I've always said it's importnat to learn the difference between showing and telling, and to understand when and how to use each. There's definitely a time for telling, but you need to learn how to do it effectively. Same for exposition—it's a powerful tool when used properly. Unfortunately the common 'wisdom' says "Show, don't tell", and "avoid exposition", or at least a lot of beginners interpret it that way. Here's Shaelin articulating the things I've always known to be true but have never tried to explain in any detail:
It seems to come down to a trouble with prioritization. Beginners will commonly fall to over-directing action in their first scenes. He walked to the door, placed his hand on the knob, and proceeded to open it. He reached into his pocket with his left hand to take out a pack of cigarettes which he lit with a match. They don't know what to focus on, how to steer the thing. A scene is still just 'events' to them, so it's hard to know what events matter. And that's just action. It's the same problem with description. Because they don't know what really matters in the scene, they don't know where telling or showing are more justified, where brevity versus protraction are best, or where style becomes purple. Instead of 'show, don't tell,' it perhaps needs to be 'know the roles of your scene's elements.' (Probably just as unhelpful to a new writer as far as one-liners go).
The real problem with showing versus telling is that almost nobody has a clue what showing is, and thus they get confused when they notice a supposedly telling passage work. If we keep informing people that showing is about micromanaging details, we are lost already. If you look this up on the internet, literally everybody has it wrong, so not knowing that showing is, and how it might often look like telling is excusable. Showing, in a nutshell, means putting it into plot and scene. If in plot and scene, we will have condensed time and space that appears to be telling, but since you are moving forward in plot and with character, you are actually still showing. If a person comes to realize what true SHOW is, they quit with this silly debate entirely, and as a bonus they get to do some real showing for a change.
https://www.writingforums.org/threads/alternatives-to-showing-and-telling.173656/page-2#post-1981797 I presume Xoic's linking to this thread.
Let me ask you, what interests you about it? I see you've been on the board for a while, and you're my age (and I like the Kelly's Heroes avatar!), but I have no idea where you are as a writer. If you're interested in info about showing and telling I can list some good links. That other thread I linked to is much deeper, more a discussion about how to express the ideas of showing and telling to beginners, and about the deeper ideas couched behind that deceptively simple phrase Show, Don't Tell.
I'm a beginning writer with a wierd story who writes like a third grader. Never was a really good communicator on paper. So basically, I'll soak up whatever I can find to help me format scenes and convey technical and action in scifi. Lead on McDuff!
Ok then, here's the best introduction I've ever seen to showing and telling: I'm not sure if she points this out, but I want to add a few things. There's definitely a time for telling and a time for showing. The common phrase is "Show, Don't Tell", but that isn't really the way of it. What you want to do is learn about both and practice using them both. Your feel for them will improve as you go forward. Basically Showing is for when you want to be specific and get some life into your descriptions. Make the reader feel what's happening. Telling is for when you want to get something across quickly with clarity and there's no need to make a big deal out of it.
Here's another good one: Shaelin's videos are always excellent, and she agrees with me that the important thing is to get across to beginners the differences between showing and telling, and that with time and understanding they'll figure out the finer points.
It sounds like what you want is more ghost writer than partner. I'm assuming by partner you basically mean someone who knows how to write, but will write your story, possibly contributing some ideas of their own. Generally writers have plenty of ideas of their own, often lined up for years into the future. The ones who have the skills but not the ideas I guess become ghost writers. I'm not sure how much they charge, but I would assume quite a bit. Writing a book is a long and draining task, and a person doing it for pay would require enough money to support themselves during the process. That means you would need to pay them a living wage for many months if not years, in this increasing inflation. Unless maybe some of them work part-time and also have a job, which would slow down their writing considerably. But like I say, I'm not highly knowledgable about it, I just remember seeing a few threads covering it in here before. Maybe do a search for 'ghost writer' and you might be able to find some of those threads.
Here's her followup video: Keep in mind, as with showing/telling, you don't always want everything to be specific. It would be exhausting. You want to flow through specificity and non-specificity was it suits the story. Just knowing about these ideas is a good start. Mess around with them as you write, and you'll see what works and what doesn't, and your understanding will grow.
I just noticed I'm a Senior member... no idea how that is! Unless they are talking about my age... lol
Lol these things crack me up. One message board I was on said only that I was a Male Member. Well, I had some pretty harsh words for it too, let me tell you! Senior Member sounds like a taunt kids would say to each other in the shower room after gym class.
I also found this guy.... Since I'm using Scrivner, he has some good tips. https://www.youtube.com/c/AuthorLevelUp
My thought on that is to read a couple books on fiction writing to help you discover a thing or two to avoid or use. I'll suggest Write Great Fiction-Dialogue and The First Five Pages, to get you in the flow. You can't learn everything, but the proper attitude is to learn one thing a month and be tickled pink that you learned it, as opposed to rebelling against it. Above all things, write the best you know how. After all, if you make a mistake 2000 times and then learn that you made that mistake 2000 times, nothing can solidify that in your head any better.
The scene you put in your post is a good example of, TMI. And is a good time to learn that readers will fill in that kind of detail for you, if you can generalize that sequence in a way that leads them to that mentally.
Yes, I agree. I call this even writing, insofar as time is evened out and nothing is bypassed for the sake of getting to the meat. People do this with dialogue, as well, where they fail to jump to the chase or condense dialogue into the meaningful content. Some actually teach this micromanagement of details under the completely misguided noting that SHOW is all about tedioiusness as opposed to scene. Complicating this is the absolute need to have actors do interesting and off-the-rails things or to say things off topic, in order to show who they are and make the work interesting. The ying and the yang. In particular, here, is it important that it's the left hand? Is it important how the person got into the car (if it's a normal entry), or did something interesting happen in the car? Jumping to the content is critical. This is alway why I tell writers to FIND THE PLOT POINT. Not the plot. The plot point. What place where things cause other things to turn.
I could see the fact that it was his left hand being important in something like a mystery. Where that point either includes or excludes the character from the list of suspects. But beyond that situation it doesn't matter. I typically leave out details like ethnicity from my character descriptions, and let the reader fill in that detail for themselves. If they want to see the character as black, brown, or purple doesn't bear on the plot typically.
