showing not telling in Betsy-Tacy and Tib
Feb. 1st, 2024 07:35 pmThanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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....
( I'll go next, unless you want to )
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.)
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....( I'll go next, unless you want to )
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.)
