Okay, I’m not afraid; I’ll start naming names. Rebecca Brown’s The Last Time I Saw You, in Ploughshares, Fall 200four:
"I think the last time I saw you may have been that time near the church. I still like that church despite this, though the church is also other things to me. In fact, more and more I wish I remembered those other things that are called permanent, inviolable, impregnable to assault or trespass, secure from violation of profanation, constant and true the way I remember you." (p. forty-two)
Kind of nice. But then it goes on this way for eight and a half pages. I recall Dorothy Parker, but that had substance. If there is a story here, I missed it because it was sort of like listening to a friend go on and on and on about her broken relationship until you need to tune out and nod at what you hope are the appropriate pauses. Here’s the wrap-up:
"Maybe, that time, I admitted you were right. Maybe I said that I knew I had been kidding myself but that I still wasn’t going to do what I needed to do because I was a coward, I was a liar and afraid that I knew that I had stolen something from you like a thief. And maybe I cannot bear to have said what I said, what I might have said, and to know that it is true. And maybe I cannot bear for you to know what you know about me. I cannot bear to know that you loved me once and look what I did to you." (p. 50)
Has anyone here never written such words in our diary or torn-up (if we were smart) letter to the lost love? It’s not that this is badly written nor not relative to human nature, but isn’t it a bit cliche? Instead of Parker, we have teenage angst that never learned to cope.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Show vs. tell? That could be it.
Well, it’s in the first person, and it’s an interesting way of presenting the situation, albeit in the character’s point of view without any flashback or allowing the reader to “read” what the circumstances as rolled out in conversation or action sequence might have enabled, so you may be quite right. But for me it was still just too long without any major conflict or resolution. It was more like a whiney epistle. The “tell” situation here does limit the reader to forming an opinion of the credibility of the first person narrator, and somehow, I didn’t like her enough to listen wholeheartedly.