the Observation Deck (day two): "get specific"
Today's card is not so much news to me as it is a reminder. I think everyone who has ever taken a writing class has heard "show, don't tell." Of course, the reason it's said so often is that most people have a tendency to be general, vague, non-specific. We talk about something that was like something else. We talk about how we felt or how we think other people felt. We have to learn to zero in on the details when we write. Exactly what were they eating? Was it raining? Did the car have a cracked windshield? The accompanying text references Garcia Marquez who had a grandmother who used to tell a story of how every time the electrician came to their house it was filled with yellow butterflies. When Marquez later wanted to use that in his writing, he found that if he left out the detail of the butterflies being yellow, no one believed the story. I think it is possible to get so lost in specifics that you're fetishizing them, and then it's less about the story you're trying to tell and more about the writer showing off their taste in music, or love of cars, or ability to zing off trés obscure references (just imagine what a horrorshow an novel written by Dennis Miller would be). But mostly the push towards specificity and away from vague generalities is only a good thing.
two things:
- i had never made the connection between showing and specificity before. which is funny, because when i put my mind to it, i *can* do the show-don't-tell thing.
- the one thing i took away from 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' is that the more specific you are, the easier it is to write. (the excercise where he finally had to tell a writing student to describe a single brick on a building, after she was stricken with total writer's block while trying to describe the town, then the street, then the building.)