How to Avoid Preachy Writing (WITHOUT Losing Your Message)

Discover how to avoid preachy storytelling while keeping your message powerful. Zena Del Lowe shares tips for letting your characters discover truths naturally, engage audiences, and drive the plot — without lecturing.

📌 Resources & Links:

• Free training: 7 Crucial Plot Points — https://www.thestorytellersmission.com/story-structure-made-easy
• Follow Zena Dell Lowe on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FuQeOePj4c8 

Transcript

[00:00:00] A lot of times as morally responsible storytellers, we have this tendency to, we have an agenda, we have something we want us. Say 

[00:00:07] We wanna portray something that's morally good for the audience. We have this agenda. And the problem is that it doesn't matter if you're secular or if you are a Christian, it comes across as preachy and nobody responds well to that no matter what side of the fence you're on. So what do you do? How do you avoid that?

[00:00:25] Hello and welcome to the Storytellers Mission with Zena Del Well, a podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story.

[00:00:36] I wanna give you a trick here that is also the primary trick that you're gonna use to do good setups and payoffs. And it's the primary trick that you use to make sure that your characters or your plot or your story never becomes preachy. And this is going to be exactly what you're going to use to try to figure out your story structure, because here's the thing, it also works in terms of story structure when you get lost.

[00:01:00] This is your trick. You have your character discover. Now, I know that sounds weird and maybe even extra simplistic, but let me break that down for you. What happens in novels a lot of times is that the character will go off somewhere. They'll pontificate. They'll think they'll ruminate over things, you know, and then they'll come back and they'll tell the audience what they've learned, what they, how they've synthesized the information, what it means.

[00:01:27] And how they've applied it. And a lot of times that's the stuff that ends up feeling very preachy. We don't wanna be told after the fact we want to see the character wrestling in the midst of it. We wanna see them discovering those truths as they go. We wanna see them overreacting to people because their angst is coming out sideways.

[00:01:50] We wanna see them messing it up. We do not wanna see them on a porch rocking back and forth and just thinking and telling the audience what they're thinking about. You can do that in a novel. You can never do that, by the way, in a screenplay. But you can do that in a novel. But even though you can, it doesn't mean that you should.

[00:02:06] So the antidote to that is to have the character discover. This is also when you have something really profound or poignant,It's a very powerful and important subject matter to cover, but the danger of it is to get into preachy.

[00:02:24] To start trying to teach a lesson to your audience, because that's why you're telling the story. You want to try and get the, you want the audience to understand this thing, and so then the danger is that you start telling the audience what it is that you want them to understand and the way that you avoid doing that.

[00:02:39] Or one way that you avoid doing that is you allow the character not to tell the audience or not to summarize it, or not to succinctly articulate the message that you have for the world, but rather you show us that character. Struggling with it. Struggling, struggling, struggling, wrestling, fighting, rebelling.

[00:03:04] Somebody says something to them and they go, that's bull. I don't buy that. No. And you fight against it, and you let the character discover. And in that discovery, then your character makes choices That's going to drive the plot. Obviously, depending on the story that you're telling, it's going to change what that looks like.

[00:03:23] But generally speaking. Anytime you can have your character discover something on screen or in the moment if it's a novel, it's going to be 10 times better than if your character came back and told us something that they discovered. You wanna have the dramatic stuff happen on stage, not off stage. Not off screen.

[00:03:46] If somebody, you know, once in a while. That could be a technique. You rely on somebody, you know, they were at a party, somebody took out a gun and shot, and the next thing you know, we see the characters running on, you know, on stage. We haven't seen any of that. That's the backstory. And now the characters run on because they're running away from the shooter or whatever.

[00:04:07] I mean, you can do that if it's really well done, but generally speaking, that means we're gonna go back and see that. Unfold either in your novel or your screenplay or even a play. All that technique does is delay when it's shown, or that's all the technique should do. But a lot of times what I see is people using that technique, but then they never have the moment that we see it happening or unfolding.

[00:04:31] All these dramatic things happen off screen. You don't want the dramatic things to happen off screen or off story. Everything dramatic. We should get to see it as it's unfolding. Thank you for listening to the Storyteller's Mission with Zena Del Lo. May you Goforth inspired to change the world for the better.

[00:04:51] Your story.