Show me

So, lately I've been re-reading old favorites - or at least in part. Fall is so reminiscent and it rubs off on me. But I found myself reading Forever Overheard. If you Google it, you might discover that this is a chapter (of sorts) from David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It is my favorite example of...showing. Showing is my favorite. It's better than telling. Telling is boring and absent original thought. Showing is best.

I have no idea if I've said this before - I probably have, but it bears repeating. When you write, show me the story. Take Forever Overheard for instance. I could easily tell you that the boy in the story is thirteen years old, he went to the public pool on his birthday and the story is all about how he jumped off the high dive. It seems boring, perhaps, to say it this way, and that is because it is. It's not a freak occurrence, jumping off the high dive for the first time. It's scary and nerve-racking, and if I wrote a story about it and actually said, "It was scary and nerve-racking the first time I jumped off the high dive." you might as well take away my writing privileges.

DFW doesn't say thing like that. He describes the children playing in the pool, the swimsuits of the people in line to jump, the heavy weight of standing on the rungs, and the smell of hot dogs and sugary drinks. It's good enough to take you back to a memory and feel and see and smell that first dive feeling. It shows you the story. If only more stories were like that.

I feel like society doesn't want to be shown - not in this way at least. It wants instant gratification in knowing that something is "beautiful" and "scary" and "sad." We want to define everything for our purposes and attach something so definition-less with a single word. We want things to be simple, but they aren't. We ask for a shallow understanding. But we (or maybe just I) crave a deeper one. A raw, personal, stomach wrenching understanding.

I strive to show. To edit out the telling. To put down the book that says "She looked sad." or "The castle on the hill was hauntingly beautiful." That's not showing, it's telling. Give me authors who show me something - anything new or old or completely re-envisioned. But show me.