Show Don't Tell, and Other Absurdities

Debunking

I've been writing in one form or another for fifty-seven years, and still learning the art, but there are some things I've learned that less experienced writers and some agents attempt to promote as gospel law.


Show Don't Tell
Author Lee Child, The Jack Reacher Series, has said, “We’re not story showers, we’re story tellers.”
Where do writers show stories? In a child's picture book, otherwise writers tell stories. What do kids say? Tell me a story. One form is no more or less important than the other. Both forms have their place.
A major fiction writer of our era had the habit of introducing a character in the flow of the story and immediately going into a long paragraph describing their physical attributes. That's like watching a car careen off a cliff and freeze in mid-air so we readers can see the surprised expressions on the occupants' faces. That's annoying as heck because the flow of action is totally shot down.
Instead of a laundry list of description in one (usually) long paragraph, I'll quickly introduce pertinent info, and then sprinkle more as appropriate later. Sometimes I'll throw out a sentence of description. That's not to say the laundry list is no good, just disruptive.


Just use the word “Said.”
During a writers' group evaluation, one member produced a book of some age that went on ad infinitum about using the word "said" after speech and can those descriptive words like growled, laughed, raged. That's all fine and well if the story is a play where actors give expression to the dialogue. Our job as an author is to describe our character’s emotions. There are many ways to do this. ("What are your doing?" John said. “What are you doing?” John screamed. Or ... Face turning purple and eyes bulging, the words shot from his mouth like double-ought buck from a shotgun. ”What are you doing?” Be your creative self.


Don’t be too wordy.
Telling a writer that he or she is using too many words is like accusing Picasso of using too much paint. A typical 90-minute movie is 108 pages long. The typical novel? Well, there's plenty of room to play with, so, relax, take your time, don’t rush things for someone else’s arbitrary notion of pacing.


Don’t use words people don’t use in real life.
When I began a journalism career in 1962, we geared our stories to the 5^th grade level. It's gone down hill since then, but for an author to cheapen his or her work is like asking Picasso to use less paint. (I am picking on Picasso because he's dead and what artists and writers do is create pictures, one with paint, one with words.)
Now, don't pull out a thesaurus and become ostentatious just to plug in multisyllabic words for the heck of it, but don't shy away from a word that more correctly describes what you want to convey.
 
Finally, we come to:
Active Voice vs. Passive Voice.

MS Word-10 and I lock horns on this from time to time in the first edit because I just wanted to get the scene from the head into the visible world. On second edit I do try to remove passive phrases and make the sentence stronger and more descriptive. However, there are times when passive is the best choice. In dialogue, passive voice is the norm in many cultures and shouldn't be toyed with or the character is going to come off sounding like a stuffed olive in champaign. 

Every author worth his or her salt didn't get where they did without using their creative genius. From chaos to order was the first day.