Show don't tell for imaginative pieces

[Ameliajanem]

For my first sac I have decided to do an imaginative piece, I have written a draft and got feedback and my teacher said the biggest thing was I struggle with show; don't tell

To that end, I would love some examples of how to write implicitly about a character's passion for their country - body language, metaphors etc. I just don't know how to do it, and google is not helping me out too much.

Thank you in advance for the help

[literally lauren]

Cool, so you're looking to 'show' the idea of patriotism instead of just having a 'tell' kind of sentence like 'Mike was a really patriotic person.'

You're definitely on the right track with body language and metaphors, but it can be tough to focus on the techniques before understanding the process of getting there.

In order to showcase a character's attributes, your priority should be believability. That means you can't have a character go out of his way to do something weird (or out-of-character) just in order to set up an idea. So having the radio randomly start playing the national anthem which brings a tear to his eye, or saying something like 'his mind drifted to the time he fought in the Vietnam War and represented his country with pride' sounds really clunky

I'm a fan of the '5 Senses' rule which encourages you to have 'show' sentences that make use of the character's senses. Taste and smell can be kind of tricky, and it's best not to overuse those ones, but you should be able to use sight, sound, and sense quite effectively.

So then there's the question of what patriotism looks, sounds, and feels like. Given I don't know much about your story, this might be a bit challenging, but perhaps you could have your character lament over visual, auditory, or sensory reminders of their passion for their country, like if your character was a soldier (cause that's where my mind goes when contemplating patriotism) perhaps you could have them touching their clothing and remarking that it was so much different to their military uniform. Then you get to construct a metaphor around that, as in, the character's current clothes feel flimsy and threadbare, not like the thick camo khaki of his army days. Gradually, as the story progresses, you can add in more details, like maybe your character tries to do some gardening and gets dirt on his clothes, and then his wife remarks that he should change, which makes him think about how silly it is that in polite society, one should not have a single stain or imperfection, but in order to protect and defend that society, he had to crawl through mud and grit for two whole weeks to the point where he thought he'd never get his fingernails clean.

That's just my train of thought, but see how we can start with a sensory experience and then keep adding details in order to justify the idea we're 'showing?'

Hope that helps; if you let me know the details of your story then I might be able to offer some more specific advice.

Good luck with it all!

[Ameliajanem]

Cool, so you're looking to 'show' the idea of patriotism instead of just having a 'tell' kind of sentence like 'Mike was a really patriotic person.'

You're definitely on the right track with body language and metaphors, but it can be tough to focus on the techniques before understanding the process of getting there.

In order to showcase a character's attributes, your priority should be believability. That means you can't have a character go out of his way to do something weird (or out-of-character) just in order to set up an idea. So having the radio randomly start playing the national anthem which brings a tear to his eye, or saying something like 'his mind drifted to the time he fought in the Vietnam War and represented his country with pride' sounds really clunky

I'm a fan of the '5 Senses' rule which encourages you to have 'show' sentences that make use of the character's senses. Taste and smell can be kind of tricky, and it's best not to overuse those ones, but you should be able to use sight, sound, and sense quite effectively.

So then there's the question of what patriotism looks, sounds, and feels like. Given I don't know much about your story, this might be a bit challenging, but perhaps you could have your character lament over visual, auditory, or sensory reminders of their passion for their country, like if your character was a soldier (cause that's where my mind goes when contemplating patriotism) perhaps you could have them touching their clothing and remarking that it was so much different to their military uniform. Then you get to construct a metaphor around that, as in, the character's current clothes feel flimsy and threadbare, not like the thick camo khaki of his army days. Gradually, as the story progresses, you can add in more details, like maybe your character tries to do some gardening and gets dirt on his clothes, and then his wife remarks that he should change, which makes him think about how silly it is that in polite society, one should not have a single stain or imperfection, but in order to protect and defend that society, he had to crawl through mud and grit for two whole weeks to the point where he thought he'd never get his fingernails clean.

That's just my train of thought, but see how we can start with a sensory experience and then keep adding details in order to justify the idea we're 'showing?'

Hope that helps; if you let me know the details of your story then I might be able to offer some more specific advice.

Good luck with it all!

That is so helpful thank you!! my prompt is "we cannot achieve a strong sense of identity without a strong sense of belonging to something outside ourselves", my text is invictus and I am exploring national belonging influencing identity, using a creative piece to parallel the experiences of joan of arc and nelson mandela, i am also trying to figure out how to be subtle about belonging influencing identity, that part is quite hard for me as well

[literally lauren]

That is so helpful thank you!! my prompt is "we cannot achieve a strong sense of identity without a strong sense of belonging to something outside ourselves", my text is invictus and I am exploring national belonging influencing identity, using a creative piece to parallel the experiences of joan of arc and nelson mandela, i am also trying to figure out how to be subtle about belonging influencing identity, that part is quite hard for me as well

Hmm, are you writing from the perspective of Joan of Arc & Mandela, or are you doing a kind of hybrid piece where you take a third-person approach to compare the two?

If you're switching up the narrative voice (i.e. one paragraph from Joan, one from Mandela, one from Joan, etc.) then there's a great opportunity for symbolic parallels. Perhaps linking the moments leading up to Joan's death with a moment of weakness during Mandela's imprisonment in order to suggest that both of them 'belonged' to something they saw as bigger than themselves, and that was what gave them strength in those harsher times.

I'd recommend fleshing out the prompt a little bit first and giving yourself a decent contention. It can be tough to establish a bunch of metaphors and parallels if you don't know what the point is, so starting from a 'what message am I trying to show' perspective will give you some direction.

Then, once you have that core concern of 'okay, I'm trying to suggest that a strong sense of belonging and a strong identity are interconnected, and often even mutually dependent on one another,' you can consider how such an idea pertains to the examples you're using. What you don't want to do is just take the prompt as a given and come up with a piece that has a tonne of complex writerly features but argues something as simplistic as 'yes, we can't achieve a strong sense of identity without a strong sense of belonging.' You're marked on your exploration of the prompt too, so it's not enough to just have a well-written piece with a mediocre contention - you want that argument to form the backbone of your entire piece.

Perhaps consider how you might manipulate the stories of these two characters - with Mandela your priority should be to forge links with the set text, but you've got a lot of freedom with Joan of Arc since, outside of the historical information about her age, location, beliefs, you can explore her psyche and her inner machinations at your leisure.

Ironing out a contention/thesis statement should definitely be your first port of call, and then you can mould your story to suit your ideas