Random Snippets On Prose, One

All the people who tried to be a mentor to me or something in writing has told me to ‘show, not tell,’ always in low tones, as if it were some big secret no one ever heard in a Freshman Lit class in some random local computer college. I’ve always rejected this, but only know now why I found it so untenable. Prose pieces with carefully parsed dialogue and very precise details that somehow ‘speak for themselves’ seem to me overambitious. It could very well be the case that a solitary detail such as a phone receiver hanging limp two inches from the floor could ‘mean’ something like a sudden abandonment, etc., but it doesn’t follow that when writing a story re: abandonment, every detail should scream ‘abandonment.’ Not just because it’s been done to death by minimalists, but because, in the end, a symbol doesn’t mean anything but itself. The sun rising could be some kind of thing signifying hope or a new beginning, but we see it rising everyday without a single hitch in our breathing. This is the problem of Student Fiction. Too much playing around with connotations and secondary meanings when what the thing Really Is goes missing, as in a story about death that features the moon shining shyly through thin clouds, a wheelbarrow with one wheel rusted off, ants consuming a dead dog on the street, bit by bit, etc. Okay, let’s assume it all means something and that their very presence lends mood and a portentous air to the story. But why are those things there in the first place? Symbolic Worth should be secondary. How great is it that one character in the story dies and all these deathlike things keep occurring all throughout? Seriously― I like Hemingway and Carver. Most of what I’ve read of Hempel is good. But come on. This is getting boring.

When I was still trying to get published in the school Literary Magazine, I remember having this vague sense of not believing in the whole Show And Don’t Tell thing most of the editors had as their Bible. I remember the Prose Editor actually writing ‘Don’t tell― show’ on one draft of my story. As if I had never heard that before. I think the main point of that was to leave something for the reader to do. Allow your work to speak to your reader and gain new meanings with every rereading. And I remember saying to myself ‘bullshit,’ thinking of the churning waves of things I wanted to tell everyone in my prose which couldn’t be broken down into any discernible symbols. I didn’t want to show you anything. I didn’t want to encrypt anything in overburdened symbols used universally all through time. I was convinced (and even more so now) that I have too much to say. That I will always leave the Reader with something to do. That’s it. That I will tell you everything but you still won’t completely understand.