: Re: When is it okay to "tell", instead of "show"? One of the major mantras of writing fiction is "show, don't tell". Is it ever okay to tell? When?

This is a mistake I've made in the past: "Show, don't tell" is actually a dictum of writing for the screen. Given that movies are a visual medium, it's generally a mistake to spend a lot of time with the characters (or a voiceover) telling you things that could be dramatized.

However, great books (and stories) can and do often "tell" us things that provide context for the action. Consider the famous beginning of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way â€“ in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

This is less common in modern writing, but the chief reason is probably that we've all been influenced so heavily by the movies.

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: Re: When is it okay to "tell", instead of "show"? One of the major mantras of writing fiction is "show, don't tell". Is it ever okay to tell? When?

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: Getting My Rights Back Back in the late 90's I wrote a picture book which eventually was published in 2002 by a big name publishing house. The book was critically acclaimed, won an award,

: What advice is there for aspiring journalists and authors? As an aspiring writer/blogger, I'm finding it hard to know where to start. I'd like to be able to get some work of mine, possibly

: Using Present Tense to describe a Fact on a story that uses Past Tense newcomer here, and I have a question. I have a story that starts with the sentence, 'the ocean is vast'. However, I'm

: If characters never do bad things, you don't have a plot, and if every bad action is followed by a speech about how bad it is, you end up with a didactic polemic, not a novel. It's possible

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