Scenes from a Wedding: The Ultimate Example of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
My daughter Carlyn got married at the beginning of COVID.
She scrapped plans for a big wedding on the New England seashore and instead exchanged vows in a Minnesota park with two friends standing in witness and a judge, who happened to be a friend of the family, officiating.
It was both a wonderful and a horrible day. It was horrible because it was the middle of COVID and people were dying. We had all decided that it didn’t make sense for us to risk everyone’s health by flying halfway across the country to be there in person, but when the day actually came and we were not, in fact, there, it felt physically painful. How could I be alive and walking this earth and not at my beloved child’s wedding?? It made no sense, and my body felt that disconnect. I cried bitter tears.
But it was also a wonderful day. Our immediate family and the groom’s immediate family watched the ceremony via Zoom. It was a glorious blue-sky day and the vows the bride and groom exchanged were so moving: They just really, really wanted to be married and to start their life together. I cried — so much crying — out of sheer delight and joy.
Carlyn’s Zoom wedding
Carlyn continued to want to have the party she had planned, and it was rescheduled two different times throughout the last 18 months. She wanted to wear the beautiful dress she had picked out (which I wrote about here), and she wanted to celebrate with her friends, and she wanted to dance all night. I kept thinking it made little sense to go ahead with the party. The threat of COVID was not diminishing, Carlyn and her husband no longer lived in the place where the party was to be held, and they had, after all, already gotten married.
I was also worried that it would feel empty, that it would feel like we were just going through the motions. Could we ask people to come all that way for a “fake” wedding?
The Second Wedding
This child of mine is a force of nature. She had a vision and she persisted in bringing it to life. Last weekend, we held what was billed as “The Second Wedding.” People who know and love the bride and groom made their way to an inn perched on the edge of the sea. They flew from all over the world, including our youngest daughter from Korea — which was a miracle in about a hundred different ways.
A stormy day for a wedding; My sweet girls on the rehearsal dinner night
Carlyn and her already-husband stood up in front of everyone and exchanged vows — again. And committed to each other — again. They did so with so much heart and so much soul that it made it seem as if that first wedding had been the fake one.
I had been, in other words, totally wrong.
There were flowers and toasts, cake and dancing — so very much dancing! Everyone danced as if they might never have another chance to dance again!
There was a level of joy throughout the entire weekend that I have rarely felt in my life, and I did what so many of my friends counseled me to do: I soaked it up. I let it wash over me. I felt the bright sun of my joyful child, of the love she and her husband share, of the love she shares with her sister and with her dad (my amazing husband!) and with her friends.
I was reminded of the power of marriage, and the blessings of family, and the presence of joy all around us if only we can be patient, if only we let it in.
It was the happiest day of my life — a day I will remember as long as remembering is in my power.
What does any of this have to do with writing books and coaching writers?
Maybe nothing…. Maybe I am pushing the point too far. But I keep thinking about this:
Book coaches are constantly talking about the imperative to show, not tell — and this is as true for nonfiction writers as it is for fiction writers.
You can’t just tell me how a character fell in love — you have to show me how it happened and show me how it made her feel.
You can’t just tell me about how following your program or process is going to help me — you have to show me how it will help me, and show me how to get there.
There is no writer anywhere who doesn’t have to work on this skill. So we can all use a good metaphor to help us understand what it means — to show, not tell.
And this wedding can be it.
Watching the first wedding through a computer screen — not being able to feel the sun beating down on the park, not being able to see the geese scattered on the lawn, not being able to hug the bride whom I have loved all her life and the groom whom I will love forevermore was like being told about a wedding. It was moving, to be sure. It was filled with meaning, absolutely. This was, after all, my firstborn child.
But it was nothing next to being in the experience as it unfolded — to be immersed in it, moment by moment, to be part of it, to be in it.
The Zoom wedding was like a writer telling me about a wedding. There was a distance to the experience of it, something preventing me from being all the way there.
The second wedding was like a writer showing me a wedding — inviting me to be there, to feel it, to be moved by it as it unfolded in real-time.
