GODDESSKY

I struggle a lot with "showing and not telling." Here's some exercises and techniques I've tried to practice this from researching different methods that I just conjured up together (please take with a grain of salt, everyone is different, lol.):

Object Observation: Choose an object in your immediate vicinity and describe it without naming what it is. Include details about its texture, color, size, shape, and any other distinctive features. Basically: have someone else to identify it based on your description.

Character Emotions: Write a list of emotions and for each one, write a short scene that shows a character experiencing that emotion without directly stating what the emotion is. i.e., Instead of saying, "Alistair was angry", you could say... "Alistair's fists clenched, his jaw tightened; his face turned red as he stared at the broken amulet on the floor."

Active Verbs: Challenge yourself to rewrite sentences using more active, specific verbs. i.e., "She walked into the room" (telling) could become, "She strutted into the room, her boot heels clicking against the marble floor" (showing).

Sensory Details: Choose a setting, real or fictional, and describe it using all five senses. What can a character see, smell, hear, taste, and touch in this environment, or moment?

Dialogue: Use dialogue to reveal information about your characters and the plot. Instead of telling the reader that a character is upset, show it through what the character says and how they say it.

In-Depth Character Description: Take a character from your story and describe them in detail. Show their personality through their actions, speech, and appearance, rather than direct statements.

Rewrite Telling Sentences: Take a piece of your own writing or a passage from a book and identify the "telling" sentences. Rewrite them in a way that "shows" instead.

By the time I got back  from my hike police had already surrounded the place with yellow tape. A drenched man with a jacket that read “coroner” in big bold yellow letters was at the last end of a body bag zipper. I saw a face being zipped up, in slow motion like in the movies.

“Why would someone do this?” I heard Michael’s trembling voice, rhetorically ask. Still in slow motion and faint, almost like a whisper even though I knew it was coming from right behind me.

It was the first morning of our 5th annual creatives retreat in los angeles california.A week long trip where me, Juni,Michael,Sasha, and Armando connect with each other and ourselves without any outside interruptions.

We were all just passionate about being creative and needed space to explore,express, and collaborate outside of our 9-5 jobs.

We met at the phone retail store we used to all work at. Armando was the manager when i first started. Armando’s position was surprising because he didn’t really know what to do when he was “training” me. He was an amazing salesman though. Being 6’4, having long Puerto Rican hair, and the trademark colombian gift of gab, Armando could sell ice in Alaska.

Michael and Juni were already there too.

Michael was so short and quiet you’d almost forget he was around, I guess that’s why drawing was one of his many talents. He would spend the whole week in his room drawing.

“Aaayy Porfin una chica! Dimelo como te llamas?” as I was opening my mouth, to take a  breath and answer, Juni screeched “I like your earrings so cute!, but yeah como te llamas?”  

We both laughed uncontrollably for what felt like five minutes. Juni was laughing so hard she was bent over,one hand between her legs and one on the counter as if holding on for dear life in this rollercoaster of laughter. I clap when I laugh so just picture a redbone seal. After that, we were inseparable.

Sasha joined the phone store team later. She was the only one that was a part time employee. I only saw her a few times a week but we’d been friends for years before we started working together. Her thing was dancing, she used the week of the retreat to come up with new choreography for the children’s entertainment company she’d been building since we were teens.She had the body for ballet, at 4’9 and weighing only 100 pounds, but her heart belonged to Hip Hop.

I ran and jumped at the body only to be caught in mid air.  “Armando! Please tell me it’s not Juni please!” I yelled between sobs, holding him as tight as a koala bear clings to eucalyptus.  He didn’t say anything, but it was obvious.

Juni was dead.

In a media environment saturated with fake news, “synthetic media” technology has disturbing implications. 

Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Around the same time, “Synthesizing Obama,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

Matt Turek, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, predicts that, when it comes to images and video, we will arrive at a new, lower “trust point.” “I’ve heard people talk about how we might land at a ‘zero trust’ model, where by default you believe nothing. That could be a difficult thing to recover from,” he says.