writing and craft and stuff
“Mia do you have any writing advice pet peeves”
why, yes i do. presented without too much comment:
it’s a scam because you need to use both things to tell a story effectively. if it’s all show, your novel is going to be over 200k words and half of it will probably be a travelogue. if it’s all tell, we’ll have a hard time getting into the characters’ thoughts and feelings. show, don’t tell exists to help newer writers explore what’s going in their characters’ minds. it’s not a hard and fast rule once you’ve learned how to characterize and give context. so please, do some telling. do some beautiful telling.
The opening chapter of Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley is, in fact, an info dump. But it is so gorgeously told that you don’t CARE. In less-skilled hands, it would be one of those grim backstory slogs where they tell you all about the kingdom and how magic works, but it it beautiful, it sparkles on the page, and there is a great deal of telling well-told.
I don’t think it’s actually a scam, actually.
I think instead that:
A) many people just don’t get this explained beyond the pithy quote, which means that
B) many people don’t realize the earliest references we have to this concept of show don’t tell are from playwrights and dramatists, which definitely impacts why this would be so important! I cannot stress that part enough!
Of course it matters that a play should avoid simply telling you everything! It’s a play!
Mark Swan, who kept “Show, Not Tell,” above his writing desk, in his 1927 primer “You can Write Plays”:
Events that have happened in the past, which cannot possibly be acted in the present, must be ‘told about.’ The telling of them is the only narrative or description that should be in a play. Make the 'telling’ as brief and crisp as possible, without being too obvious. See if the facts can be told in a scene, or scenes, which give the actors a chance for emotional work, thus getting an emotional response from the audience while it is absorbing facts - in other words sugar-coat the pill.“ […] "In the planting of characterization, motivation and relationship: don’t 'talk it,’ ’ show it.’ Express these things in acted scenes, not in narrative or description.”
Don’t talk it. Show it.
This is literally just Wikipedia but like, surely it’s obvious that scripts should account for actors acting, yes?
The Craft of Fiction (1921), British essayist Percy Lubbock writes of picture vs drama
It is a question, I said, of the reader’s relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel. The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with 'stage-directions’ and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel.
The novelist must be a story-teller sometimes, because they need to tell us things. The dramatist, however, CAN show us things.
It’s great writing advice. It can be borrowed sometimes for prose writing too! But it cannot be followed completely in prose writing because it’s advice which accounts for a literal visual medium that relays the writing.
(via khalko)
I know that everyone on here is an anarchist or Marxist or whatever else that traditionally does not care about this, but the damage that the Supreme Court has done to the US administrative state over the last five days (Loper Bright, Jarkesy, and Corner Post) is large enough to significantly alter the course of the 21st century, for the worse. It is massively easier for the wealthy to block a government regulation today than it was at the start of last week. It’s an obscure set of policy reforms to anyone who’s not a lawyer, but they’ve been a key goal of the right-neoliberal agenda for longer than any of us have been alive.
(via deqdyke)
Well, I was going to write another version of “I voted for Nader and wound up with Bush the Sequel as President, and look how well that worked out” spiel, but then got horribly depressed. Folks, if you don’t know enough by now to not only not vote for Trump but also not throw your vote away by staying home or voting some impossible third party option, then what can I tell you? I voted once on strict ideals and got a huge unneeded war and then all the money got set on fire. Don’t say nobody warned you.
I’m not even saying Trump is going to launch the nukes or anything like that, but it seems pretty evident to me, and it has been evident ever since I first saw him in the news way back when for running one of his companies into bankruptcy, that Trump is in this not to make America great again, but to make Trump’s bank account happier. Trump is in this for Trump. He will say or promise whatever it takes in order to get what he wants, and you will not be able to count on him fulfilling a single one of his promises. He doesn’t give a crap about building a wall, but that’s what he’ll say to whip his base up and get him into the White House so that he can make life that much better for Donald Trump.
He pretends he’s the candidate of the people, but he was born into wealth, he hasn’t had to seriously work a day in his life. But there are people willing to put this fat cat carnival barker into office, and if they do, they’ll get what they deserve, as Trump continues making the rich richer (as that’s what makes him richer) and sucking what he can out of the not-rich.
So anyway that’s my pointless howl of the night. And now, the song that’s been running through my head every other moment since this election season kicked into gear:
“The soviet union wasnt that bad, youre just poisoned by american propaganda” BRO THERE WERE GULAGS
Ah yes, stalin killed 9 million people, the official response to political opposition was an ice pick to the brain stem, an entire country was starved by force with the explicit intent of genocide-as-punishment, they did forced imperialism, had a direct hand in the establishment of north korea, and the soviets took the flag in berlin because they originally allied with nazi germany in WW2 until hitler betrayed them and the allies let them have their revenge. But yeah the USSR was a beacon of a communist utopia and everything bad ever said about them is just fake news because if america was bad in the cold war surely the soviet union had to be good
All throughout my youth, the news was salted with the occasional story about people from the Soviet Union who would defect for one reason or another. Scientists, authors, athletes, performers - a lot of ballet dancers left the USSR. There was a literal Berlin Wall to keep people in Soviet-controlled East Germany from trying to escape to the West. People got shot trying to do just that. You don’t have to go as far back as Stalin to get a sense of Soviet oppression - you can simply look at the number of people who were risking so much just to get out.
If Trump gets four more years he’ll have the chance to appoint 2-4 more justices. That’s thirty more years at least of ultra conservative far right rulings taking away our rights. Look at the damage they’ve done in just the past eight years!
Just as a quick nitpick, Chevron greatly expanded government authority and power. Overturning it isn’t an L.
That’s not the way I interpret Chevron. Now I am not an American, and I have likely a different view on government/agency authority. (I am also very aware how government agencies actually work over here in Europe)
But what I take from this is:
The Chevron ruling gave government agencies the authority to interpret policy in their own field of expertise. And it took that decisions way from judges who generally don’t have that expertise.
ie. The ruling confirmed that a government agency like the EPA probably has more experts working there than a policy maker in Washington would have. The policy would be clean air, and the EPA could define what clean air actually means. As opposed to a judge who would define clean air depending on his/her own interpretation.
I had to google it. But here’s an interesting explanation:
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-happens-if-supreme-court-ends-chevron-deference
A 17th-century oil painting depicting St. Gregory of Nazianzus, by Peter Paul Rubens, is returning to the German castle from which it was taken in 1945.
Credit…Christie’s
Do you know a character that has the same name as you?
Those of you with siblings, have you ever gotten into a physical fight with any of them?
Oh yeah. Absolutely.
No?
I don’t have siblings, but I really want to see the results of this.
while you were exploring each other’s bodies I was exploring this desolate and fucked up space ship
👉👈 what if we… explored each others bodies in this desolate and fucked up space ship?
What if we explored each other’s desolate and fucked up bodies
what if my body was a space. ship
What if my space ship was a body
What if we fucked the spaceship?
(via thirdmagic)