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Writer's pictureSarah Lynn Green

"Show, Don't Tell"

Throughout middle and high school, I wrote with all my spare time. First I typed fan fiction about my favorite movies on my mom's typewriter. (I remember that typewriter being what I thought was top notch because I could delete letters. One backspace and my mistake was gone -- not gone forever, because the indentation of my error would forever be etched into the white paper, but man, to erase the ink rather than paint White Out over it sure looked more uniform. I wasn't into mixed media storytelling.) In high school I hogged our family's first computer and created file after file on Windows Notepad, most likely crowding the minimal hard drive available on that monstrous device.


The first real-length novel I wrote was about a couple named Kevin and Katie -- to this day, my closest friends are surprised I didn't name my children these names. Katie was the new girl at school and Kevin was the campus's mysterious bad boy. She was overly optimistic even though her parents transferred her to new schools every few months, he was withdrawn and guarded even though he had never experienced one ounce of adversity in his entire suburban life. With my good-girl-meets-bad-boy match, I was trope-ing before I knew what tropes were, but I hadn't yet discovered the necessary concepts of character motive and development.


Nevertheless, I remember my older cousin stumbling upon a print-out of one of the book's last chapters, in which Katie finds out she has to move away... again... and breaks the news to Kevin. I tried to snatch the paper away from my cousin, but he gave me my first bit of feedback ever. "I like this line," he had said. "'Kevin took a deep inhale of his cigarette and exhaled slowly, but not at all steadily.'" He told me, "That line lets me know just how upset Kevin is before he even says a word."


Well, what do you know. There was my teenage cousin giving me my first "show, don't tell" writing lesson. I remember it well, but I still have to remind myself of the golden rule of composition whenever I write.


"Show, don't tell."


Hopefully my absence over the last year has shown the Internet how busy I've been. Busy working a full-time job, busy being a mom, busy feeding the cat and taking the puppy to training school and wiping down counters and paying bills and Sunday food-prepping and trying to find time to exercise and scheduling doctor appointments and all that everyday stuff that sends the hobby of writing and maintaining a corresponding website on the backmost backburner on the range.


But there are some days, like these quiet Saturday afternoons, that I think about writing some more. And the vapor of an idea begins to develop.


So here I am, telling the Internet that I'm still here, and hoping that soon, I'll have something to show you.



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