![]() She candidly says that she couldn’t explain that feeling and never could have predicted it she doesn’t show you any of that bafflement through dialogue or action. Smith tells you that she felt a sense of kinship she doesn’t describe a scene that illustrates that sense. There’s a lot of telling in that paragraph. At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems. I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. The better you learn the rule, the more you’re permitted to break it. ![]() ![]() Judge your writing on the merits of the whole. It’s okay to blend show and tellĭon’t feel that you have to “fix” every sentence that veers out of show and into tell. In the cemeteries in Tonga, late in the day, there always seemed to be old women tending the graves of their parents-combing the coral-sand mounds into the proper coffin-top shape, sweeping away leaves, hand washing faded wreaths of plastic flowers, rearranging the haunting patterns of tropical peppercorns, orange and green on bleached white sand. William Finnegan is a master in his memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life: Do it well, and the reader will see exactly what you’re seeing-details the reader probably wouldn’t even notice in real life. When you show, you get to write detail the way you would if you were writing fiction. We who were waiting for the always-late bus stood still in our places while others flew by-off the Danziger Bridge, off the interstate onto Chef Menteur, heightening the reality of our immobility. The stop, an uncovered bench the size of a love seat, was just in front of Banner Chevrolet car dealership’s lot full of buffed to shining cars, prices on yellow bubble numbers plastered to windshields, deals none of us could afford. I was deposited at the corner of Downman and Chef Menteur where I waited to transfer to another bus. She trusts readers to picture this location and her demeanor even though they may not be familiar with the businesses she identifies in the passage: Brown skillfully uses her location for changing buses as a way to let the reader know how she felt about her place in society. “Show, don’t tell” just means that when you convey the feelings of the character-in a memoir that’s often your own feelings-the most effective method is to show with a vivid description rather than to tell with subjective words, typically adjectives, like sad, happy, angry and all the rest. Of course your memoir is telling all sorts of things. However, the quote attributed to Chekhov is: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining show me the glint of light on broken glass.” That’s someone’s pithier interpretation of what Chekhov factually wrote to his brother, but it represents Chekhov’s meaning well enough. The origin of the “show, don’t tell” concept is credited to writer Anton Chekhov, and that is correct. First, let’s clear up two misconceptions.In our last blog post, we talked about why that old saw, “Show, don’t tell,” still applies in memoir and in good writing in general.
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