Show v. Tell

Zoom in…Storyboards

Tell v. Show

• Naomi was painfully shy, especially at social gatherings.

• Even with the party in full swing, with the dancers twirling and busting a move, Naomi stayed in her dark and lonesome corner, blushing profusely and quietly refusing when the jock of her dreams asked her to dance.

» Input provided by 1A…especially Oscar G and Krystin D

Tell: Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl

• “My father found all of this slightly amusing. An intellectual who had escaped his wealthy German-Jewish family by coming to America in the twenties, he had absolutely no interest in things. He was a book designer who lived in a black-and-white world of paper and type; books were his only passion. He was kindly and detached and if he had known that people described him as elegant, he would have been shocked; clothes bored him enormously, when he noticed them at all.”

Tell: My Dark Places by James Ellroy

• “Lloyd was a fat boy from a broken home. His mother was a Christian wacko. He was as foulmouthed as I was and loved books and music just as much. Fritz lived in Hancock Park. He dug movie soundtracks and Ayn Rand novels. Daryl was an …., athlete and borderline Nazi of half-Jewish parentage.”

METHODS OF SHOWING

• Action • Speech• Appearance • Thought

Action: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings• “His obesity, while disgusting, was

not enough to incur the intense hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made our hate not only just imperative was his actions at the dinner table. He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal.”

Storyboard this quote…zoom in…• “His obesity, while disgusting, was

not enough to incur the intense hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made our hate not only just imperative was his actions at the dinner table. He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal.”

Action: Russell Baker’s Growing Up• “In that time when I had known her best, my

mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run.

“She ran after squawking chickens, an ax in her hand, determined on a beheading that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when running up from the cellar over with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled back down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not. She ran.”

Speech: Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors

• “My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just land in the air. But when my mothers says something, the ends curl.”

Speech: David Sedaris’s “City of Angels” Me Talk Pretty One Day

• “I knew exactly what he was up to. I know the rules, I’m not stupid, so I wrote down his name and license number and said I’d report him to the police if he tried any funny business. I didn’t come all this way to be robbed blind, and I told him that, didn’t I, Alisha?

She showed me the taxi receipt, and I assured her that this was indeed the correct price. It was a standard thirty-dollar fare from Kennedy Airport to any destination in Manhattan.

She stuffed the receipt back into her wallet. “Well, I hope he wasn’t expecting a tip, because he didn’t get a dime out of me.”

“You didn’t tip him?”

“… no!” Bonnie said. “I don’t know about you, but I work hard for my money. It’s mine and I’m not tipping anybody unless they give me the kind of service I expect.”

Appearance: Patricia Hempl’s “Memory and Imagination” I Could Tell You Stories

•“My father gave me over to Sister Olive Marie, who did look remarkably like an olive. Her oily face gleamed as if it had just been rolled out of a can and laid on the white plate of her broad, spotless wimple. She was a small plump woman; her body and the small window of her face seemed to interpret the entire alphabet of olive; her face was a sallow green olive placed upon the jumbo ripe olive of her habit. I trusted her instantly and smiled, glad to have my hand placed in the hand of woman who made sense, who provided the satisfaction of being what she was: an Olive who looked like an olive.”

Appearance: Rick Bragg’s All Over But The Shoutin

• “He had always been a clean drunk, a well-dressed drunk, what people in that time called a pretty man. He might be cross-eyed drunk but his shoes were always shined, always the best-dressed man in jail. His children and wife might go without, but his shirts were always pressed. Some people had backbone to lean on. Daddy had starch.”

Appearance: James McBride’s The Color of Water

• “Big Richard was a tall, thin, chocolate-skinned man with a mustache, who favored shades, short-sleeved shirts, shiny shoes, and sharkskin pants, and always held a lit cigarette between his teeth.”

• the blending of looks, dress and gesture give us a quick but complete portrait of a man

Thought: Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions

• “In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer….Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.”

Thought: Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart

• “I remember the look on my father’s face as he sat and held my mother’s hand that night I found them in the kitchen. I remember my mother hearing the news of his death, and crying out from such an astonishing place of loss and loneliness. Yes, those two people loved each other. It is plainer now in retrospect than it ever was when they were alive. Or maybe I can just see it a little better now, having learned for myself what a bittersweet thing love can be. From my vantage, love – no matter how deep or desperate it may be – is not reason enough to stay in a bad relationship, especially when the badness of it all is damaging or malforming other people. But I didn’t get to make that choice for my parents, any more than I get to make it for you.”

Mixed Methods: Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl

• My mother had lots of energy and education and not a lot to do. “If only my parents had let me be a doctor,” she often wailed as she paced the apartment like a caged tiger. She tried one job and then another, but they never lasted. “Nobody has any vision!” she announced after being politely fired as the chief editor of the Homemaker’s Encyclopedia. “I really thought that an essay on English queens and their homemaking skills was a brilliant idea.”

YOUR Turn

Work Cited• Propp, Karen. “Showing Character.” http://www.karenpropp.com/stories/character2.htm