: Re: How to tell when you can only tell So, I had a problem with this story proposal, more precisely, with a part of it: Basically, the narrator follows Person A through the entirety, for

@Phylliss352

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Just to be clear, the T in SDT refers to you as narrator telling the reader something, not to a character's dialogue telling another character something. (Obviously, characters don't talk to each other like they're narrating a novel.) For example, X can tell Y that Z is mean, but if you as narrator just tell us Z is mean that's "telling".

Similarly, X can tell Y that Z killed W. Can you tell us that Z killed W? Sure, because there's a further subtlety: when we say "don't tell", we really mean don't tell us what to think. Let me decide whether Z is mean. I probably will after I learn Z killed W!

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