: Re: Is straight-up writing someone's opinions telling? When I first learned about the "show don't tell" guideline, I believe it applied to everything. I have now learned there are many grey areas,

I would add one word to that (then I'll tell you why):

Visa squared his shoulders, knowing Reino respected confidence.

An opinion is part of somebody's internal life; and how they see the world.

Without the word 'knowing', it is the narrator telling us something about Reino's internal life, and we have to guess that Visa knows this.

By adding the word 'knowing', the narrator is telling us something about Visa's internal life and why he is squaring his shoulders, because he believes something about Reino. (and I am presuming from the context that Visa is the POV character.)

In writing it is okay for the narrator to reveal inner thoughts of the POV character for a given scene, that can be done as direct thoughts (in italics), or direct dialogue with other characters, or indirectly in prose as a description of thoughts that isn't in a verbatim thought-by-thought form. Or a mix of the two, for example:

Britney walked half an hour, thinking over her conversation with Tomason, and near the first mile marker she realized something: Tomason was not lying to protect himself, it was to protect Jack! All the lies protected Jack. she stopped walking. Why would he protect Jack?

If you are talking about somebody's opinion, be sure to attribute it to them.

This can be in thoughts, but remember (for the sake of realism) that most opinions are not reviewed in detail by the people that hold them, and are almost never reasoned out in thoughts, they come in snippets as they apply to a situation. Again, as above, the reason Visa squares his shoulders is he believes it will help to show confidence. We don't need to learn why he believes this and who taught him that and when and where and how many times he has used it, or what happened to make him believe that Reino respects it -- We just need to know this is a belief he holds or something he knows.

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: Re: Is straight-up writing someone's opinions telling? When I first learned about the "show don't tell" guideline, I believe it applied to everything. I have now learned there are many grey areas,

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