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.
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