Characterization comes in two parts—physical and personality, or, if you prefer, external and internal. This complicates all the basic telling/showing decisions, which are complicated even more by what the story’s viewpoint is. Let’s start with the physical/external, because it’s a lot like the description of places I
Read more →Today I want to talk about the “show” part of “show, don’t tell.” Because it isn’t quite as simple as it looks. (And that is why it took me the whole post to just talk about showing in terms of describing a setting, meaning I’m going to
Read more →Probably the most common piece of technical advice about writing fiction is “show, don’t tell.” I’ve gone on at length in other posts about what’s wrong with this dictum, but today I want to talk about how to do it right. Starting with some technical aspects. First,
Read more →When I was in grade school, we had a regular “show and tell day.” Kids would bring in an object they thought was interesting, show it to everyone, and then explain what it was, how to use it, why they thought it was interesting, or whatever. It
Read more →Found this in a batch of older questions: When one conveys descriptions, actions, or background information through dialogue, does it count as showing or telling? The short answer is, the writer is “showing” two characters in conversation. People in conversations are of course “telling” each other things;
Read more →The other day, I was looking over two different multi-book series, each of which is easily pushing a million words. Both are quite popular in their respective genres, but they are very different in their approach. Yet it could be argued that both writers make similar mistakes.
Read more →“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” -W. Somerset Maugham I’ve had at least four questions from people in the last week or two about that hoary old piece of advice “show, don’t tell.” So even though I just
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