1. Show v. Tell
Zoom in…
Storyboards

2. 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

3. 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.”

4. 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.”

5. METHODS OF SHOWING
• Action
• Speech
• Appearance
• Thought

6. 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.”

7. 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.”

8. 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.”

9. 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.”

10. 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.”

11. 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.”

12. 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.”

13. 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

14. 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.”

15. 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.”

16. YOUR Turn
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.”

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