Introduction

For this selection, I’ve chosen stories that contradict the creative writing maxim: Show DON’T tell. It’s true that inexperienced writers can be tempted to overload their stories with exposition and explanation. But it’s equally tedious when they are so terrified of being accused of ‘telling’ that they dramatize absolutely everything in long oblique scenes. At its best, telling brings energy. It allows the writer to grab hold of a story, to move rapidly through time, to work directly with voice, and to play games with older forms of storytelling like fairytales and myths (Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber being a wonderful example of that). Two of the two stories in this selection work with negatives: telling the reader what a character has forgotten, or what people don’t want to know.