Emulate James Lee Burke’s Strong Imagery to Show Not Tell

Burke's writing is as rich and multihued as a Louisiana bayou.

I’m a fan of James Lee Burke. I thought I’d read every Dave Robicheaux novel he’s written, but just yesterday I found a jacket-less hard cover copy of Crusader’s Cross mixed in with books I’d picked up somewhere and had been meaning to get to. It was like opening a discarded wallet and finding a hundred dollar bill.

Burke is strong on imagery and thrifty on words.

Here, in Cross, is how he tells us what  Dave Robicheaux and his brother Jimmie’s childhoods were like:

Before breakfast, my mother would return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a pail of frothy milk in one hand and an armful of brown eggs smeared with chickenshit clutched against her chest. Then she would pull off her shirt, scrub her hands and arms with Lava soap under the pump in the sink, and in her bra fill our bowls with cush-cush and make ham-and-onion sandwiches for our lunches.

Jimmie and I both had paper routes in New Iberia’s red-light district. We set pins in the bowling alley and with our mother washed bottles in the Tabasco factory on the bayou. My father hand-built the home we lived in, notching and pegging the oak beams with such seamless craftsmanship that it survived the full brunt of a half dozen hurricanes with no structural damage. My mother ironed clothes in a laundry nine hours a day in hundred-and-ten-degree heat. She scalded and picked chickens for five cents apiece in our backyard, and secretly saved money in a coffee can for two years in order to buy an electric ice grinder and start a snowball concession at the minor league baseball park.

Our parents were illiterate and barely spoke English, but they were among the most brave and resourceful people I ever knew. Neither of them would consciously set about to do wrong. But they destroyed one another just the same—my father with his alcoholism, my mother with her lust and insatiable need for male attention. Then they destroyed their self-respect, their family, and their home. They did all this with the innocence of people who had never been farther away from their Cajun world than their weekend honeymoon trip to New Orleans.

In three short, image-filled paragraphs Burke shows us, rather than tells us, his family was poor, hardworking, and dysfunctional.

Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, Burke’s frugal yet rich style is worth emulating.

Just a write thought.