Show vs. Tell

[MillieDynamite]

I always find it hard to hit the balance. Showing implies it isn't passive, but show to much and becomes repetitive, which can be worse than passive. Show to little, leave to much to the readers imagination, and they are doing all the heavy lifting. Telling is good in some places to synopsis something that happened, but a hole story of telling and a person is worn out before the third paragraph. Even when I publish, I don't know if I have the balance right.

 

[caleb35]

I feel you. I'm working on this at the moment. My problem is that:
1. I usually write in 1st person, so this isn't my natural method;
2. I've a HUGE cast of characters. Now nearly all will be familiar to my readers (this is the final story in my arc) BUT even the most dedicated will need a reminder, not to mention new readers, so I'm having to drop in loads of explanation. This is one of the reasons why I went for a third person narrator, as it struck me that it would be unrealistic for a first person narrator to be constantly thinking "I remember when I first met X when she was..." etc.

To me it's not a "show vs tell" issue, so much as "how much does the reader need to know"? Of course, that requires me to put myself in the mind of another reading the story, which I've always found a tricky thought exercise.


Can't help you there, but here's how I did it in "What a difference a day makes..."

Excellent points all around. A few thoughts:

1) regarding the reminders, is that a big deal in the end? I suggest that it may not be. I don't think you need to always lead off with a "I remember when" but there's a few different varied ways you can introduce flashbacks. Also, we each tend to flashback quite a bit; I don't think it's out of the ordinary for a first-person character to keep remembering bits from the past, particularly the same bits over and over again (we all also tend to fixate on certain moments). Mick Herron doesn't write first-person narrative (at least not in the Slow Horses series), but in each book he does repeat many of the same character beats and descriptions, as if you hadn't read previous books. Instead of coming off as tedious, it's still fun to read and acts as reinforcements to help you feel more familiar with the characters.

2) "How much does the reader need to know" is a great way to phrase it, thank you. That was a big part to my own questioning that led me to kick off this thread. I had written a few different flashbacks, but I realized that while each was nice and smutty, they didn't really move the story along or tell the reader anything that they couldn't have figured out for themselves just by reading the characters' actions and interactions.

 

[THBGato]

1) regarding the reminders, is that a big deal in the end? I suggest that it may not be. I don't think you need to always lead off with a "I remember when" but there's a few different varied ways you can introduce flashbacks. Also, we each tend to flashback quite a bit; I don't think it's out of the ordinary for a first-person character to keep remembering bits from the past, particularly the same bits over and over again (we all also tend to fixate on certain moments).

I agree with you. However, my problem is that I'm having most of these reunions in flashbacks already - so I want to avoid having flashbacks within flashbacks, as it were.

[I've got my current MC listening to a radio interview between two MCs of past stories. As the interview progresses, things they say and songs they play trigger flashbacks in my current MC of interactions with other characters. Eventually, the story will snap back to the story present. It's a little complex.]

I realized that while each was nice and smutty, they didn't really move the story along

I think this is a particular tension of writing for Literotica - that feeling that you ought to put a sex scene in because that's what readers are here for.

Fight it, I say!

 

[Britva415]

I had written a few different flashbacks, but I realized that while each was nice and smutty, they didn't really move the story along

My attitude about this, as a Literotica reader and as a Literotica writer, is that, either way, what I'm here for is stories where it isn't necessarily about sex which moves the plot along, it's more about a plot which moves along to the sex.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I reject prescriptive advice with regards to convention and grammar in general. If it works, it works.

This

 

[Voboy]

It's a little difficult to adequately describe without posting the actual text in question, which I don't want to do nor was that my goal in starting the thread. I will say that the stuff in question is the protagonist in an encounter with the antagonist and thinking back to previous encounters and things and statements that occurred between them in those previous encounters. As you were saying, upon my re-reading, it occurred to me in several places that, while they were not bad bits in and of themselves, they did not need to be shown or told to move the particular story along -- each was something that the reader could probably guess on their own.

Here's what I'll sometimes do in this kind of situation.

When two characters have a sordid past, I'll sometimes write that past exactly as though I was including it in the story... but then I won't include it in the story. By writing it, I've manifested it: it "exists" now, as a real in-story shared history, and I can now treat it as something that canonically happened.

What that gives me is consistency: I'll refer, at times, to those prior experiences, and when I do there'll be a reasonable, logical backstory the characters can have conversations about or make veiled allusions to.

So, while I'm not "telling" the readers what happened, they can figure it out based on the thoughts my narrator has and the dialogue he or she shares with others. I'm writing a story like that right now, in fact: in my head is a clear image of what the two MCs did with each other about ten years before, and now their occasional references to that material will serve as foreshadowing to the hardcore fucking they'll do later in the piece.

But the readers won't ever get to "know what happened" ten years ago, in a linear way. No doubt I'll get comments about that, but I don't care. I know what happened, and it's my story. So they can suck it up.