Adam RobertsI blogged about show-don't-tell. Eccentric view, mine, I think (in the strict sense of the term): https://medium.com/adams-notebook/on-showing-not-telling-9ef276b05782
Daggs@arrroberts I feel like most of the advice pieces are aimed at writers trying to make money out of writing (like those "excellent book for fans of X and Y!"/"a cross between Z and A" blurbs I detest) - not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with treating writing as any other job, mind you. It's just that the end goal of the author is not the same - and thus (I think) the methodology can/should be different as well. And some ND people DO struggle with flow (I know my daughter does)🤷
Steve J. WrightI don't entirely disagree, but... I can see Olaf Stapledon from here, slapping a monkey wrench into his palm. I think he wants a word with you.
More seriously - I think your argument about difficulty can be turned on its head. If SF is full of big ugly lumps of exposition, doesn't this demonstrate that *telling* is harder to do (well) than *showing*? If a writer wants a challenge (and I agree that writers challenging themselves is a good thing), wouldn't it be a greater challenge to "tell* with as much elegance and eloquence as *showing*?
Stapledon is famous for telling, in great dry didactic chunks of it. To take a writer with a more durable reputation, and one who's probably closer to your heart - what about H.G. Wells, and "The Shaoe of Things to Come"? The presentation, after all, is very like Stapledon's "Last and First Men" - it's supposedly a history textbook, dictated from the future by unknown means. Could it usefully be rewritten as a straightforward *showing* sort of narrative? I think the result would be a much less intriguing book.
I can see your point, certainly, but I can also see Tade Thompson's, and you and he are both writers I respect. Writing advice like "show, don't tell" is up there with "don't use adverbs" or "the passive voice is to be avoided" - they're guidelines with cogent reasoning behind them, which have been elevated (or degraded) to the level of rigid and unalterable rules. I think it was C.J. Cherryh whose first rule for writing wa "no rule should be followed off a cliff", and I do think that one, at least, is sound advice.
Stephen Cox Author@arrroberts boosted for interest in discussion.
Elbowpatch@stephenwhq @arrroberts
As a secondary school teacher I use the idea of 'showing not telling ' to get the younger students to focus on inference. Often in schools we teach simple, easy to grasp 'rules' which can be broken later, when they have the skills to see when and when not to abide by them. It's once they start breaking the 'rules' though that teaching gets more complex- oh to stop them using so many fragments in their prose...
As a secondary school teacher I use the idea of 'showing not telling ' to get the younger students to focus on inference. Often in schools we teach simple, easy to grasp 'rules' which can be broken later, when they have the skills to see when and when not to abide by them. It's once they start breaking the 'rules' though that teaching gets more complex- oh to stop them using so many fragments in their prose...