“You told, you did not show,” my friend, Harriet, said when she gave me feedback on the first version of what was to become The Language Professor. Three other friends had given me mitigated feedback, but their reticence had not registered with me. When Harriet said what she said, however, a feeling of certainty took hold of me and did not let go. She was right, I thought, I had to rewrite this story.
I left The Phone Call – that was the story’s first title – worked on something else and came back to it a few years later. This time I would show, I would not tell.
This time I did show, but poorly. I told the story in dialogue form, a form I had used in another book I had written. No sooner did I finish this second version, which now bore the title, The Language Lesson, and give it to a friend for feedback than I knew, before being told, that I had still not succeeded in showing how it felt to be thrown out of your job with the flick of a finger.
And then I remembered something else I had learned about writing through the years, start in the middle of the action. The final version of The Language Professor was born.
Here are the three different opening sentences: the first, from The Phone Call, which tells; the second, from The Language Lesson, which tries to show but does not succeed; the third, from The Language Professor, which shows in no uncertain terms:
• The phone call came at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, nine days before Naomi was scheduled to go back to work…
• “I don’t believe it, “Naomi said.
“I’m sorry,” Reuben said, “those were my instructions.”
• The bastard, the fucking bastard, Naomi swore as she searched frantically for the memo
granting her a one year leave of absence.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Debora Resnick
author of
The Language Professor
Eloquent Books
Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6
http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html