You speak in such general terms that it is impossible to apply the information. I am glad to see you are using quotes now and you avoided saying telling was bad, but you never defined what makes a sentence showing, telling, or something else. You got it correct that less is more and everything needs to support the story, but specific examples of what is and is not appropriate would have made that clearer.
Thanks for your comment! As the concept is already so well known with many other great videos focusing specifically on 'Show vs Tell' I didn't want to get too far into it. I intended to use it to explain how word choice is an intentional form of telling that can either lock a reader in or turn them off, and that showing is sometimes too wordy to be useful. In the future, I'll try to explain things in more detail!
@@pickleditto Actually, most get 'show, don't tell' wrong. For my English teacher, it was use more descriptive words, like dart instead of run. Online, not only that idea shows up, but also the idea that if a character says or thinks something, it is automatically showing (wrong). Often they have no idea how to show something and so they tell things that are better shown, like in the middle of an action scene where you want the reader to be there, writing, 'the corridor seemed endless.' That is better expressed as a thought if you want the reader to be there. If you are between scenes, it is better told than shown. And the worst is that they have never done any text analysis and so think everything should be shown, not realising that most of a story is telling and only the highlights need to be shown, unless you want a slow story. You could say my writing is show heavy nowadays, as I find more pleasure in the word play found in dialogue than in relating a sequence. Thus, I use tricks like a meandering thought to break the dialogue and show the passage of time. I suppose a good example would be a road trip. To name every town would be boring. I would just name the town and start the dialogue there, with the reason why that town is important coming out gradually in the dialogue. The more usual approach would be to tell the events that led to stopping there, using snatches of explicit description and dialogue to highlight important elements of the stop. But few appear to understand that. That is, of course, a very brief overview. An in-depth analysis of part of a book (several pages) showing what is telling and what is showing and how they combine to tell the story successfully is something I have not seen, but maybe I have missed it. Erle Stanley Gardner does short passages suitable for such an analysis.
@@aSnailCyclopsNamedSteve I'll look into the idea of doing an in-depth dissection on a line level of what sentences are showing/telling and how they combine! Could be a rewarding concept for others, thanks!
@@pickleditto Glad to help. Good luck. I find line-by-line analysis fantastic to see all the things I miss by being distracted by the content. You can catch sentence variety and length, verb variety, vocabulary colourfulness, rhetorical devices, etc.
That's pretty true! I'd say "mastering" openings is more about knowing the basic ingredients that set the story up for success. As I say in the video, there's no real "perfect" way to write an opening; otherwise, they would all be the same. Thanks for your comment!
Very insightful!
Your video got ranked next to Studio Binder video.
Never quit. 🎉
No way! 😳That's amazing, thanks for letting me know and for the encouragement!! 🌟
You speak in such general terms that it is impossible to apply the information. I am glad to see you are using quotes now and you avoided saying telling was bad, but you never defined what makes a sentence showing, telling, or something else. You got it correct that less is more and everything needs to support the story, but specific examples of what is and is not appropriate would have made that clearer.
Thanks for your comment! As the concept is already so well known with many other great videos focusing specifically on 'Show vs Tell' I didn't want to get too far into it. I intended to use it to explain how word choice is an intentional form of telling that can either lock a reader in or turn them off, and that showing is sometimes too wordy to be useful. In the future, I'll try to explain things in more detail!
@@pickleditto Actually, most get 'show, don't tell' wrong. For my English teacher, it was use more descriptive words, like dart instead of run. Online, not only that idea shows up, but also the idea that if a character says or thinks something, it is automatically showing (wrong). Often they have no idea how to show something and so they tell things that are better shown, like in the middle of an action scene where you want the reader to be there, writing, 'the corridor seemed endless.' That is better expressed as a thought if you want the reader to be there. If you are between scenes, it is better told than shown. And the worst is that they have never done any text analysis and so think everything should be shown, not realising that most of a story is telling and only the highlights need to be shown, unless you want a slow story. You could say my writing is show heavy nowadays, as I find more pleasure in the word play found in dialogue than in relating a sequence. Thus, I use tricks like a meandering thought to break the dialogue and show the passage of time. I suppose a good example would be a road trip. To name every town would be boring. I would just name the town and start the dialogue there, with the reason why that town is important coming out gradually in the dialogue. The more usual approach would be to tell the events that led to stopping there, using snatches of explicit description and dialogue to highlight important elements of the stop. But few appear to understand that. That is, of course, a very brief overview. An in-depth analysis of part of a book (several pages) showing what is telling and what is showing and how they combine to tell the story successfully is something I have not seen, but maybe I have missed it. Erle Stanley Gardner does short passages suitable for such an analysis.
@@aSnailCyclopsNamedSteve I'll look into the idea of doing an in-depth dissection on a line level of what sentences are showing/telling and how they combine! Could be a rewarding concept for others, thanks!
@@pickleditto Glad to help. Good luck. I find line-by-line analysis fantastic to see all the things I miss by being distracted by the content. You can catch sentence variety and length, verb variety, vocabulary colourfulness, rhetorical devices, etc.
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If everyone mastered it, it would become common and boring.
That's pretty true! I'd say "mastering" openings is more about knowing the basic ingredients that set the story up for success. As I say in the video, there's no real "perfect" way to write an opening; otherwise, they would all be the same. Thanks for your comment!