Show & Tell

My last post was originally intended to be a rebuke for 'writing rules' and other advice no one asked for. (Which is totally misnomer. I was absolutely scouring teh Internetz for advice. I just found things that infuriated me.) Something I found absolutely true that I decided to cling to for my bored evening convinced me I needed to just ignore advice for a minute, and the pathetic excuse it was to avoid doing what I should've been doing to begin with- and hammer out a few pages for their own sake.

But tonight is a new night, and I am up later than I should be. To revisit a rekindled flame:

Of all the worthless, counterproductive advice I have heard about writing, I feel the most offensive and pervasive is the infamous, “Show, don’t tell.”

Why? Because it’s misrepresented and self-destructive. Because it’s totted and worshiped by those insipid twits who like to discuss ‘real art’. The kind that dismiss what doesn’t fit into their trivial, small world of finite expectations and parameters for what is worthwhile and what is not.

But most especially because it’s just disingenuous. “Show, don’t tell.” The overall concept, I agree with. Immersion is always better than dictation. But that is the intent; not the law. I find it comical when someone gets hung up on something I’ve written and then cites this to me. If I say that something is happening, or that something is what it is, these people misunderstand the scope, and miss what is being told is showing a larger image that they are too busy playing editor to realize is before them. The instinct to pounce on this begets a nearsightedness that guarantees missing the target. “It’s not so much as missing the forest with the trees, as missing them in a completely different forest.”

Side note, and neurotic tertiary complaint:  One cannot show without telling. One cannot tell without showing. Semantically the concepts are intertwined.

I am aware that I am picking at a topic that has been more contentious than our high-school creative writing teachers would have us believe. (And that it’s 5 a.m. in a guard shack and no one could give two shits about it. These are neuroses for their own sakes. Repetition or parallel? ... Repetition. Admitted.) But I have long been a fan of, you know, actually reading and writing, and enjoying what is read and written, rather than belittling the conveyance. If a thought is communicated and understood, it was successful. If it was enjoyed, it was art. I suppose that makes me a very simple person, but I can’t help but feel there is wisdom in the humility.

I know some people need to really bemoan the changing of the times, and the trend of people enjoying young adult reading when they are not in any way conceivably young adults. Or whatever gets a pretentious didact's panties in a bunch. But, seriously, what is up with this belittling, or even the characterizations to begin with? It’s one thing to pick apart Twilight or The Notebook or 50 Shades of Grey on their individual merits (correct, I wasn’t listing YA novels), but to wholesale dismiss anything is generalization. Generalization. You know, the heart of bigotry?

On another level, and as I have read in some arguments about the subject, it’s just such a lame cliché in itself. A cop out. It’s empty buzzwords that once held relevance in a specific situation that is being stretched too thin, while would-be-professionals parrot it repetitively to cover the entirety of literature. Sometimes- often, even- I fall prey to my compulsion for sesquipedalian loquaciousness and accompanying purple prose. I think in convoluted metaphors. It’s what I do, and I do it well. And the result can be pretty dramatic writing, or (and more often than I’d like) dramatically horrible writing. When I ask for objective opinions to help me figure out a better way to express something, a zombie chant of ‘show, don’t tell’ does nothing for me (nor, I'd argue, for anyone). What you’re trying to say is, ‘focus more on the perspective of the character’, ‘this idea you’re trying to express is too complicated for the method of delivery you’ve chosen’, or even ‘I don’t like it, and I’m not sure why.’ You can contort that into some mindless axiom if you’d like, but that wouldn’t help me. It wouldn’t make a more interesting story, either. It would tell me you're too lazy and disinterested to actually read. (Not read what I wrote. This isn't narcissism. You just don't read in general. Go see a movie, bookworm poser.)

I suppose, in the end, and as it usually is with me, my problem is with the lie of absolutes. All of life is balance. And I would give much for this to not be a saying, but a conventional wisdom: “Make sure you balance your showing and your telling.” Personal preference on if you lean for more or another, but never the idea that one is good and the other is bad. It’s as ignorant as the insinuation that the less adverbs, the better (its own can of worms).

Every author and every writer has tools to build a world, and being told to not use, avoid, or be afraid of any of them is detrimental to not only their world or any worlds, but Fantasia itself. It’s a cruel ploy to young dreamers and aspiring authors who will have enough criticism, and the majority (as with all artists) will be undue.

If there is any rule that I have found helpful and true- and it is the only one thus far that is actually universal- it is:  Write. Write. Write.

No excuses.

Write.

You will not do better if you do not do. You will not do anything, actually. Because you are- y’know- not doing. We are all procrastinators at heart, apparently. I have yet to meet or even hear of a fiction writer who isn’t head-over-heals tumbling for ways to avoid what they supposedly love to do- particularly if it’s for a living. That's fair. It’s understandable. It’s apparently just what we are.

You must write.

…

…

I’m going to go read more articles on the Internet and play Pokemon.

I can write a crappy rough-draft chapter tomorrow on duty.