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On writing
I noticed that Neil Gaiman took on the famous "show don't tell" rule this morning:
It depends what you're writing and what kind of effect you want to have on the reader. "Show don't tell" is a useful rule of thumb, but lots of fine books and stories tell (Borges, for example, does almost nothing else, and we love him for it), and so do storytellers.
There was once a princess who, although she was perhaps a little on the thin side and extremely short-tempered, was very beautiful...
could often get you further than a page in which you see her short temper and learn about her beauty (although, if they have anything to do with the story, you'll do that anyway).
Which got me thinking. Usually I take "show don't tell" to be a rule of plot - the last thing any reader wants is to have the epic confrontation between Good and Evil narrated in retrospect (while you were debating about the virtues of 2% vs 1% milk, I was throwing the Ring of Power into Mount Doom).
Even then, though, stories have different demands when it comes to telling vs. showing. If supercool character #1 really wouldn't have a problem buying a gun and wiping out his colleagues at Wolfram and Hart on the way to the supermarket, then is it necessary to show this? On one hand, it provides drama, of a kind. On the other hand, if the point of the story has nothing to do with office massacres - what's really at stake is the relationship between two cyclists in Winnepeg - then "showing" this could derail the direction of the story and imbalance the relative importance of characters.
I can think of at least one story in which telling is better than showing. In Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai there's a scene where the coolest, most accomplished samauri leaves the relative safety of the village and walks out by himself into the night into the camp of the enemey. Rather than following him, the camera waits with those at the gate, and after a time dilation the cool samarui walks back into the village and says "seven" to the people who've been waiting for his return. It's beatifully understated and does more to establish this character as an impossible badass than any choreographed fight scene could have done.
And there are also examples of "showing" done poorly, to the detriment of the narrative. C.J. Cherryh, for example, had major issues with the Hobbit-like end of Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy. "No story should end with the hero unconscious and the epic action culminating offscreen," she thought (I paraphrase here), and added that "it should be a rule that the hero is always a participant in the culminating action."
There's obviously a degree to which this is true (Hobb's ending has a certain WTF quality to it). But what interests me is that when Cherryh tried to put this "rule" into effect in her new Foreigner trilogy, it backfired. It wasn't *bad* per se, but the problem she faced is that the protagonist of the Foreigner series is a translator, not an action hero. His field of operation is negotiation and political manouvering, so when Cherryh did shoehorn him into climactic final battles, it seemed very arbitrary and contradicted the essential premise of the character.
Myself I always find the problem is knowing what to tell and what to show. I think I too often err on the part of showing, and end up with the plot equivalent of "Mr. Protagonist goes to the grocery store" for twenty pages. When I make the decision to tell, I feel like it's always a question of how much I can get away with. (Will the reader believe me if I just say the protagonist has a gun, and don't explain where he got it from?)
Showing vs Telling is also interesting to consider in terms of rpgs, I suppose. When playing a character, you get to experience a lot that would normally just be "told." (This is where my character gets to stand in line for twenty minutes, waiting to talk with an Important Person!) And yes, it's usually dull. That's the appeal of cut scenes, I guess - although they don't allow for the blow-by-blow experience and overcoming of difficulties, they do allow players to skip the dull bits and get straight to what certain actions would accomplish.
Blah blah blah. Now to clean my apt.
It depends what you're writing and what kind of effect you want to have on the reader. "Show don't tell" is a useful rule of thumb, but lots of fine books and stories tell (Borges, for example, does almost nothing else, and we love him for it), and so do storytellers.
There was once a princess who, although she was perhaps a little on the thin side and extremely short-tempered, was very beautiful...
could often get you further than a page in which you see her short temper and learn about her beauty (although, if they have anything to do with the story, you'll do that anyway).
Which got me thinking. Usually I take "show don't tell" to be a rule of plot - the last thing any reader wants is to have the epic confrontation between Good and Evil narrated in retrospect (while you were debating about the virtues of 2% vs 1% milk, I was throwing the Ring of Power into Mount Doom).
Even then, though, stories have different demands when it comes to telling vs. showing. If supercool character #1 really wouldn't have a problem buying a gun and wiping out his colleagues at Wolfram and Hart on the way to the supermarket, then is it necessary to show this? On one hand, it provides drama, of a kind. On the other hand, if the point of the story has nothing to do with office massacres - what's really at stake is the relationship between two cyclists in Winnepeg - then "showing" this could derail the direction of the story and imbalance the relative importance of characters.
I can think of at least one story in which telling is better than showing. In Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai there's a scene where the coolest, most accomplished samauri leaves the relative safety of the village and walks out by himself into the night into the camp of the enemey. Rather than following him, the camera waits with those at the gate, and after a time dilation the cool samarui walks back into the village and says "seven" to the people who've been waiting for his return. It's beatifully understated and does more to establish this character as an impossible badass than any choreographed fight scene could have done.
And there are also examples of "showing" done poorly, to the detriment of the narrative. C.J. Cherryh, for example, had major issues with the Hobbit-like end of Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy. "No story should end with the hero unconscious and the epic action culminating offscreen," she thought (I paraphrase here), and added that "it should be a rule that the hero is always a participant in the culminating action."
There's obviously a degree to which this is true (Hobb's ending has a certain WTF quality to it). But what interests me is that when Cherryh tried to put this "rule" into effect in her new Foreigner trilogy, it backfired. It wasn't *bad* per se, but the problem she faced is that the protagonist of the Foreigner series is a translator, not an action hero. His field of operation is negotiation and political manouvering, so when Cherryh did shoehorn him into climactic final battles, it seemed very arbitrary and contradicted the essential premise of the character.
Myself I always find the problem is knowing what to tell and what to show. I think I too often err on the part of showing, and end up with the plot equivalent of "Mr. Protagonist goes to the grocery store" for twenty pages. When I make the decision to tell, I feel like it's always a question of how much I can get away with. (Will the reader believe me if I just say the protagonist has a gun, and don't explain where he got it from?)
Showing vs Telling is also interesting to consider in terms of rpgs, I suppose. When playing a character, you get to experience a lot that would normally just be "told." (This is where my character gets to stand in line for twenty minutes, waiting to talk with an Important Person!) And yes, it's usually dull. That's the appeal of cut scenes, I guess - although they don't allow for the blow-by-blow experience and overcoming of difficulties, they do allow players to skip the dull bits and get straight to what certain actions would accomplish.
Blah blah blah. Now to clean my apt.
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But it's definitely through that not everything deserves to be shown, and in the right circumstances, a judicious bit of telling can be more effective. To show everything would take forever, so you spend that on the things that merit it: important bits of character (especially to avoid situations where we get told one thing and shown another, or situations where you both show and tell, and we get irritated at the redundancy), or important bits of action (like climactic battles). Somebody's got a name for this technique -- it's something and leaping, I think, but I forget -- basically, deciding what's important enough to show, and what you can swiftly gloss over with a bit of telling. A bit only; it's the lengthy stuff that's really a problem.
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>>I wouldn't use a cinematic example in this debate, because I think showing and telling mean somewhat different things there; the only telling that can happen in a visual medium is through dialogue, but in fiction it can also happen through exposition.<<
Yup, and that's the problem, isn't it - particularly in SF, where you've got to introduce a world as well as characters.
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Sometimes, you've got to tell. But a little goes a long way.
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A paragraph can be worth a thousand pictures
For _Sunshine_, I figured out the world's basic features, but an expository dump somewhere could have been nice. Or as swan_tower says, a sequel. Here I suspect we want more information than actually exists in McKinley's brain, though.
The begging I can remember easily right now has been in anime. Scrapped Princess came through (mostly), pleasantly confirming what I'd guessed at. Noein eventually talked a lot but missed out on crucial plot elements. Juuni Kokki might be coming through, but my "Please! Exposition!" was a recent exclamation in club. Especially when MainCharFromEarth ran into a troupe specializing in their world's creation myths. "Please! Show us!"
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SO THERE!!!!!
Regarding Exposition...