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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48738
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

One of the things I find most powerful for constructing strategies or schemes which may go beyond what the author could do themselves is show don't tell. If you tell the audience what the strategy is, they can poke holes in it. "What if X happened?" "What if Y didn't show up?" However, if you show them what happens, that's all they have. It's frustratingly hard to distinguish brilliance from madness.

Somewhat case in point, I had an English teacher who admitted that he and his friends liked to play Chicken with cars when he was a young and foolish age. They'd all stand on the curb, wait for a car, and then try to run out in front of it to the other side of the road. The guy who left the curb last was the cool cat. He was the one that had the real brass balls.

My teacher was the guy with the cojones. Nobody could ever figure out how he managed to leave the curb that late without being totally freaked out. He never told them. He just showed them. Over and over, he won the game.

Many years later, seeking to put us students on a less reckless path, he let us in on the secret. He told us how he did it. In all reality, he was too scared stiff to leave the curbside. It terrified him. So he remained frozen in place until his raw desire to stay "in" with his friends broke free the mental cement that held his feet in place and he quickly fled in the winning direction. But he never told them that! He showed them the cool kid.

Original score: 3