Re:‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer
by vidarh on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:24PM
(#21193950)
Yes, but that is not going to tell you what they think or even how they feel with any kind of fidelity.
If someone is a true literary master they may come closer to bridging that gap, but you always leave a lot of ambiguity on the table that way. Sometimes that ambiguity is fine, and allows the reader to add their own interpretations and the outcome may well be better for it, but if you have specific things you want to convey, it can be incredibly hard to convey even very simple things without telling.
I got incredibly cynical of that after going through literary analysis at school and seeing just how contrived a lot of the attempts at analysis were. Even when trying to analyse works line by line the outcomes are often extremely dubious (or directly contradicted by the author); I don't think even most world renowned authors are capable of unambiguously putting through particularly complex messages without telling. Often it's hard enough to get the message through when it is incredibly explicit.
If someone is a true literary master they may come closer to bridging that gap, but you always leave a lot of ambiguity on the table that way. Sometimes that ambiguity is fine, and allows the reader to add their own interpretations and the outcome may well be better for it, but if you have specific things you want to convey, it can be incredibly hard to convey even very simple things without telling.
I got incredibly cynical of that after going through literary analysis at school and seeing just how contrived a lot of the attempts at analysis were. Even when trying to analyse works line by line the outcomes are often extremely dubious (or directly contradicted by the author); I don't think even most world renowned authors are capable of unambiguously putting through particularly complex messages without telling. Often it's hard enough to get the message through when it is incredibly explicit.