Forest Girl

Forest Girl

Forest Girl was an innocent and lovely creature of the forest. In the soft dawn of each new day’s beginning forest girl would dance and twirl her bare and delicate body along the forest paths, passing her soft skin amidst the glistening dew that lay upon the leaves of the summer and autumn forests and she would sing songs and ballads with the fury critters that lived and breathed deep within the shaded glens of the forest. At night she would lay her warm and bare skin down upon the earth and stare up through the overhanging branches at the dark infinite void above with the stars and moon twinkling down upon her face, until somewhere in the long night hours her brown eyes slowly closed and she would drift herself away to far off dream worlds where she was and always would be Forest Girl.

But then one day the foresters came. They arrived in loud trucks with muddy tires and huge crunching bulldozers. They wore metal hats upon their heads and held plastic clipboards in their arms while pointing their fingers at this tree and that tree as they shouted orders. Soon the bulldozers fired up their engines and rolled over the land. Heavy crunching and buzzing sounds echoed throughout the forest for a long time thereafter. Day by day, tree by tree, the forest fell and disappeared until one day the forest was no more.

Forest Girl was forced to leave her beautiful world with Mother Nature and move to the big city with all its overhanging pollution and blinking traffic lights. There were no trees to be seen along the busy streets and nothing fury but for the fat rats with red eyes that scurried from underneath the dumpsters in the alleys. This made forest girl very sad. So she strolled down to the river bank one evening and removed the clothes from her body and she danced free and naked beneath the twinkling stars once more, as God intended her to do, as she always had. And while there inside the glimmering moonlight she was attacked and raped at knife point by two black crack heads who then killed her and dumped her lifeless body into the river.

And the following day the foresters read about the homicide in their newspapers while they sipped their coffee and ate donuts alongside their quiet bulldozers. After a while they crinkled up their newspapers and emptied out the last remaining drops of coffee and they chucked the empty cups to the soil and went back to work.

This sounded like some sort of parable but I'm not sure of its point. The moral of the story is - Don't tear down our precious forests because if you do, naked forest girls will get raped and murdered by crackheads in the city and nobody will care?

Well, that is part of it. But I believe their is much more to be learned from the tale of Forest Girl at a deeper level.

Have you read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea? That story has multiple life lessons within its pages such as self-confidence and perserverance, faith in yourself and in God, hard-work pays off, etc.

I believe if you re-read Forest Girl you will discover multiple life lessons within its text as well.

Other than that, how did you like Forest Girl?

This one "tells" more than it shows. What we have is a straightforward narrative, no dialogue, no action scenes, just a prosaic account of them. There is very little difference between this piece and a newspaper story.

Start in medias res. Hit the ground running.

Finally, it might be a tad too early in this stage of career to compare oneself favorably with Hemingway. No one says it's wrong to emulate him, but doing so takes much more than simply jotting down a string of simple. declarative sentences.


You Know I'll Stop Reading When
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Show, Don't Tell
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Show Don't Tell Redux
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Has anybody else had an opportunity to read "Forest Girl"? If so, any comments?

I thought it was great, there was a level of intensity that is hard to come by in a story, however I did think the rape part was abrupt and not totally necessary, but still story was very good.

It's good. Like the above poster said, this is just telling; there is no showing going on. You use descriptive language well, but try to show what's happening a bit more. I'd recommend reading some Stephen King novels to really see how that works. Also, "fury" should be "furry."

Your sentences are long and I failed to relate to "Forest Girl" I couldn't keep reading because it was a bit mono-toned due to the telling. The paragraphs you used telling, you could of been showing. As in the last few paragraphs.