set it up and then draw it out with action, detail, and dialogue?

I’m guessing you entertained your audience with the latter approach. You probably also used active rather than passive sentence construction, another key to active writing, so that the subject of the sentence is the one performing the action. For example: She saw the dog and approached it. As opposed to: It was then, after seeing the dog, that she started to approach it. In the process, as you can tell from the above example, you tightened up the language. Getting rid of filler words that don’t add to the meaning powers up language.

Ironically, you don’t need to remember any of the above when verbally recounting a story to an audience. Yup. It turns out that most of us are actually pretty good at story showing. We’re just not used to doing that through active writing. That’s easy enough to change. Like anything else, the more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets.

There are also ways to cheat a bit. You can now dictate into Word. Just hit the Windows button and the letter H on your keyboard once you’re in your document. A small microphone will pop up, and you can start talking. Just make sure to add in the punctuation, or you’ll end up with so many words strung together that it’ll be hard to actually decipher it all.

Will you have to go back and fix certain things?  

Yup.

Is that easier than typing?

Absolutely.

This falls into the whatever-works-for-you category. If you’d rather type, by all means, have at it. What doesn’t work is convincing yourself you’re not good at something—in this case, active writing or active storytelling—since you probably already know how to do that well.