: 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?

@Yeniel532

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I'm going to go ahead and disagree, and I'll tell you why. The problem with telling, with clarity, is that you're no longer letting the reader's imagination do the work. Clarity is great for technical documentation, but a lot of highly regarded fiction is anything but clear. Hell, if you're a postmodernist, then clarity is your enemy. You fight it to the death.

To take a simple example, think about horror movies, and horror fiction. How scary is it when you actually see the monster clearly? It's usually a bit of a joke at that point. But that precious time when the monster is hidden? When all you catch is the fleeting glimpse, all you know of it is its sinister handiwork? That's magic. That's where all the scary comes from.

It's just like that with character description and character interaction. You need to have the reader filling in the blanks themselves to really engage them. They're going to do a much better job of pulling themselves into the story than you ever could, and you have to give them that space. Hell, even scenery description is better when it's vague(1).

Don't ever say, "Such and such is boring. Such and such is annoying. So and so is sad. So and so is happy. So and so is socially inept." It's quick, it's clear, it's boring. Those things are easy to show via dialog and description. Show them, and give the reader the space to empathize, and to color the scene with their imagination.

1) My favorite example is from The Colour out of Space by Lovecraft. Just a short story, so his space for description is pretty much nil. He sets the entire scene in the first 6 paragraphs, and never touches it again for the rest of the story. I can forgive him his favorite words (unknown, miasma, and infinite) for those 6 elegant paragraphs.

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