Showing vs. Telling

Out topic last class was the much-discussed topic of showing versus telling. After you did the “he is late again and drunk” exercise (written first by simply telling it and then rewriting it in “show” mode), I read to you from a couple of wonderful books on writing.

We, of course, then discussed the writing style of the writing manuals. The first book is a much-loved classic called Writing Down the Bones:Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. This was the Zen-philosophical approach to writing with a heavy dose of New Age thrown in. Interestingly, although she had some interesting points and talked about the importance of experience you pointed out that she told rather showed (even as she was talking about the importance of showing, telling isn’t it J ).

Many of you seemed to respond to the descriptive way that Betsy Lerner wrote in her book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. This was the excerpt I read:

The only place you’re likely to find more alcoholics than an AA meeting is a writing program. While I was in graduate school, a group of so-called cowboy poets were famous for going out every night and getting drunk, which invariably led to brawling or other crazy behavior, which they would then boast about in the writing lounge the next day, swigging down the tarlike coffee that must certainly be a staple of every writing department lounge. They would carouse and cheat on their girlfriends back home wherever that was. They cavalierly rolled their spiral notebooks (no fabric-covered journals for these cowboys) into the back pockets of their jeans as they swaggered into class, always late and always needing to borrow something: a pen, a lighter, an aspirin. They were young guys, getting off on their youth, their muscular poems, their own sense of reverie, as if they had personally discovered language. They took leaks wherever they like, marking the city and their haunts like a pack of dogs. (113-114)

The excerpt I finished the class on deepening and completing your work was from Louise deSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives.

I will post the details of the children’s books you looked at later in the week.