ARCHIVE FOR Dawn Dorland

The following is a craft essay based on "Because It’s Not Called Storyshowing", Dawn Dorland Perry's craft talk at Muse 2014.

Writers are often admonished to show, don’t tell.  Same for me in my many years of workshopping fiction.  Hell no would I write psychologizing, mansplainy stories that patted your head with a moral, or imposed interpretation, or told you how to feel.  Like Hemingway, I aspired to lay the truth spare and bare.  A description of hills would be charged with conflict.  A euphemism would devastate through its mere repetition.  No one ever accused me of being obvious.  …