Show, Don't Tell

An attempt at good writing 

A well known and oft repeated writing axiom is "Show, don't tell."  As a wanna be writer, I strive to let my words show.  One of my better examples, I hope, is a scene where my character Stepha is starving.  Now I could have writen, "Stepha is starving," but that would have been the easy way out.  So in classic writer's style I showed the reader Stepha's circumstances.

What most people leave

To do so I conjured up at memory of my father eating an apple.  One afternoon, I dropped in at my father's barber shop as he was eating lunch.  The last item in his pail was an apple.  As I watched he ate the fruit down to the core and continued until only the stem remained.  In my youthful brashness I blurted out, "Yuk, you ate the whole thing, seeds and all."

He nodded and flipped the stem into the trash.

"How's come you did that,?" I asked

He replied, "Habit."

I used that memory to construct the scene in Slogans where the villagers are being transported out of Russia to Poland.  Food is scarce and the women have been ordered to let the their children starve to death and save themselves.  In an act of love and defiance, Akulina fed her sons and went hungry.  This is how the scene unfolded to illustrate Stepha's hunger and Akulina's love.

An apple of life

"In another time and place he would have flung the apple into the compost heap to enrich next season’s crop.  At best Stepha would have taken his knife and peeled away the fungus spots, cored the rotten center and dug out the worm holes leaving only the rich meat.  But he was not somewhere else.  So yesterday, when in the car's dim light Mati reached beneath her skirt and miraculously produced the two sorry apples, both he and Vanya grabbed the fruits and clutched them against their chests.  Slowly Stepha brought the blemished orb to his mouth and sunk his teeth deep into its softness and with his lips sucked the juice and devoured his treasure; core, seeds, stem, and worm."