I’m posting this because it came up in a discussion on FIMfiction. The subject was the notorious “Show, don’t tell” advice, which can usually be trusted to confuse and mislead writers, because it sucks. It’s bad advice.

“Show don’t tell” sucks for a reason: it’s usually not the correct criticism for the problem.

What ‘show don’t tell’ means in practice is, ‘you’re taking me out of the story by giving me shortcuts that prevent me experiencing what’s happening’. “Twilight was sad but then she felt better” vs. twelve paragraphs of hopefully evocative purple prose. Really, evocative is the main word to use in understanding this complaint: ‘show don’t tell’ ALWAYS means ‘you’re not being evocative enough’.

You don’t always want to sit around being evocative. Some details and perspectives are not relevant to the point of the story or indeed the point of the experience.

Neither the word ‘show’ nor the word ‘tell’ are particularly illuminating of this dilemma, which is why folks get dragged into endless rumination about ‘showy’ and ‘telly’ with examples that could be either.

If you’re not being evocative enough, you’re not engaging the reader: you’re giving them a set of facts to file away. If you’re being TOO evocative, your reader is floating around dazedly in a cloud of vague impressions with no clue as to what’s relevant.

If you get evocative over the stuff you want experienced, and summarize the stuff that the reader needn’t ‘walk through’ personally, you’ll strike the balance just fine. All you need is an intended path for the reader’s experience, and to let them vicariously experience the RIGHT details.