For much of middle America, spring is a mixed blessing as the same warm air that brings the flowers back also brings severe weather.

Living in an area with only mild tornado activity and no hurricanes or tropical storms (one of Michigan’s many excellent qualities), I love a good rainstorm and I especially love the sound of thunder. When the skies darken and the atmosphere rumbles and tumbles around me, I get a feeling in my gut that is hard to describe. A bizarre sort of mixture of deep awareness of the season and of the power inherent in nature, fond childhood memories of watching storms with my dad in the open garage, and that vague nagging instinct to seek cover. Just a pinch of terror to season it all. Gives me goosebumps just writing about it.

There have been times in my life when I have worried about the weather. A few tense cross-state car rides in whiteout conditions (once with a vanload of youth groupers for whom we were responsible). The first tornado warning I experienced with my infant son in the house. I recall our Little League coach telling us not to hang on the metal chain link fence while menacing clouds glowered and jagged lightning danced on the horizon lest lightning strike, travel through the metal, and kill half a dozen of us in one fell swoop. But during most storms I am safely tucked away inside with a plan worked out for staying that way in case of emergency (interior basement room, away from the windows, stocked first aid kit, etc.).

However, I remember vividly a summer storm when I was 13 or 14. Our softball and baseball games were all canceled and parents were whisking their ball-capped kids from the field and driving down country roads bordered by ditches, heading for basements at home. The reason I remember this day is two-fold.

First of all, the air was different. Whereas a winter storm might cause a whiteout, what we were experiencing as my mom drove me back into town after dropping a friend off at his house was a greenish-brownout. The air was thick with dirt and organic matter that was being stirred up by a supercell not far from us. The thing about those videos of tornadoes on YouTube is that you can only see the actual tornado if it is a good distance from you. Once it’s close, you can’t always see it. That’s the scary part.

Second, and much worse than the eerie air swirling around the car, my sister was unaccounted for. Well, we knew she was at a friend’s house, but that was not good enough for my mother. She needed to see her eldest daughter, to have her in our own basement, not someone else’s. So we cut through the dense air to pick her up and bring her home. As a mother now, I can more easily imagine what my own mother must have felt during those soul-tense moments.

The rest of that day is a blur. The next morning trees were down all over town, but I don’t actually remember the worst of the storm. In fact, I don’t even remember actually seeing Alison get into the car or rushing inside our house or going to bed at night. But I remember that car ride between the softball fields out in Hampton Township and the house-lined streets of Essexville.

When you read really good fiction, the same thing happens. You are left with a feeling, sometimes hard to describe but real nonetheless, that you can’t get from mere recounting of events. There are a number of books that I adore that I could not easily summarize for someone else because what happened in the book is not what I remember. I remember how I felt when I read it. There are other books for which I could give a plot synopsis to a friend who asked what it was about. But if I’m recommending a book it is almost never because of plot and I tend to say little about what happens (which always sound so sterile when recounted to another) and more things like, “I can’t explain it to you. You just have to read it.”

A good storyteller can cause physiological reactions in a reader’s body through black marks on a white page. The process is astonishing and awe-inspiring to me. Letters are arbitrary. Phonics are meaningless. Words alone convey some form of reality, but not in whole. But when those letters and sounds and words are strung together in an artful way, more than meaning is produced.

I’ve read a lot in recent years about how authors should remove the parts of their writing that they think are the best because they are probably overwritten and self-indulgent. Not so fast! I’m here to declare that not every story is best told with spare language. Granted, some certainly are and the most talented writers (in my mind) can use very little language to convey deep emotion. Still I would not recommend arbitrarily deleting those passages just because it is currently popular to do so. Maybe have some beta readers test them. Find out what clicks and what doesn’t. Some probably are overwritten. But some of them really may be excellent writing that works and helps to tell your real story. What I mean by the “real” story is not the plot, not what happens, but what you want the reader to feel, what you want him to remember long after that last page.

It’s the difference between this…

And this…

Strive to write in such a way that your deeply held emotions and experiences are made alive and immediate for your readers. Pick out the details that say more than you could say in a paragraph of words and make those details hardworking representatives of the whole. This will keep your good descriptive writing in your story without overdoing it.

For example, in my story of the car ride to get my sister and get home before the tornado struck, I could spend paragraphs describing the weather, how tornadoes form and the destruction they can cause, my own thoughts and the thoughts of my mother, spelling out everything for the reader so there would be no mistaking what happened. But that’s not what made the ride memorable. I don’t remember my own thoughts and I don’t have access to my mother’s thoughts. I was not thinking about the physics of tornado formation at the time. I don’t know if my sister was worried at her friend’s house or whether she was relieved at the sight of her mother pulling up in the driveway to get her.

What I remember is the way the air looked and that feeling you get in your gut when you don’t feel safe. That’s it. So if I were to tell that story, that’s what I would focus on. And if I did it well, I would hope that I could get a reader, even one who had never been in a similar situation, to know what it felt like. And I could probably do it in just a few sentences if I worked hard at it. It might start as a couple overwrought paragraphs, but being a copywriter by trade, I think I could get it down to three really hardworking sentences. I certainly wouldn’t discard it altogether.

You’ve read scenes like that, or even entire books. They make you forget you’re on your couch or tucked under your covers. They pull you in completely. That’s great writing. And that’s what I hope we’ll both create–and keep.