“Show, don’t tell” (Burroway 17). Every aspiring writer has heard these words at least once in their career. But what do they mean? After all, writing is all about telling-people tell stories, they show movies. And yet, if asked, I believe most authors would state that their goal is to create scenes so vivid they play out like miniature films in readers’ imaginations. In order to create these miniature motion-pictures, a writer has to set the ‘stage’ of the mind with words carefully chosen not only to impart physical actions (i.e. what is happening to characters) but also emotional valence (to both the characters and the reader). In his poem, “Snow Day” Billy
Collins does a superlative job capturing the essence of a winter’s day, and projecting it word by word, like some type of home movie, directly into his readers’ imaginations.
The first stanza of the poem begins perfectly: “Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, / its white flag waving over everything…” (38). This is no mere snowfall; it is a “revolution”, something violent, dangerous, angry, joyful and freeing. It is the fall of tyrants, the triumph of the people, and the horror of social upheaval. He sympathizes with the “anarchic cause of snow”, and struggles to hear “which small queen is about to be brought down” (39). Small changes and one simple conceit transform a mere recitation of a common winter events- snowfall, school closings and the petty rivalries of small children- into the stuff of epic literature. That is “showing, not telling”, that is what makes Collins’ work fascinating to read-he writes as if directing Les Misérables, not reciting a weather report.
Julia, good post! I like that you saw these images in the Collins poem. We'll talk about this more in class, but what do these images do for us? What does he use them to say?
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