Stir Up the Imagination
M emories of what happens in a person’s imagination can be every bit as real as the memories of real life events. This is one of the advantages telling has over showing . Here, I don’t use these terms in the sense of show, don’t just tell , but I use them to distinguish between two types of storytelling. Some stories are told by actors on a stage or screen. They show us the story. Some stories are told through nothing but words. A speaker stands in front of a crowd or a novelist puts words on paper and tells us the story. In this sense, the initial memories are of the experience of seeing the story unfold in showing . We have memories of going to a movie with friends and seeing the story on a large screen. We are drawn into the story and we jump at the right moments and cry at the right moments and laugh at the right moments, but there is still a barrier. We are outsiders, observing the story unfold before us. When the storyteller tells us the story, we don’t have the images or the...