Writer’s Workshop: Show, Don’t Tell

“Show, don’t tell” is age-old writing advice. As an editor, I’ve even told writers the same thing, so you’d think this would be easy for me. Well, it wasn’t. As a blogger, I’ve become used to delivering a message in a quick and easy way: create a catchy title, home in on a central message, stick to two or three points, and write a conclusion. However, full-length works don’t work that way. Memoirs, for example, require deliberate and slow writing. Readers want to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste the scene. So, I practiced this part of the craft while working with a developmental editor for five months.

Chapter five of In Search of a Salve shows what I mean. By this point in the book, I’ve shown what happened the days after my mother died, but what most don’t know is how difficult the next nine months were. Subsequently, many in my life never understood how integral one person was at that time—my friend, Mika.

Initially, I began chapter five describing who Mika was, how we met, how we became close friends, and how she positively influenced my life when we were 16. In one version of the chapter, I said this:

Our renewed friendship was one of the only healthy coping strategies I established that year.

While this lone sentence is totally acceptable for a 700-word blog, readers need more information for a book. My editor prompted me to add more details with this comment: Show us the coping, then tell us about it. Show, then tell.

I wanted to tear my hair out. My memoir had already grown from 40k words to 70k. What more could I show? But she was right. For a full-length memoir, it is unacceptable to simply write information like a mic drop and move on. Readers expect to be in and stay in the moment with you.

So, I revised the entire chapter.

Instead of beginning with Mika and our friendship, I began with these memories of my mother:

The most shocking part of my mother’s death was that she was physically present one day, and then ceased to exist the next. Up until her death, my primary world consisted of my mother, my father, and me. When it was time to grocery shop, the three of us picked through canned goods and frozen food together. From seven o’clock at night until ten, my parents sat interlocked on the couch, and I curled up on the loveseat, where we watched television together—The Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday night and Alice and One Day at a Time on Tuesdays. When my mother and father wanted to see the latest movie, the three of us packed up chips, bottles of Coke, and blankets and went to the drive-in, where I sat in the backseat and watched Eddie Murphy’s career blossom. Those moments dissipated in one instant.

My mother’s death and my father’s preoccupation with Joëlle created a space of loneliness I was ill-prepared for. Silence. When my mother wasn’t dealing with her illness, she carried a lightness that manifested through Prince lyrics. Whenever I heard Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today, I knew the air would float with Purple Rain album refrains. She’d start with “Let’s Go Crazy”and croon and move through each song until she reached the title cut, and then she’d watch the movie, mesmerized like a teenaged girl. Prince’s eccentric vibes filled every crevice of our home. If my father played DJ, then he’d pull out his Kool Moe Dee album and repeatedly play “Wild Wild West.” I remember the day the three of us visited two record stores looking for the song he’d heard on the radio. The lyrics riled him up and brought back adolescent memories of living in Cabrini Green, a time he rarely detailed. But with my mother’s death, the music stopped. Now that our home was empty, the silence was loud. Too loud.

I continued by adding more about the impact of my mother’s absence, and eventually, I returned to a description of Mika, how we’d met in the first grade, lost contact in middle school, and reconnected in the 11th grade shortly after my mother’s death. I let my words “breathe on the page,” as my editor calls it. Now that there was context, Mika’s role and the coping mechanism sentence made more sense:

I introduced her to my new hobby: watching Degrassi High, with the radio playing in the background.

“How are you listening to the radio and watching TV?” Mika asked, while turning the radio off.

I would just laugh, unaware that my hobby was a coping mechanism to drown out the quiet.

Better, right? I showed what losing my mother as a teenager was like, and I illustrated how I began to develop coping mechanisms, one unconscious strategy at a time. Frequently, writers are told to “show, don’t tell,” without specific guidance, so I hope this example is helpful.

All questions and comments are welcome below.

Pre-order In Search of a Salve on AmazonPre-order In Search of a Salve via indie bookstoresPre-order In Search of a Salve via Barnes & NobleWriter’s Workshop: Show, Don’t TellMonday Notes: Family as Performative ActionInspiring Image #145: Beauty in DeathWriter’s Workshop: 3 Reasons I Chose a Hybrid PublisherInspiring Image #144: Transient Pittsburgh