Showing versus telling
I've got bones to pick with "show, don't tell." It's unhelpful and vague and prescriptive and there's lots of bad showing and good telling. This is, of course, as always, my personal preference.
"Show don't tell" misses the point for me when authors take it as an instruction to never have characters name how they feel. Most adults can usually recognise the signs of hunger in their body. I don't need the symptoms listing before drawing that conclusion. It's okay for a character to understand they are hungry right off the bat.
If we can name at least some emotions I feel like this leaves more room for the delicious What is this feeling? confusion of others. Otherwise this character is just trapped in some Cartesian dualism that probably needs exploring in and of itself.
Sometimes "What is this feeling?" is indeed hunger! We get cranky or shaky. In which case it can be something interesting with why it's not being recognised. What else is going on?
The white hot heat of lust is being mistaken for the white hot heat of loathing because they haven't been taught to recognise it, here in this place, and are blindly reaching for an emotion, any emotion, that comes close or is more acceptable to society and themselves.
It's also fun for the readers, whereas listing the bodily reactions of hunger for no applicable reason is... less fun.
This body-showing happens a lot with POV characters but weirdly there's much more telling, I feel, with non-POV characters. POV characters are generally extraordinarily accurate at picking up the moods and intentions of people around them, which is the absolute opposite of real life. This cuts out so much juicy tension.
Unless that person is the love interest and it's one of those very basic misunderstandings that could have been solved with a conversation - in which case it happens all the time.
Where "show don't tell" isn't applied and I would like it to be more is about what characters are supposed to be like. Don't tell me they are funny, via either the narrator or the other characters - show them being funny! Or smart, or shy, or sad, or whatever. Where is the evidence? I'm getting like a forensic psychologist over here. This is all hearsay, your honour.
That's fine if that's who the character really is, or if this disconnect is the theme. (It rarely is.) Being tight about this also means it works really well when an unexpected or overlooked trait is noticed by someone else. Very romantic to have a love interest see something in a character no one else does! Including themselves. But again, there has to be some evidence for it.
Also, I wish we'd stop blindly applying the label of 'intelligent' and its synonyms just because we think this is a 'good' trait. There are tonnes of nuances and different types of intelligence - what exactly do we mean with this blanket statement? Does it just mean they know a lot of Facts, usually about baseball? There are other kinds of intelligence!
It's okay if a character went to a perfectly average school and had a perfectly average academic career. Even less than average. For most people it doesn't actually matter. And again, lots of different types of intelligence beyond academic careers.
If they are an astrophysicist tell me how smart they are. But then, back it up with showing. I'm not saying they have to make perfect decisions all the time or display mastery across every facet of intelligence. But give me something. I've got a great example here but I don't want to be mean about it and it would take too long to explain with all the relevant modifiers. But it's real.
Telling is like fast travel. I honestly think it's okay to fast travel sometimes. If it's a new route or the party is supervising a herd of woolly mammoths and it is perilous or fun or interesting that's great. But if it's a known road or short airship trip I'm going to say "Do you want to just be there?" We do this all the time in narrative. We don't (generally) go to the toilet with characters, or in every lift, or eat every meal, or recount every minute of a long journey. We just know that stuff happens and tune into it only when it's actually interesting.
We've got to have both showing and telling, woolly mammoths and fast travel, lust and loathing, and getting the balance right is tricky. A simple, blanket "show don't tell" doesn't actually help with any of that.
Part of the reading notes