mckitterick:

bettsfic:

rupert-giles:

I just saw a writing advice post abt the “show don’t tell” thing and it was good at first but then it deadass turned “the sun rose over the city” into “Yellow light spilled over the streets, soaking the grit from the rainbow puddles into the air.” but even longer and I’m just gonna say it right off the bat, sometimes you don’t need more words. Sometimes you can just say “[x] felt [y]” straight up and spare your reader from having to skip over your sudden need to jack off to your own vocabulary

show don’t tell is bullshit because it neglects the notion of familiarity and therefore relevance.

when you’re writing description, everything about that world is assumed until you, the writer, say otherwise. are the characters in a studio apartment? the reader will conjure their idea of an apartment, along with all of the social context that comes along with it: city living, temporality, potentially poverty or at least financial struggles. in other words, the reader will always assume the familiar. 

so it’s your job to only point out the unfamiliar details. 

is there something special or interesting about this studio apartment or the reason they’re living there? does it face east? and if it faces east, what’s the consequence of that? does the sun wake your character up every morning? are they annoyed by that? can they afford curtains? 

if a character is in the bathroom, you don’t need to describe the toilet unless there’s something meaningful about that toilet. we might need to know it’s filthy before a character falls to their knees and pukes into it. we might need to know there’s hair clogging the drain if they’re trying to wash their hands. we might need to know the shower is immaculate, or that there’s expensive shampoo in the caddy or even a fucking pumice stone because all of those things provide context to a character’s plight. 

the point here is, we don’t need a description of the sun rising unless there’s something special and relevant (see: unfamiliar) about that sunrise. is it fucking green today?? are there two suns? is the character watching it rise, and if so, why are they awake that early, and is that outside of their norm?

every detail, and i mean every detail you write becomes indicative of your narrator. no one cares about yellow light spilling out over the streets unless there’s something about that observation that affects how your character sees or thinks or feels. 

everything else? cut. 

Excellent points, though I hasten to add that speculative fiction writers often deal in the unfamiliar – setting, characters, and situations – so we need a lot more show than fiction set in the mundane world, otherwise we end up with a lot of narrative exposition, filtering through characters, and “As you know, Marta” expository dialogue.

Plus, who cares if it’s longer when those lines and scenes are better and more immersive to read!