this just popped up on my facebook which is relevant here https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2016/12/23/writing-character-plot/
I feel like "show don't tell" is overstated. Some older fiction was all tell, so they started asking for show. That said, all show is incredibly tedious and ever novel I've read has telling.
Ha, yeah, this is probably the reason why I wrote this thread. I remember first reading about show don't tell on the old Palahniuk site. People read that and thought it should be 100% show and 0% tell. Just like the people here "cut everything not necessary to the plot or character development" and I think it also should not be a 100% vs 0% thing.
I've heard that people who read novels, read them for the immersive experience. It's different than how the short story crowd feel. If the details are there to bring people into the feeling, why not?
I like to become (at least briefly) immersed in anything I read ...even a nonfiction book or essay. Telling explains stuff. Showing puts you there. You want to be able to do both, whether it's a short story, long story, article, whatever. The trick is to be aware of what you're doing. I feel that's the problem around the 'show and tell' issue. Folks can't recognise which is which, to the extent that they focus on shortcut fixes like eliminating 'was.' Which is just plain misleading.
Show don't tell is one of the most misunderstood and mistated pieces of writing advice - what it means is make the reader appreciate the important bits of your story by immersing them in it , it doesn't mean show absolutely everything, or don't tell anything So in characterisation if Joe and his anger problem are central to the plot you don't write "joe was an angry man" you show joe being angry over little things, its fine however to write "Joe hadn't eaten since the shitty meal on the plane" unless Joe's hunger is also plot central
For about the third time its cut everything that is not necessary for plot, character, or setting development ... details which don't have any bearing on any of those don't bring people into the story .... details that do bring people into the story do so by showing either character or setting
Fro the millionth time I get that. Not including setting development is not changing anything I said. Not sure why you think harping on "setting" is counter to my point. The only thing that matter is this right here "cut everything that is not necessary". You can follow this with any word in the world that you want. Every scene has characters. Every scene has setting. You can sit there and say that Joe and Bob going to every capital in the US is developing character or settings and etc. My point, and I really hope I am a little bit more gracious if I have to say it the dreaded third time (like Candyman in the mirror), is that you don't have to "cut everything that is not necessary" for a novel. This is some advice given to screenplays and noobs take it to mean it is some maxim for any story in any medium and it is not. Period. Take books such as anything by GRRM, Rowling, Bret Easton Ellis, Tolkien, Stephen King, Salinger, and etc. Now, do you mean to tell me that I could not cut out ANYTHING from their books and you would understand the plot, setting, or characters ANY LESS???? Necessary in this context means that without this let's say paragraph (not even to the sentence level) that you would not understand the plot, setting, or characters as you would with that paragraph. GRRM pages of what shit people are eating. Stephen King telling you the life story of every two bit character that is in the book for five minutes (can argue it is developing character, but sorry, these characters who show up for 5 seconds just to get killed are irrelevant), and American Psycho is my favorite book and it is very stylistic and some of the things that get repeated over and over again like chapters dedicated to magazine-like reviews of bands but the Whitney Houston chapter can be cut without you losing any understanding of the character or plot or.....crap....--what is that last thing I always forget??? --oh, yeah, setting. Man, Dean Koontz with his 10 page descriptions of a river bank would kill me if he read this. Genesis and Huey Lewis were more than enough to show this aesthetic and Whitney's music has nothing to do with the story outside of his review. There is so much stuff that is not necessary in the BOOKS OF SOME OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS OF ALL TIME that you would cut if you followed the silly maxim of mainly amateur writers that everything not necessary should be cut. Amateurs (and hey I am an amateur too) hear this piece of advice and apply it willynilly to every piece of storytelling because they don't know no better. Just like show and don't tell. It is not an all or nothing type thing.
Not sure why you think if someone doesn't agree with a stance you make 100% of the cases that you think they don't understand the principle. We are not that stupid. That guy is simply saying he does understand show don't tell, but does not believe that you should use it 100% of the time because it would be tedious. Seems ridiculous amounts of arrogant that you claim people don't understand because they don't agree with you. Take books such as anything by GRRM, Rowling, Bret Easton Ellis, Tolkien, Stephen King, Salinger, and etc. and tell me they NEVER tell. They all do. Not 100% of the time. But they do. Palahniuk culties (ha) hear him say that and since they are inexperienced writers and even more inexperienced producing works a publisher would publish they may take it to be something that you do in 100% of the cases. You do not, unless you are calling authors who outsell all of us with one book are somehow wrong. Writing is not screenplay writing and it sure as hell isn't science where something is a law until proven wrong. Shit, when should you use blond or blonde again???????
Where did I say you should show 100% of the time ? My point was that if he thinks 'Show don't tell' means 'never tell 'he doesn't understand what the advice giver means - I agree that 100% showing would be incredibly tedious, but no one is being advised to do that. (Martin, Tolkein etc follow what I said above Show where its important, tell where you need to .. because they understood that SdT was short hand for a more complicated concept) Likewise in your original argument - you keep saying that removing stuff that doesn't move plot or characterization (or setting) forward strips down a book too much - but you don't seem to have any real grasp of what moving plot, setting, and characterisation forward actually looks like , because in virtually every example you give of 'irrelevant' detail which needs to stay, the detail isn't irrelevant at all and contributes to character or setting Everyone knows that writing a novel isn't the same as writing a screenplay, except that neither form benefits from being filled with irrelevant guff .
See that right there is the classic misunderstanding - its not cut everything except that which is absolutely necessary for setting, character and plot the advice is to cut anything that has nothing to do with setting character or plot .. GRRM's food descriptions - setting Kings Character descriptions - character (not just their own but also the more major characters as they interact with them) Dean Koontz - setting American Psycho - character The point isn't could some of those things be cut without compromising the golden triangle (arguably they could be but they all justify their presence), the point is to identify things that contribute nothing and cut those as the meaningless garbage they are. It is very had to find an example in well known published works because most editors do understand the rule and will ruthlessly excise fluff , but it is easy to find in the sort of Z list self published work that clearly never went near an editor
Poet, Just because a famous Author stuffs their book with unneeded garbage, doesn't make it is good. 'The Girl that played with Fire' is filled page after page of garbage, what did I do? Like most readers, I skipped right over those pages and got back to the plot. Trust me, if the writer or editor doesn't cut garbage out, the reader will just skip right over it. (And I am not the only reader that does that.) - You're forgetting a basic concept of literature with this statement, writing -like everything else with time- evolves. You are supposed to learn from what previous authors have accomplished and builded on that. I imagine that the advice and style of writing will be drastically different 100 years from now. - Poet, let me give you some advice. When you want to make an argument like this, it is best you have some contemporary works of fiction handy in order to provide concrete examples to back your statements or claims. You can just say 'A, B, and C did it!' I need a passage, a paragraph, or chapter that validates your claim.
I just finished listening to Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. It got good reviews, and it's chock full of crap that just got in the way of the story, for my taste. The author gave the backstory on every character we encountered, like, even mentioning that some insignificant driver or somebody had emigrated to the US by crossing the border from Saskatchewan to Michigan (which I remember because in addition to being totally irrelevant it's also totally impossible - Saskatchewan and Michigan aren't even close to sharing a border). But this book was well-reviewed. Obviously other readers weren't bothered by all the extra information we got for no discernable reason. So, really, I think we're maybe going to have to accept that there's a significant subjective element to it all. Maybe somebody out there thought it added to the mood or the setting or the theme or something to know the route this driver took years ago when he emigrated to the US. Apparently Hawley's editor didn't object to it, or to any of the other crap he included that had me rolling my eyes through hours and hours of what felt like filler to me.
IMO it really depends on why we are cutting ... if you've got info in your book which you feel justifies its presence even if it doesn't move anything forward then fine keep it But if you need to cut maybe you're at 150k and want to be sub 100k then the irrelevant guff needs to go first , then if you still need to cut next up is some of the stuff that only moves character or setting but not plot (along with cutting adverbs and replacing with stronger verbs and killing darlings and all of that stuff)
I think hes saying that you've confirmed he was right about you writing a book full of meandering crap and making excuses for it
But his claim there is no evidence for. But my claim there is plenty of evidence for. He says "Shot in the dark, but are you in the process of writing a book that is full of meandering crap and you simply can't bear to slice and dice your baby open, and throw away all the crap? And for some reason you're trying to justify this to a group of strangers?" I did not start this thread looking for advice. I did not even say "does anyone agree with me???" I simply gave advice and said other advice was crap. It is obvious I came to my OPINION after much thought as I gave examples from my favorite book and other wildly successful books supporting my claim. But somehow these books I esteem so highly are somehow below the opinions of random strangers? Makes no sense. The real story is, I have an opinion contrary to rincewind31 which I support with evidence. rincewind31 has zero ability to argue counter and just uses a personal attack because I said something he doesn't like. He proved he is resentful and bitter with not a single idea of his own. Every book has stuff that can be cut out of it. Not sure why I am supposed to have a cry because my book has excess like every single other book out there does. Even though, I always think of my work as being as long as it needs to be. Or maybe he just does not understand "necessary".
But this assumes that you're correctly understanding the advice that you're arguing against. I feel as if your argument is pretty circular. It's reading to me as the following. I'm not saying that the following IS your argument, but it's how I'm hearing it: - People say that unnecessary stuff should be cut. - But look at this stuff. It's totally unnecessary. - But cutting it would be wrong. - So the advice is wrong. But...if a work would suffer from the removal of something, then that something isn't unnecessary.
To be completely fair, if you put an opinion on a discussion board with the strategy of calling something else crap, people are going to disagree whether or not you asked for their opinions. This is true in life, and especially in discussion forums. Even ricewind's comment was an opinion. We know it's in your opinion, because we all have one too. What makes no sense is why you would come to a group of strangers known to discuss and disagree on a daily basis only to disparage them for discussing and disagreeing. I'm forced to ask -- how did you not expect this?
I think by posting this reply where at least 80% is unnecessary guff, and could easily be cut without damaging the content you're probably disproving your own original point.
I smell troll If you don't want the opinions of random strangers why post on a forum full of them? The most recent 'contribution' feels like an attempt to reignite a dying argument - another one for the ignore list, me thinks
