April 2025
Hello! I hope you’re all doing well!
I’m going to start off with some news. First off, Revolution in the Heart: stories inspired by Ursula K LeGuin edited by Jonathan Strahan. In which I have a story! Along with a bunch of other super fabulous folks. It’ll be out October 21, 2025. Available wherever fine books are sold!
More news! If you’re in St Louis, you could drop by The Fountain on Delmar at 6pm on April 13 for one of their Author Salons—the author is me! I will probably read from the title story of Lake of Souls.
Sometimes I hang out in places where people give and discuss writing advice, and not infrequently I become irritated. It would be a hundred percent unfair for me to speak up in those particular contexts, for various reasons, and so I don’t. Instead, I stew.
Well, welcome to the writing stew! Today’s simmering annoyance is an assertion I saw someone make about the inherent superiority of showing vs telling. Their argument was, showing is just more immersive and engaging, therefore better. They then presented two paragraphs, one “showing” and one “telling” and then asked, which work would you rather read?
Like, let’s pretend these were the examples:
The queen was tired, uncomfortable, and angry.
vs
The hard ivory edge of the throne pressed into her legs, painful enough to keep her awake, even though her mind felt like lead and all she really wanted was to go back to the royal chambers and sleep all day. “Leave us,” she snapped, waving away the vizier and his ever-present smirk.
So, on the face of it, the question “which of these would you rather read” seems cut and dried. The second example has a lot more interesting detail!
The thing is, both of these are supposed to be only small parts of larger works. It would be like showing a frame of Star Wars that was just black space, and then a frame of Plan 9 From Outer Space of a flying saucer. Which movie would you rather watch?
Yeah.
The problem here is the assumption that a close-in POV (what is here being called “showing”) is inherently more interesting or enjoyable than a more distant one (labeled “telling”). I mean, that’s one of the problems here. Another one is the implication that since a close-in POV is so obviously better than a distant one, “show don’t tell” is just good advice.
But in fact, while some works do keep a steady distance in POV all through, many others move focus back and forth, distant when it’s needed, closer when it’s needed—and that “it’s needed” depends not on rules about what’s more immersive but on what a particular sentence, paragraph, or scene is doing in the work as a whole. Hell, even if your story keeps a steadily remote distance all through, that’s not a flaw. It’s just something that isn’t currently fashionable and (like any POV) needs to be carefully handled. And anyone who isn’t aware of this should not be giving out writing advice.
Indeed, the whole question of this sort of writing advice—blanket statements about simple, simply stated “rules” for what good or bad writing is—is fraught with assumptions that bypass really important questions—chief among them, what does the writer want to accomplish with this story? There are as many answers to that question as there are writers. You cannot judge the quality or “correctness” of any sentence in a work unless you know what that sentence is trying to do in that particular context. I can easily imagine a story where “The queen was tired, uncomfortable, and angry.” hits the reader like a hand grenade, and conversely a story where the second example was dragging and dull because the reader’s (or the writer’s) interest is elsewhere and it would have been better to pass over this moment and get on with the real business of the story.
I’ve been reading quite a lot, but most of it isn’t the sort of thing I usually list here. Or, maybe some of you would be interested in something like Richard Seaford’s Cosmology and the polis: the social construction of space and time in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Which I found super interesting, and very readable, which isn’t true of all academic work. Not by a longshot.
So, not a lot of recreational reading. I just downloaded the latest of Melissa Scott’s Astreiant books, and I’m waiting for Robert Jackson Bennet’s A Drop of Corruption, which comes out today! I read an ARC of Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons already and am just waiting for people to start talking about it.
So instead of reading recs, I have a podcast for you! Wizards vs Lesbians. Disclaimer, all the regulars on this podcast are people I consider to be either friends or friendly acquaintances, so I’m slightly biased. They discuss books that are, to one degree or another, about wizards vs lesbians. The discussions are interesting and lively, and I always enjoy them even when (maybe particularly when?) I disagree with one or another conclusion or assertion.
I’ve been playing a lot of Farm Together 2, which continues to evolve. And No Man’s Sky dropped a nice update last week, with an expedition to match. You can now decorate your base with the Ancient Bones you dig up! If you haven’t NMSed in a while, now would be a lovely time to dive back in.
I’d been hearing great things about Chants of Sennar, but hesitated for the longest time because I’m not a huge fan of puzzle games. I did finally buy it, and yes, too puzzley for me, but it was beautiful and obviously well-made, so I passed it on to my daughter who loved it. So if you’re someone who likes that sort of thing, you will probably love Chants of Sennar.
Well, that’s April. Stay well!
Ann