Show, not tell

A few days ago, my daughter and son-in-law sent an amazing video clip of my six-month old grandson’s first exposure to a unique desert creature called child of the earth. Little O watched intently as the strange-looking insect circled the jar in which it had been captured. How would he describe what he was seeing for the first time?

One of the first directives a new writer is given is to show the reader through descriptive language, not tell. Let the reader create his or her own vision through the words of the writer. Watching an infant’s eyes widen at the wonder of an unusual, though yet for him to know, rarely seen insect made quite an impression on me. My grandson never took his eyes off it. He couldn’t touch it or, like most infants, explore it with his mouth. What if my readers were like O, but in this instance, reading for the first time about an unusual member of the animal kingdom?

It glistened, gel-covered, amber, like wet cellophane. A large, globular head, with protruding black eyes slowly moved back and forth in an arc, testing the boundaries of a quart Mason jar. Its head was attached to a long larval body by a stalk, making it look like a dashboard ornament, though its movements were much more controlled than the hula girl my husband used to have in his car. Alternating bands of black and white ectoskeleton gleamed as if aspic covered its body and tail. The powerful back legs must be taken from a grasshopper. I wonder if this oddity of nature can hop as well as crawl. Two smaller appendages attach to the proximal body, and the claws look amphibious. Can this so-called child of the earth climb walls? Though only an inch and a-half long, its strangeness gives it a science fiction monster quality. It is so ugly, I wonder if its physical characteristics alone have kept it from extinction.

Child of the Earth, or Jerusalem cricket, is neither a child, nor a cricket, and it is certainly not from Jerusalem. Its proper and scientific name is Stenopelmatus. It’s found in the desert west, can make a drumming noise when mating, and a stink when provoked. Read all about it. I can’t wait for my grandson to walk the desert with me. Who knows what we’ll find to describe.