Passing Down

by A. LaFaye published in the spring issue of Chiron Review

http://www.chironreview.com/

“I’m not some used car salesman you can bargain with,

Muriel.” Edna pointed the knife, balancing her sister’s left eye

perched on the tip.

       “So getting some fuzzy dice over the mirror is out of the

question?” Muriel ranked arguments right up there with

colonoscopies. And ever since she’d chosen a tour of the country

via a used VW bus over college four decades earlier, her sister,

Edna, acted like she’d been promoted to eldest in the family

because she hadn’t shirked her duties.

    She’d like to shirk something all right.

    Suddenly, she remembered her mother standing at the

window of the van, handing her the only camera in the family.

    “Take them everywhere you go. Send a few home when you

can.”

    And that was her mother’s good-bye as she stepped back and

waved before returning to the house while her dad finished a

last-minute engine check like she was preparing for takeoff.

    Spying her mother’s photo album tucked sideways on a

bottom shelf in Edna’s living room, Muriel shook her head,

thinking, I must have taken a million shots with that thing. Why

didn’t I send more to Mom? Her mom had kept that photo of her

waving from the tunnel of a giant sequoia on the fridge for

nearly a decade.

    “Muriel,” Edna pressed the knife into the cutting board,

bringing her back this tiff over furniture. A bunch of wood glued

together in useful ways. “That bedroom suite wasn’t just our

mother’s it was her mother’s before her. It needs to be passed

down.”

    “It’d be passing down to me.” And lord knows she needed

some furniture. Her place was so empty she was getting sick of

the echo every time she headed to the kitchen.

“Who gets it after that, Pedro?” Edna huffed.

“That bird will outlast me by 25 years, easy. He’s always

loved dark woods.”

    Setting her shoulders, Edna said, “It’ll go to me, then to Mary

Anne.”

    Muriel held her hands up to weigh things out. “Covered in

bird shit, sold at the first pawn shop to take it? Not sure which is

worse. What do you think?”

    Edna sliced carrots with sous chef speed, muttering to herself.

    “Do you have room in this house for a bedroom suite?”

    Muriel glanced around the cluttered room. The behemoth

sideboard beside her sat piled with papers filed between green

depression glass service wear. Their Aunt Jane’s Muriel

believed. She could still smell her plum preserves boiling on a

stove.

    Then she spied the yellow vinyl stool that had occupied the

very same spot in their mother’s kitchen. She’d perched on the

edge of that seat after school to chat with their mother so many

times, Edna called it “Muriel’s thrown.” Her ass wouldn’t even

fit in it now.

    For a moment, she remembered her mother’s earrings

bobbing as she washed the dishes, telling her about the fire at

Granger’s Market. That little electrical short lead to a pretty

buttery-sweet, insurance-financed bakery. Their mother

decorated birthday cakes in that kitchen for years – with two free

cakes a year as a bonus.

    That memory filled Muriel’s nose with the smell of a much

more recent fire far closer to home. So much for all those photos

she took on her anti-college road trip. Clearing her throat, she

asked, “For that matter, does Mary Anne have somewhere to live

at the moment?”

    Edna kept her eyes fixed on her vegetables. “Just because my

daughter is having some difficulty arranging things for herself,

doesn’t mean you should get the furniture.”

    “And what does it mean that her little accident left me with

ongoing feud with the insurance company and a new empty

apartment I can’t afford?”

    “It should be passed, Muriel.” Edna stood, facing the sink,

hands on either edge for support. “Who will you pass it on to?”

“Shall I adopt someone? I’m a little over the hill, but I bet I

could find a deserving sixteen-year-old out there somewhere.”

    “I have a daughter!” Edna washed her hands in water that

blanched her skin.

    “Your daughter will probably see other uses for that furniture.

Resale value comes to mind.”

    “Fine, Muriel, fine. Take it! Burn it for all I care.”

Muriel stood in the doorway of her sister’s kitchen, noticing

Edna’s stooped shoulders moving to the rhythm of her tears.

Reminded of their mother, Muriel could recall her keeping time

with a song on the radio as she folded their father’s work shirts

over the cherry red Formica table.

    The dishes put up to dry, she’d sit at the vanity in the

bedroom, take out her earrings, comb out her minky brown hair,

and tell their father about all the news – Gladys Foster lost her

keys and trampled all her flowers in a mad search. Muriel’s bike

needs a tune-up, she rode it down Shotgun Hill again. Kelly’s

had loaves of bread for a dime. Oh, and Edna’s piano recital will

be next Saturday at the church. Can you come or is there an Elks

meeting?

    Her father nodded and hummed his replies. Punctuated with

“that girl has a death wish” and “I can make it if you get my suit

cleaned.”

    Her mother’s earrings, cut glass, the lone pair, shimmering in

a bowl below the lamp, casting tiny rainbows onto the wall – so

much color from such cheap glass.

    “Edna.”

    A hmph of a response.

    “Mary Anne can have them, when she’s ready.”

    Edna turned. “Isn’t that the point of this little negotiation,

Muriel?”

    Muriel turned to the side door. Gripping the handle, she said,

“We’re never ready for what our mothers have to pass down to

us. That’s the point, Edna.”

Setting Up Surprise

How much do you love writing that surprises you with a fun turn of language? Are you looking for waves to work a little more peep in your literary step? Well then, 

Here's a writing exercise that will help you set up a few surprises in your writing:

Setting Up Surprise

Feel free to share the results in the comments on this post. Thanks! Write on!

The Power of Specifics-A Writing Vlog

A Tight Write Bite by A. LaFaye

Click the Video Below to Watch

a Writing Vlog

A Closer Look at "Show, Don't Tell & The Use of Time in Fiction

Created with WordSwag

“Show,telling through dramatic telling to dramatization.  Knowing when to use each of these approaches to the portrayal of time in a story is one of the hardest, but most important skills for any writer to acquire. Let’s look at how this can play out in your writing.

The saying, "Show, don’t tell” is really shorthand for a continuum of a writer’s control of time which moves from telling, to dramatic telling, to dramatization and all points in between.

Telling is very useful because if we showed every element of a story it would be enormously long. Even in Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” she doesn’t show us every minute of that hour, she condenses time through telling, then expands it through dramatic telling and dramatization where necessary.  We learn of her heart condition by telling, then we see her transformation from grief to liberation through effective dramatization. I’ve linked title of the story to a copy of the story itself, so after you’ve read this look at the use of time, you can read and explore how Chopin uses time in her story.

So, when should we use telling?

Telling is your go-to approach when you need to condense time and share essential information that is not dramatically important to the story such as “He went to the grocery store” or “Bailey never missed an episode of Reverence.”

If the information you’re conveying brings us to a new place and time, then you want to make sure that this “time skip” doesn’t go over any essential events in the life and development of the characters or the forward progression of the plot. Don’t pull out a “Cthulhu Axe” in your writing.  The author H.P. Lovecraft had several stories in which characters had to battle alien cthulhu monsters and in one story, the character goes up into an attic, discovers a monster, the fights it with the axe he picked up on the way up the stairs. 

HOLD UP.

If he picked up the axe on the way up the stairs, then the writer should’ve told us that as he went up the stairs, otherwise that axe pops up out of literary thin air.  Make sure you tell readers about pivotal elements like this as they happen, not after the fact. On the other hand, you can host an anniversary dinner Sixth Sense style.  In that movie, we see Bruce Willis’s character in a tense/non-communicative anniversary dinner only to find out later that the reason his wife isn’t answering is because the Willis character is actually dead, but doesn’t realize it.  You can withhold key information if the “secret” is essential to the plot reveal later.

Telling is like the plate in a fictional meal—it’s functional, helpful, plain, and essential to holding everything together.

Dramatic Telling is the tasty side dish of any fictional meal. It’s the use of condensed time to show important details of a story.  Through the use of concrete specific details, active voice, and action verbs, dramatic telling can “show” you a lot within a story without bringing you into a specific moment or scene.  For example, you might say that “Fadro and Eric were frienemies.” (telling) or you could say, “Since the colossal spitball war of first grade, Fadro and Eric had been battling their way through Holston Elementary one science experiment explosion at a time. As Principal Garrett puts it, make friendly rivalry potentially deadly.  Here, we see more of why they are frienemies, have a sense of their identities, and a more specific timeline for their relationship, but we never entered a full scene with both boys present.  Dramatic telling is best done with double-duty details.  Details that develop more than one element at a time. Because these boys make “friendly rivalry potentially deadly,” we have a sense of their risk-taking, competitive, and scientific personalities (character development), but we also have a sense of the plot with a pinch of foreshadowing. 

With that side dish served, let’s look at the main course of dramatization.

Dramatization is when you use full scenes to bring us into the moment of a character’s life which is a key component of drawing your readers into your story and offering them a vicarious experience.  You could say that “talking to a stranger at the edge of a lake saved Ginny life” or you could see this full scene from the short story “Surface” to see how one weird conversation on the edge of a lake allowed the terminally ill Ginny to gain new lease on life. Be prepared, it’s a long scene that includes multiple flashbacks which employ dramatic telling. I’ll put those in bold. Notice the use of character-specific dialogue, directed thought (in italics), dialogue tags, and that most scenes combine telling, dramatic telling, and dramatization to bring us into the moment.

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

 And this damn lake was no Oak Street Park, so Ginny flung her cell phone into the water. 

           

            “Pity. Party of 1. Your table is ready.” 

            A voice drew her attention to the shore.  A tall kid stood by a tree, his hair as pale as his skin which she could practically see-through.

            “You’re…you’re…”

            “Look who’s talking.” He leaned against the tree, the pattern of the bark visible through his clothes.  “Not like you’re living it up over there, Miss Doom and Gloom. Heck, those thunder clouds have more life in one cubic centimeter than you do.”

            “I…”

            “Have speech problem?”  He stood up and took a step towards her. “Don’t sweat it.  There aren’t any entrance exams where you’re going.”

            “Where’s that?” Ginny asked, feeling chilled.

            “Into the lake, I hope.” He walked up and threw in a seed pod that didn’t make a splash. “I mean why rent a lake house if you’re not going to swim?”

            He stared at her, his eyebrows raised.

            “Am I…”

            “Gawking at me like I should be wearing a long black robe and carrying a farming tool fit for chopping some wheat?” He took a swipe at the imaginary crop. “Yes, indeed you are.”  He laughed.

            Ginny could feel her jaw tighten.  Jerk.

            “You’re just looking at the surface again.  The signs floating on top.”  He cast his hand out as if he skimmed over an unseen object.

            If she wasn’t so tired, she’d stand up and give that guy an earful, but she settled with saying, “Oh, and you’re here to help me go deep and see the purpose of life before I …”

            “Die? Croak? Kick the bucket? Shuffle off this mortal coil.”

            “Whatever!” She shifted to face the other way.

            He appeared again on that side of the dock, leaning onto his toes, saying, “Nope. I’m not here to talk about ‘whatever.’” He did air quotes. “ I’m here to talk about neocides and pHlevels. You?”

            “I’m freaked out.”

            “I can understand that. I mean, when I learned what was going to happen to me, I was …” He laughed.  “Let’s just say, it’s a good thing my mother always bought a fresh stock of tightie-whities every three months.”

            Ginny snarled in disgust.

            “Hey, don’t judge. They say Einstein didn’t bother getting up to go the bathroom when he was on a hot streak.  Know what I mean?”

            Ginny closed her eyes and held her stomach.

            “Changing the subject.” He walked back to the tree.  “Do you remember your neighbors on Peale Street?”

            “The Bickersons and the Arugables?”  Ginny shredded a leaf.  They were really the Dickersons and the Aarables, but their neighborhood feud was legendary on account of the Dickerson’s beehives and the Aarables loathing for the flying little honeymakers.”

         As a newly single mom, it took Ginny’s mother worked for almost a decade to afford a house. Too bad the neighbor report didn’t include bickering neighbors.

         Ginny lived in headphones from the moment they moved-in to drown out the yard-to-yard shouting matches.

            “Yep. Those are the very jerks I’m referring to.  FYI.  Neocides kill bees. And they are killer on the red blood cells. Turn the suckers into cups.”

            Ginny blinked. 

            Did this guy speak English?

            She blinked again.

            His words sifted into her thoughts and she slowly sorted them out.

            Spinning to face him, she asked, “Are you saying my blood’s jacked up because my neighbors killed my other neighbor’s bees?!”

            “And sprayed all three yards for weeks while you were at school.  That’s right.”  He tucked his hands in his pockets.

            “Shit.”

            “Yep. Stuff decimated the US populations.  We’re going to be dealing that screw-up for years.”

            “How do you know this?”

            “Same way, I know you’ve got three nickels in your pocket right now.”

            She gripped the coins. She carried them every day. They were the change she’d gotten when she bought a hotdog in the aisle at the ball game with her dad. She’d wondered why the vendor hadn’t give her a dime and hesitated there on the step, her dad had turned, yelling, “You’re missing it, Ginny!  Come on.”  And a fly ball had hit him right in the temple and he’d crumpled over the seat.

            “You spoke to my dad?” She practically, fell off the dock when she scrambled to her feet.

            “Not possible.”  He sighed. “I can do a lot of things.  But I can’t do that.  Just like there’s no way for you to know if he would’ve lived if he hadn’t turned to yell at you.” He wagged a finger at her.  “Besides. You need to stop looking at the surface.  Unless you want to talk about the surface of your blood cells. See now, there’s where I can help.  Tell them to look at lower Ph level therapies to permeate the lining of your blood cells.  It’ll reverse things.”

            “What?”

            “Go see Dr. Elliot Littlefield.”

            “Who?”

            “Elliot Littlefield.  Say it, so you’ll remember him.” He walked towards the tree.  “I mean after all, it’s that teenage son of his who’ll grow up and get you to spend those nickels.”

            He turned to face her, smiling.  “Oh, and he’ll bore you with some dumb theory about quantum physics and time.  You might want to listen though.  Could come in hand someday.”   He whispered something like “today,” then he stepped behind the tree. 

            She leaned to see where he went.

            He leaned back,  “See you around, Ginny Carpenter.  And remember, look a little deeper.”

            And he was gone.

To see the full version of this genre-bending story, click on the title.

Hopefully, this overview of the continuum of telling, dramatic telling, and dramatization gives you deeper insight into the use of time in your story and then adage old advice “show, don’t tell.”

I'd also like to invite you to follow me on social media. I can be found @sylvanocity on FB, Twitter, and Instagram where I often share writing advice in "Tight Write Bites."

Let me know if you have any questions! 

Write on!

Multicultural Children's Book Day Review

Mystery of the Naga At Night

A Pack-n-Girls Adventure

Written by Lisa Travis

Illustrations by Adam Turner

Published by WorldTrek Publishing, 2019

In their second adventure in Thailand, friends Jess and Nong May, must uncover the mystery of a mythological 7-headed snake, called a naga, that's slithering through the forest at night.  With a twist on the familiar Scooby-Doo switcheroo, the solution to this mystery is not what young readers might expect. In this fun adventure, there's plenty of adventure, a great look at international service work, cross-cultural experiences, and the importance of friendship. 

On the other hand, there are a few issues with this fun book that may raise some concerns for readers, teachers, and librarians. The writing is a little uneven with some awkward sentences, abrupt time shifts, underdeveloped characters, and essential plot points that occur "off the page." The truth behind the Naga is grounded in social issues within contemporary Vietnam, but the "solution" is not very plausible.  Additionally, the girls mysteriously recruit their brothers whenever they face danger and even hold their hands at the most intensive moments which is not very empowering to girls and may send the wrong gender messages to readers.  

While many readers will find this to be a fun adventure, there are a few issues that may suggest it might be better to seek out more evenly developed and gender empowering stories. If you're looking for books that immerse children in the cultures of Thailand, consider the work of Minfong Ho set in Thailand like Sing to the Dawn and Hush or Dia's Story Cloth by Dia Cha or Mela and the Elephant. It's always helpful to look at the books selected for the Pacific/Asian American Award for Literature.

This review is part of Multicultural Children's Book Day and done in honor of their mission to "not only raise awareness of the kid's books that celebrate diversity but to get more of these books into classrooms and libraries.  To support this mission, you can share their social media posts with the #readyourworld

I'm fully committed to their mission as a teacher and an author, so if you'd like to follow my work, consider checking out my own social media accounts @sylvanocity on FB, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also look at my books on my website www.alafaye.com

I hope you'll support Multicultural Children's Book Day on January 31st and their mission every day by finding, sharing, and supporting books that reflect all aspects of culture. 

Show Vs. Tell: 

A False Binary

Think Continuum!

We've heard the adage "show don't tell" so often it's practically become the golden rule of writing.  The question is ...should it be? Like so many binary comparisons --male/female --the use of time in fiction has been confined to a false contrast that should actually be described as a continuum.  As anyone can see from a quick read of most writing, there are places where telling is just fine.  The final line of Chopin's ironic "The Story of an Hour" is a great example:

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills. 

And when it comes to showing there is a big difference between what I've labeled "dramatic telling" and "dramatization."

Dramatic Telling is a handy way of conveying information in a condensed way that much more absorbing and active than telling, but doesn't require the full development of dramatization (or scene work).  Here's an example from the novel The Year of the Sawdust Man which opens

 "I knew every inch of Mama's room.  We spent our days there ever since we moved to that airy house on Main Street--cutting paper dolls from magazine advertisements or acting out plays from the books we'd read.  Mama loved the models in the Ladies Home Journal because we drew and colored them ourselves.  For our plays, we made clothes out of the laundry Mama cleaned for our neighbors.  Mama enjoyed playacting more than cleaning clothes. We spent so much time in that breezy room overlooking Minkie's Mercantile, I knew every ring of dust, every pierced earring, every piece of handmade clothing she owned." 

Here, we learned a lot about the relationship between mother and daughter, the character of both people, the setting, and there's a hint the central conflict in this story, but it's not a scene, so it's not fully showing these people in this room. We see them through a condensed summary of dramatic telling which often uses

1. Active Voice--strong verbs, focus on action, concrete details
2. Specific Language--it's not just clothing, but "every piece of handmade clothing"
3. Double Duty Details--details that show more than one element of writing at a time
4. Condensed Time

Here we see a mother who acts in plays, reads books, and creates paper dolls with her daughter rather than cleaning the house or washing the clothes she's paid to clean which reveals how close they are to each other, how artistic they both are, and how unfocused her mother is on practical matters.  This paragraph reveals a lot using a form of telling that mimics showing. 

Double Duty Details are one of the tools used to create this effect. It's a term I'm well-known for and I've written quite a few blog posts on the topic, so I'll be brief here and point out that by saying that she wore clothes she should be washing because she "enjoyed playacting more than cleaning clothes" which shoes both her creativity and her lack of inhibition and her lack of commitment to gainful employment which shows her identity, her actions, and hints at the central conflict of the story--Mama, AKA Heirah Rae Bergen, struggles to fit in the society in which she lives and eventually withdraws from it, leaving her daughter feeling abandoned. 

Condensed Time is a great propel the plot forward while covering a lot of ground in the process. To feel the bite of the loss of her mother, we need to know what Nissa's (the narrator's) relationship with her mother was like before she discovers she's left town alone. This quick summary of their time together in "that airy room overlooking Minkie's Mercantile" shows us the creativity and closeness of their relationship while hinting at tension below the surface. Why else would Nissa be so hyper-aware of everything in her mama's room? We also learn that they live in a small town in the past --living on a main street with a Mercantile gives that away--the airy-breezy room also suggests a warm climate that is likely also Southern according to the word choices here. 

Let's look at another quick example from Worth in which the narrator explains the war between the farmers and the ranchers in his 1870s Nebraskan community when he realizes their new family member, an NYC orphan would have no idea what they mean by "fence fighting" between the two rival families the Gantry's and the Danvers. Nate says, "Fence fighting didn't mean a thing to a boy from a city, but I knew Mr. Clemson spoke of cattle trampling crops, then turning up lame or missing, a Danver boy drowning on Gantry land, and now the killing of Danver sheep. 

Here, through the use of specific details, strong verbs, and summarized action, I used condensed time to convey the backstory of the feud that works as the backdrop to the family drama of the story.

Dramatization, on the other hand, puts in the moment when action is taking place. That can happen in a full scene that uses telling and dramatic telling to bring us into the central events of the story. When lightning strikes the ground and spooks the horses hitched to the wagon Nate stands in--he is crippled in the accident that follows.  

I use dramatic telling to lead it off saying, "Then lightning struck ground, sending those horses toward the house and my leg into pieces." 

Then I bring readers into the moment:

"My mind gobbled up the world in that instant, then spit it back at me in tiny little moving pictures--the look of the wheel turning all splintered and gray--the ground rolling by with rocks hopping up--my pitch tumbling to the ground and ricocheting. No sound. No feeling. Just a jumble of pictures all moving faster than the rain itself." Notice that telling is used here with "No sound" and "No feeling" which work because most folks have been in that moment when disaster strikes, time slows down, and you notice every detail.  

Dramatization also often incorporates full scenes with dialogue, character descriptions, and so on.  

When you think of show vs tell as a way of controlling of time in your writing and notice that it's more about a continuum than the binary, you gain greater control of your ability to propel the story forward and realize there is a time for everything --telling, dramatic telling, and dramatization--as long as you bring us into the moment when it's essential.  

Let's Leap in Spring 

Poetry to Ponder: Writing Spring Poetry with Specific Wordsa fun tutorial for young poets

Did you know that a dog can show you what spring is all about? 

Katrin B. at Pixaby

Don't believe me? Then click on the link to read this poem by Marilyn Nelson. It's called "April is a Dog's Dream"

Care to try a little spring poetry of your own? Then watch this tutorial on writing a spring poem using Nelson's poem as a mentor text:

(If the video doesn't play automatically, just hit play again) 

Here's a look at the writing advice from the video with a link to the Marily Nelson poem "April is a Dog's Dream"

Poetry to Ponder: Writing a Poem About Your Favorite Spring Place

When writing poetry:

Be Specific

1.     Choose words that give readers as picture

a.     Soft grass growing

b.     Sweet breeze blowing

c.     Wind full of singing

d.     Chew and charge and chase

Park, playground, creek

Share words with a partner

            What can you see?

            What do you smell?

            What do you hear?

2.     Sense words—see, hear, touch, taste, smell

3.     Action words—growing, blowing, singing, chew, charge, and chase

4.     Make music with your words—look at how you can make fun sounds with words

a.     Repeating sounds like “ing” -growing, blowing, singing or “ch” in chew, charge, chase

b.     Look at the music in specific words like “breeze”

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Most importantly—have fun sharing your favorite place in spring in a poem of your own!

Poets: If you'd like to share your poem here, feel free to share it in the comments.  

Teachers: If you have a poetry exercise you'd like to share, please do.

Write on!