Overview #3: Showing, not telling

So I remembered my own rules, and here it is, this week's overview. This was harder than I thought it would be. Now, don't get me wrong, I've been writing long enough that I've learned the difference between showing and telling, and sometimes telling is strategic to compress time for the sake of narration so I don't bore my readers to death with pointless details or side-stories or back-stories that do nothing whatsoever to further the plot. The hard part was going back and looking at the posts for the characters I'd written and trying to decide what needed to be shown. Some things don't need to be shown. Sometimes adequate description, i.e. telling, can go a long way, as brevity has more impact than long-windedness. It took me a moment, or two, but then I remembered that, even though these drabbles are an exercise in the discipline of brevity and are taken in isolation, when I finally put all this work to use, it'll be in the context of a novel or a short story. That being realized, I reminded myself that stories, like people, have memories, and that if I told something in one place it could be that I'd shown it before and I needed to remind my readers of a certain point about a character. Thus, I chose moments that were told that would have an interesting back-story if shown. Once I had that down, it was fun, coming up with explanations for moments. I was also reminded of an idea that I'd seen while reading fanfic, and I want to try it out sometime. It proves the new dimensions that the internet and electronic media have added to the art of literature. I thought, well, what if I wrote a story, short or long, and every now and again, in a moment of telling, I could turn that word or phrase into a hyperlink and link it off to an independent moment that, while not integral to the plot, provided some back-story or an interesting moment to give the readers more details of the story as they go along. But that's a project for another day.

In summary, then, showing is more effective than telling if you've the time and space and it's important to the plot of the story. (At this point I'd have to make a lawyer-like argument and say that characterization, like witness credibility, is always relevant to the plot of a story, although the theory is that the conflicts in the plot are what allow a character to develop. Sometimes it's the small moments that make a character, not the big tragedies, the same way it's the small decisions, not the big ones, that develop us as people.)

P.S. Madness, this week's challenge is your turn. I've already thought mine up for next week.