showing not telling in Betsy-Tacy and Tib

[asakiyume]

Thanks to osprey_archer, I've been (very leisurely) reading the first few Betsy-Tacy books. They are a real delight, and I laughed at this scene from the second, Betsy-Tacy and Tib. The girls are eight years old, and they're each looking after a younger sibling, and Betsy, the inventive one, has hit upon learning to fly as an activity. They will jump off progressively taller things, flapping their arms, until they master flight. At the point of this excerpt, they've already jumped off a hitching block and a rail fence, and next they're going to jump from the lowest branch of a maple tree. But this presents problems....


Tib went up the tree in a flash. She climbed out on the lowest branch, but there wasn’t room to stand up; she had to squat. She waved her arms, though, and kept her balance, too.

“What kind of a bird am I?” she called, waving her arms.

“You’re a Tibbin,” answered Betsy. “You’re a Tibbin bird.”

“Here comes the Tibbin!” cried Tib, and she waved her arms and came down. She fell on her knees, but she laughed as she dusted them off. “I like this flying game, Betsy,” she cried.

“I’ll go next,” said Tacy, because Betsy didn’t say a word about going next. “That is, if Paul is all right. Are you all right, Paul?”

Paul said he was all right.

“Of course I’m sort of looking after Paul,” said Tacy. “But I’ll go next, unless you want to, Betsy.”

“Oh, you can go next if you want to,” said Betsy.

So Tacy went next.

She climbed out on the lowest branch. But she sat on it; she didn’t squat. She didn’t even try to wave.

“What kind of a bird am I?” she asked. But you could see it was only to pass the time. She didn’t look happy as Tib had looked; she looked scared.

“You’re a Tacin,” answered Betsy. “You’re a Tacin bird.”

“Oh,” said Tacy.

She waited a long time before she flew, but at last she flew. She let herself down, holding tight to the branch with her hands; then she loosened her hold and dropped.

“That’s good,” Betsy said. “That’s fine, Tacy. Well, I suppose it’s my turn.”

Nobody said it wasn’t.

Betsy got to the lowest branch and sat on it. She held tight and swung her legs. She didn’t fly though.

“When are you going to fly?” asked Tib.

“In a minute,” answered Betsy. She sat there and swung her legs.

Betsy never does jump: instead she distracts them all (not just Tib and Tacy, but the younger siblings too) by telling a story about the three of them as birds, and about why they turn back from birds to girls (because their mothers are weeping so sadly because they're gone)--which story causes everyone present to burst into tears, and Betsy has to hasten to the point where they transform back into girls and climb, not fly, down from the maple tree. "Like this," and she climbs down.

Maud Hart Lovelace never once says that Tacy and Betsy are afraid to jump; you get it all from the dialogue and the action. [okay, she does say Tacy is scared, but MAINLY it's from the other things.] Very cute.

(I like telling just fine in stories, as it happens; I'm not sharing this as some kind of implicit writing directive. I just thought it was a very cute example of the art of showing in practice.)

Comments

[athenais]

I'm not sure why I never saw them in our library at school or our public library; surely they must have been there. They sound like exactly the kinds of books I would have enjoyed as a young reader, too. Minnesota would have been so exotic to me, too, West Coast child that I was! :)

[asakiyume]

You probably would have had to notice them at just the right age! Yeah, and not only would it have been exotic for being Minnesota, it would have been exotic for being the past: Maud Hart Lovelace was writing mid century, but drawing on her memories of her own childhood at the beginning of the century. So in that sense it's like the Little House books: a picture of life in the past.