This essay was inspired by, and is based on, a discussion with the novelist and teacher Lee Martin at the Vermont College of Fine Art’s 2016 Postgraduate Writers Conference, directed by Ellen Lesser. # Show, don’t tell is one of the great dictums of the writer’s art and the editor’s science, aimed at extruding an end-product that breathes and throbs on the page or screen.  At the basic level, though, in the creative process, the vivid pictures that