Over het vaak misverstane ‘show, don’t tell’, je hoeft een personage niet ‘yay!’ te laten roepen en hem van vreugde op en neer te laten springen. Stel je voor hoeveel tijd Alice Munroe zou hebben verspild, showing not telling.
Zo begint Dulse:
At the end of the summer Lydia took a boat to an island off the southern coast of New Brunswick, where she was going to stay overnight. She had just a few days left until she had to be back in Ontario. She worked as an editor, for a publisher in Toronto. She was also a poet, but she did not refer to that unless it was something people knew already. For the past eighteen months she had been living with a man in Kingston. As far as she could see, that was over.
She had noticed someting about herself, on this trip to the Maritimes. It was that people were no longer so interested in getting to know her. It wasn’t that she had created such a stir, beofre, but something had been there that she could rely on. She was forty-five, and had been divorced for nine years. Her two children had started their own lives, though there were still retreats and confusions. She hadn’t got fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on this trip. – Francine Prose, Reading like a writer