![]() She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving aīlack-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her Here is his example of “telling”:īetween classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to Take this other example from Chuck Palahniuk. This isn’t just a matter of tone, or pacing. Saying that I go shopping all the time is absolutely different from me describing a specific shopping trip I had. Saying that I was bullied by Lucinda over the entire third grade is absolutely different from describing a specific incidence of bullying. Because, and here is an absolutely vital fact about writing: You cannot swap out a concrete description for an abstract one, and still maintain the meaning of the piece. It’s trying to convert the first passage into code, as if the only purpose of “showing” is to obscure, to force readers to decipher your meaning from the details.īut “showing vs telling” is absolutely not a process of translation. The second passage isn’t trying to be compelling. It’s the difference between being believed and having to convince someone. Saying “Lucinda was mean” will always be simpler than going into detail about all the times Lucinda was mean to you. The first lesson to learn here is that “showing” will always necessarily be less concise than “telling”. In the span of running from their desk to tripping at the doorway, the narrator has to clumsily drop their chess set and be unpopularly ignored in order for Lucinda to meanly step upon a chess piece with her prissy patent leather shoes - Is this the sort of interaction you were imagining when you read the first passage, Lucinda looming over the narrator, stomping on the items they drop? ![]() This is a bad approach to both creative writing and translation. This attempt at “showing” reads as if the author was trying for a word-for-word translation, converting each adjective into its equivalent physical detail, and then cramming them all together into a single paragraph scarcely longer than the original. Is a clown car of a paragraph where the author’s entire third gradeĮxperience with Lucinda is compressed into a single incident, all theĭetails stumbling over each other until it becomes caricature. The first passage is straightforward, it’s clear, it adequately conveys the experience of being bullied, as told from a third grade perspective. There’s an obvious flaw to this advice: the first passage is undoubtedly better written than the second. ![]()
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