Abstractions

I'm sure you've heard "show, don't tell," but what exactly does that mean? I want you to look at the book From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler (Grove Press 2005). Here's a summary of what he has to say about avoiding abstractions:

Use only sensory details. When describing a room, start in one corner and move your eye around the room. You can't say "To my left, there were trees." That's generalization. You have to show what you see first, a part of a specific tree. You can't say "He looked angry." That's abstraction. Tell us what the eyebrows are doing, what shape the mouth holds, etc. You can't say "His finger was sliced open where the blade had cut him." That's analysis. You don't see the blade cutting him now. You see the cut, so describe that.

He says we perceive things in only 5 ways: signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity.

The Editor says that people react in 3 ways: involuntary physical response, internal/emotional response, and external response (dialogue, action, etc.).

Some of these things can be used sparingly, like narrative summary, but only in low-tension scenes.

So how do we get around using abstractions, summary, analysis, etc.?

If you're writing from a limited third or a first person point of view, internalize what you want to get across into the narration. You can also use action and dialogue to get your point across.

Let's have an example.

BEFORE
Jimmy hated fishing. It made him queasy. Sometimes his dad took him to the shed where he prepared the fish after catching them. He didn't like the color of the table where his dad gutted the fish because he knew it was only that color because of the fish blood. The shed was hot and smelly. Tools lay all over the place like his dad was using the shed as one big tool box.

Jimmy hated fishing. It made him queasy (abstraction). Sometimes his dad took him to the shed where he prepared the fish after catching them (summary). He didn't like the color of the table where his dad gutted the fish because he knew (filter) it was only that color because of the fish blood (analysis). The shed was hot and smelly. Tools lay all over the place like his dad was using the shed as one big tool box (generalization).

AFTER
Jimmy stepped into his dad's fishing shed and gagged (involuntary physical reaction). "Pwah. What's that smell?" (dialogue)
His dad looked up from the dark red table, a gooey knife in his right hand. "Fish!" He grinned.
Jimmy covered his nose with his sleeve (action) and kicked some stray hooks out of the way to get to the table. He imagined stepping on one and getting tetanus, maybe lockjaw (flash from future). He looked down at the trout under his dad's knife. Wet, stringy stuff bulged out of the slice across the belly. One wide eye stared up at Jimmy. Pleading.
Jimmy's stomach gurgled (internal reaction).
"Don't get ahead of yourself," his dad said. "Got to cook it first."
"That's not--" Jimmy whirled around, kicked a pail, sending fish sliding across the floor, and lunged out the door where he puked in the bushes.