Don't tell, show...and other annoying habits

[Dansak]

My pet hate seems to be quite common at the moment.

Time and again I go to read a story and they lose me in the first paragraph because they're telling me a bunch of stuff that they should be showing me. Show don't tell is probably the best advice I've read.

It's frustrating to see what could be a great story ruined in the first chapter because they spend half the page telling us that John is tall dark and handsome and is in a really good mood today because he found an app that will make everyone...blah blah blah.

That could have been a great story if they didn't rush the intro by telling me about John. If they'd taken the time to show me how he felt and why he was in a good mood I would have stayed with it. Show don't tell is a difficult thing to master, I still struggle with it but the basics that are easy to get your head around.

And the other thing...spelling and grammar. Okay, I'm not the best with editing, I hate it, it's a chore. But it's got to be done. I use grammarly and edit every chapter at least twice, and even then I miss stuff that makes it through to the published chapter. That's ok, we all miss a few typos here and there. But some of the stuff I've come across is so badly edited that it looks like a cat had walked across the keyboard. I'll stick with a bit of bad editing if the story is good but for the most part if an author can't be bothered to spell check their work then I can't be bothered to read it.

Rant over. I feel better now. Thank you.

 

[Kinen]

I both agree and am terribly guilty...

 

[JWtts]

I both agree and am terribly guilty...

Haha. Same.

I imagine some of the "Telling -vs- Showing" happening is authors eager to get to the "good stuff". John is tall, dark, and handsome and in a good mood. Check. He found an app. Check. Aaaaand now we're off to the races. Not to excuse the behavior, but it kind of makes sense. Because sometimes people don't care why the hot, lonely housewife is lonely, or what happened to her sink requiring our handsome plumber who forgot to wear underwear today, but here we are.

As far as editing goes. Yes! For me there's the 1st draft. The let it stew a few days, re-read and edits. The re-read again. The copy+paste into CHYOA. Reading that pasted chapter twice, checking formatting and such, afraid of having overlooked something and looking like an idiot, and then nervously clicking 'Save/Publish'. Fast-forward days, weeks, etc. later and I re-read a previous chapter to remember some detail or thing while writing a new chapter... aaaand there's a typo or worse, "why did I say it like that?!".

 

[Dansak]

Haha. Same.

I imagine some of the "Telling -vs- Showing" happening is authors eager to get to the "good stuff". John is tall, dark, and handsome and in a good mood. Check. He found an app. Check. Aaaaand now we're off to the races. Not to excuse the behavior, but it kind of makes sense. Because sometimes people don't care why the hot, lonely housewife is lonely, or what happened to her sink requiring our handsome plumber who forgot to wear underwear today, but here we are.

As far as editing goes. Yes! For me there's the 1st draft. The let it stew a few days, re-read and edits. The re-read again. The copy+paste into CHYOA. Reading that pasted chapter twice, checking formatting and such, afraid of having overlooked something and looking like an idiot, and then nervously clicking 'Save/Publish'. Fast-forward days, weeks, etc. later and I re-read a previous chapter to remember some detail or thing while writing a new chapter... aaaand there's a typo or worse, "why did I say it like that?!".

For editing this is almost exactly what I do, even down to the bit where I re read a published chapter and think 'why did i say that'! And letting the first draft stew for a few days, that's such a helpful thing to do, it's amazing how different it reads after some time away from the page.

I also do not publish the latest draft, by that I mean when a chapter is published on Chyoa, I've got at least three or four more already written. I found out quite early on that if I write a chapter, edit and publish, I'm stuck with those details and can't make changes. I often write something I think is done, then three chapters later think 'shit, if I'd had John go for a run in the park instead of the gym he could have done XYZ'. So now I hold the chapters until there's at least three more after, that way I'm reasonably sure I'll not need to switch any details about.

 

[Cuchuilain]

Rant over. I feel better now. Thank you.

Glad yuor fealin beter now Dansak.

You're right - if the story starts and I can see that the author has obviously not went to much trouble checking it, then I will bail out pretty quickly. However, if there are grammar/spelling issues but I can see the author's first language isn't English then I'll probably persevere (with the view that there could be some good quality that I could miss because I'm being a nit-picker)

In mine, I try to have at least a couple of read-thrus of a chapter before it goes live, however I normally won't start on the next chapter until that one's published. I tend to write on the site (saving in draft), rather than in a wordprocessor, then publish when I'm happy enough with it.
I have run into an issue, where if I have say 3 or 4 chapters all in draft mode, and the 1st one's ready to publish, the site goes ahead and publishes them all together and I need to work frantically to fix the not-quite-ready ones, so now its 1 at a time.

I also have 2 other confessions.
1) Occasionally I publish too late in the evening when my judgement is not at its best then wince when I re-read the next day and need to make some hasty edits.
2) On contributing to some mass participation stories (eg the Snowball ones), the one-off chapters are more akin to doodles than oil-paintings so they don't receive quite as much QA.

The other bit of laziness that puts me off as a reader (which I have very occasionally been guilty of when writing and forgetting which branch I'm in), is someone accidentally switching POVs. This should be caught in the proof-reading too.

 

[TheLowKing]

Is this the rant thread? I've got one.

Chapters named 'characters' where writers describe ad nauseum who all their characters are.

Nooooooo! Please don't!

Have you ever read a book that did that? Did LotR start with an in-depth description of the nuances of Strider's heritage and character? "Stider is a tall man but AcShUaLlY his real name is Aragorn and he's heir to the throne of Gondor!" A note saying, "hey, look, Pippin is the clumsy one and Merry the responsible one"? The effect the One Ring has had on Bilbo over the decades? "Don't try to take it from him or he might go all feral on you!" Of course not, we learned about those things through the story. (There are counter-examples in LotR too, but let's conveniently ignore those for now.)

Is your character damaged? Lonely? No-nonsense? Brave? Rude? Please, please, please don't tell us in advance! "Jennifer is 18 years old and always forgets her appoint--" Stop! Their actions will speak far louder and more compellingly than your words ever could. Have her wince from a harmless touch, cut through the bullshit with a word, stand up to a bully twice her size, or swear at a teacher. Personality established!

Does your protagonist have 2 sisters and is his mother a single parent? Your first sentence can literally be him walking into his front door. Wow, mom is right there in the living room! Damn, it's not even noon yet and she's already tipsy. Better go upstairs. Your younger sister's bedroom door is open. She's doing her homework, obedient as always. Hi Mary! Big sis Jane hasn't returned from partying yet, I guess? Really living college life to the fullest. Boom, introduction done, and we got 2 names, 4 character traits, and half a family tree as an added bonus. One more sentence to begin establishing a real plot, and you're off to the races.

 

[huginn]

I
Chapters named 'characters' where writers describe ad nauseum who all their characters are.

Nooooooo! Please don't!

Have you ever read a book that did that? Did LotR start with an in-depth description of the nuances of Strider's heritage and character? "Stider is a tall man but AcShUaLlY his real name is Aragorn and he's heir to the throne of Gondor!" A note saying, "hey, look, Pippin is the clumsy one and Merry the responsible one"? The effect the One Ring has had on Bilbo over the decades? "Don't try to take it from him or he might go all feral on you!" Of course not, we learned about those things through the story. (There are counter-examples in LotR too, but let's conveniently ignore those for now.)

I read once, actually far more times than I can count, a book that started with an essay on history of a group of short folk with hairy feet, their governance and on pipeweed. That book had in the beginning this nice thing, table of contents, which contained some interesting items in section titled Appendixes, for example "Annals of Kings and Rulers" and "Family Trees (Hobbits)". You are right it does not begin describing Strider. LotR manages to be a great book despite all the telling about the world it does. Possibly we could consider the Hobbit as a better example for this. Except, The Hobbit also has almost three pages in the beginning telling, not showing of all kinds of things. Would we have been better off not knowing Bilbo's stature until the eagles came to rescue the dwarwes? There are many fantasy book series that leave the reader far more confused about their world just because they try to show things that are essentially unshowable because of their scale. So I would say that despite how ubiquitous the advice to show,not tell is, there are places to break it.

That is not to say that I have ever been a fan of "Characters" chapters on CHYOA. Still I have mostly seen them as appendixes that can be left to be read after the story is over. Here it tends to be same as leaving them unread.

 

[Gambio]

To be fair to character pages, this types of chapters are sometimes necessary when you have a public story and want to give a quick overview so all the writers are on the same page

 

[Dissonant Soundtrack]

I'll note I've added character pages to my long-form transformation story, so people can come back and remember what I've done to everyone.

 

[huginn]

I'll admit that character pages are valuable as writer resource and thus they will be visible for everyone. I almost always check character pages for webcomics, where associating the name and visual character is more important. Just starting a text story by reading a list of characters feels out of place for me.

 

[pwizdelf]

so people can come back and remember what I've done to everyone.

This made me laugh aloud.

I realized I'm not sure right now where I come down on character pages. I can't fault @TheLowKing's reasoning and I also pretty well agree since I also usually skip those assuming they're a writer reference. Then again I sometimes do a character list myself, although it's 50/50 whether it's just jokey shit. Boy this was a useful contribution to the discussion. oof

 

[JWtts]

Haha. Guilty of the 'Characters Page' and honestly, I think it was more out of a "everyone's doing it"/go with the flow type thing. Plus, it started out as an addition to an existing story before the user deleted the story and left CHYOA. But I agree with @TheLowKing, if you're telling a linear or 'Private' story it's probably not needed.

I think if it's a 'Public' or 'Moderated' story I think it could be useful as a character bible for any potential contributors, sort of like a series bible for a book series with multiple authors, which editors use in publishing. Yes, you'd hope new authors would read the story and chapters to get character details and descriptions correct, but you never know. Or it's a massive story and having something to keep things straight can be helpful.

As a reader, I don't really "read" the Character chapters, but I might take a peek just out of curiosity.

As a potential contributor/author to someone else's story I'd greatly appreciate a 'Characters' chapter to best adhere to the original author's vision of the characters or have a base to start from.

 

[Dansak]

I'm guilty of using character pages! For me it came about because of photos. I love using pics in my stories but it divided opinion, some people didn't like them popping up in chapters. So, to get around this I put the pics in a 'cast and info' page. So my character page is there primarily to show pics. At best I give one line about the character and perhaps one paragraph about the story.

 

[wicker]

Haha. Same.

I imagine some of the "Telling -vs- Showing" happening is authors eager to get to the "good stuff". John is tall, dark, and handsome and in a good mood. Check. He found an app. Check. Aaaaand now we're off to the races. Not to excuse the behavior, but it kind of makes sense. Because sometimes people don't care why the hot, lonely housewife is lonely, or what happened to her sink requiring our handsome plumber who forgot to wear underwear today, but here we are.

As far as editing goes. Yes! For me there's the 1st draft. The let it stew a few days, re-read and edits. The re-read again. The copy+paste into CHYOA. Reading that pasted chapter twice, checking formatting and such, afraid of having overlooked something and looking like an idiot, and then nervously clicking 'Save/Publish'. Fast-forward days, weeks, etc. later and I re-read a previous chapter to remember some detail or thing while writing a new chapter... aaaand there's a typo or worse, "why did I say it like that?!".

yes, this is written fiction, not a movie. In a movie, you can see right off how a character is. In writing, you can't.

 

[wicker]

To be fair to character pages, this types of chapters are sometimes necessary when you have a public story and want to give a quick overview so all the writers are on the same page

this

 

[Gambio]

The flip side to this is also bad. I've read stories that were trying really hard to show, not tell. It makes for some awkward dialogue, plot holes, or general confusion if the right info doesn't arrive at the right time. If you're introducing the characters for each story branch, some descriptions up front to help me decide which branch to invest time in might be practical.

Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the phrase either, I think a lot of authors draw the wrong conclusion from it.

The saying really should be show and tell.

 

[TheLowKing]

Damn, I didn't intend for my off-the-cuff rant to target so many of you. Sorry about that.

I do agree that as a writer's resource, character lists are invaluable! Every story I've ever written (or tried to write) has had one, listing names, attributes, relationships to each other, and the major story beats each was involved in, so it's not all bad.

I hope you don't rely on them to avoid having to show (there is that word again) your readers who your characters are in your stories, though! A story is not an instruction manual, it's an adventure. While the example I gave in the previous post was at least partly meant in jest, I do think that doing something like that really helps ease your readers into your story. Far from being a necessary evil, imo this kind of gentle introduction makes stories a lot more engaging.

 

[TheLowKing]

I read once, actually far more times than I can count, a book that started with an essay on history of a group of short folk with hairy feet, their governance and on pipeweed. That book had in the beginning this nice thing, table of contents, which contained some interesting items in section titled Appendixes, for example "Annals of Kings and Rulers" and "Family Trees (Hobbits)".

Hmmmm, I wonder what story this could be?

Would we have been better off not knowing Bilbo's stature until the eagles came to rescue the dwarwes? There are many fantasy book series that leave the reader far more confused about their world just because they try to show things that are essentially unshowable because of their scale. So I would say that despite how ubiquitous the advice to show,not tell is, there are places to break it.

Of course, every literary convention can be broken to great effect in the hands of a skilled author. However, it takes a skilled author to know when those times are. To go back to my standard example in discussions like these, if I went ahead and wrote a story full of run-on sentences, nonsense words, and a plot that's so unfathomable that no one who struggled through it can make sense of it, it'll be rightly dismissed as a load of hot garbage. But when James Joyce does it, it's a literary classic for the ages.

 

[Cuchuilain]

Hmmmm, I wonder what story this could be?


Of course, every literary convention can be broken to great effect in the hands of a skilled author. However, it takes a skilled author to know when those times are. To go back to my standard example in discussions like these, if I went ahead and wrote a story full of run-on sentences, nonsense words, and a plot that's so unfathomable that no one who struggled through it can make sense of it, it'll be rightly dismissed as a load of hot garbage. But when James Joyce does it, it's a literary classic for the ages.

I thought it was just me with Joyce!!!!!

 

[zankoo]

Chapters named 'characters' where writers describe ad nauseum who all their characters are.

Nooooooo! Please don't!

With respect to your choices for your own stories -- I like a cast of characters.

Since this is a choose-your-own-path thing (in which each and every thread may not successfully flesh out all the characters) ... and since there's a story map and the reader can jump into the middle of the action ... I very much like a Who's Who.

But if they get in the way ... well, fortunately, it's easy to skip them!