On the impossibility of correlating an objective criticism of art with a subjective appreciation

Although all great art is truly great in itself, only some of it is, at different times and for different people, like a key which fits a lock on a door we’ve never opened. As we obtain new rooms, so do we close off others behind us. This must be the key to my theory of milieu – the undetectable stream of living which resets our fundamental thought-processes and makes us approach the same task at different times with such subtly different tones.

Writing: show or tell?

Shena Mackay tells us a lot of information in her short stories. I was always of the opinion that ‘show, don’t tell’ means that you reveal information slowly through prompts, and that each prompt (for instance, a necklace or a car) should have only one corresponding reveal. Prompts should be separated from each other by the passage of some action in real time. That gives you a lean, sparse story that’s both economical and concentrated. Example:

A woman is walking to her car, sees a necklace in the road which reminds her of a necklace she lost when a child. Innocently bewildered by her reminiscence, she picks it up and continues to her car. Then the police arrest her for theft.

The ‘tell, don’t show’ version could run like this:

A woman in the back of a police car looks at the path she was walking on which reminds her of the necklace that reminds her of her childhood, which got her there in the first place.

If you can show how the summary looks grammatically tortuous, you can tell that the one is preferable to the other.