The first drafts of your short stories are due this week! You'll be turning your ideas into words. So let's talk about three different craft elements and exercises that will hopefully will be helpful to you at this stage. Zooming In and Zooming Out"Show don't tell." Have you ever been told this by a past English teacher? I bet that at least some of us have. It's a pretty standard piece of writing advice that gets batted around a lot, in part because there is some truth to it, and maybe in part because it is so short. We can have a longer discussion about this in class, but showing usually means using description and seen to build a kind of three dimensional scene that a reader can inhabit and think about. Taking it back to the good old Ladder of Abstraction, showing is usually concrete details further down the ladder. This is usually the best stuff as far as the experience of the reader goes. The most memorable parts of a piece of writing is often the showing. A very small example of showing: "Her bag was unzipped and her shirt untucked." Telling is summary, judgement, abstraction—basically all the stuff higher up on the Ladder of Abstraction. A very small example of telling: "She didn't care about her appearance." Writers use both of these modes all the time. You've been navigating the abstract and the concrete in your analytical writing all semester. Writers of creative work do the same thing. I think the reason that showing is always emphasized over telling is that it's harder to do, especially for beginner writers. For our purposes, I'd like to revise the old dictum to this: Show and tell (but for real, don't forget to show.) An even more helpful way to think about perhaps: zoom in and zoom out. As the writer, you get complete control over where the attention of your reader is directed. Like the director of a movie or a photographer, you get to shift a perspective. It's easy to just get lost in the overall landscape mode so to speak: (this happened, then this happened, then this happened.) Try to zoom in on a moment in time at least once in your story. Imagery and dialogue are two different ways to do this. ImageryTime to echo any number of English teachers in your past again: Imagery is writing that engages the senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Especially, perhaps, sight. What image will you zoom in on in your story? It can be an object, one of your characters features, a scar, a tree, a desk, the corner of a desk, a piece of jewelry, a smashed glass on a sidewalk, a pebble, a leaf... It can be anything, as long as it's small (zoom in) and as long as you spend words to describe it (show.) Hopefully it is an object that adds some kind of meaning to the theme, plot, or character of your story. The truth is, whether or not you want it to, once you describe it and put it in your story, the image will become significant for the reader no matter what. DialogueDialogue is a special way to incorporate sound imagery and build your characters. It also automatically slows down the time in your story to real time forcing you to zoom in and create a scene. How can you incorporate this tool in your story? Who will you give a voice? Will it be your main character and your antagonist? The person pushing your main character around? Whoever you give a voice in your story, you give a kind of power.
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