Show Don't Tell: Not Just for Prose · 8:52pm Apr 16th, 2016
I'm still on writing-hiatus, which will last probably another week. It's the end of the semester so things are busy for me. But I have this thing to bitch about and I'm not waiting any longer.
"Show Don't Tell" isn't just for prose. I realized that after binge-listening to The Shake-Ups in Ponyville. They're a very #HORSEFAMOUS brony band because they're actually a band: they play real instruments, live. Some of their songs are pretty good.
Unfortunately, about half of their songs are unlistenably bad. And it's for a reason that I rarely care that much about: lyrics. The lyrics make many of the songs excruciatingly cringeworthy, and in most cases it's because they're super-duper-telly.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about: a song called "Pony Pets". The song basically names each one of the pets of the Mane 6, their species, and who owns them, and then says "these are the pony pets". What story are you trying to convey? Your audience already knows all this and you aren't telling us anything new or interesting. Why even sing about the pets? What's the point? Did they do something? Does something happen? It sounds like the marketing department for Hasbro hired somepony who doesn't know anything about the show to write some lyrics by stating arbitrary facts they could look up on the wiki.
My point here isn't to dump on The Shake-Ups in Ponyville. They've improved since their first large album of which maybe 2 or 3 tracks out of 15 are listenable. On the Pony Power Pop CD, about half of the songs are good. But lyrics become important when you try to use them to say something, and if what you're trying to say is totally boring or goofy, they'll make the song worse than it would have been as an instrumental. The mere fact that it's ponified doesn't improve it, and I say this even though I listen (for the past few years) almost exclusively to pony music.
Don't tell the audience something they already know. Don't tell us what to think or feel. I think this is as true in poetry and music as it is in prose.
A related epiphany: basic design choices for stories can even be telly. If you lean too hard on a trope or a cliche or an unoriginal character choice, or even if your entire story is about Fluttershy being shy (which already personifies her), you're being telly by proxy. You're using a trope to communicate an idea to the reader, but that idea is already established so it adds nothing to your message unless it serves some essential narrative purpose.
Case in point. I recently criticized somepony for using "Anon" as a protagonist in a story, and the response for why they made this choice was "lots of ponies use 4chan".
This argument is absolutely baffling to me. It implies that "something being well-known means it's a good story element", and I don't think that line of logic is justifiable at any level. If your protagonist has green skin, the fact that you're referencing a bunch of racist homophobic teenagers doesn't make your bizarre, shitty design choice any better. Using "Anon" is just as dumb as if you'd come up with the idea all on your own, except it's worse because it's not even original.
It's hard for me to read fiction, but I especially can't read stories when something pulls me out of the experience. Making your protagonist a green-skinned alien mascot from an image board does just that.
For buck's sake, authors: popular ≠ good. I really don't think shit references make stories as popular as their authors seem to feel. But if that's the case, it's not a defense of your art. It's an indictment on your readers.
No. Your stories are bad and you should feel bad. 
Not all of 4Chan is bad. I mean, you can get banned if you badmouth Mr. Rogers
3874771
My opinion of 4chan isn't the issue I have with "Anon" stories, to be fair.
3874822 True, I mean, really? Anon? Why not use a common name like Jake or Julie
3874846
You don't need a name in a second-person fic. That said, it's not just the name, it's the whole thing: Anon has green skin and a question-mark for a face. Why? Solely because it's an oblique reference to 4chan.
3874861 I have to agree. I mean, there might have been a 4Chan reference with one pony in Trade Ya, but 4Chan....eh
3875811
That may be the intent, but it doesn't work for me. Why not just say "you" and not reveal the character's name or skin color or other attributes?
Absolutely. This is why interesting writing stems from interesting thought, or good thinking.
I disagree, TQ. You're always telling the reader what to think or feel.
3876922
Not telling them what to feel. Tricking them to feel things with words.
3877152
Yes, very true. :) You can see then why I don't like the phrase in its original form? No one flat out tries to directly tell the reader what to feel or think. The issue is readers realize what the author is doing and dislike it for one reason or another. The author isn't being manipulative enough (they aren't evoking well), or they're too obvious or too "telly" or too preachy (i.e. asserting morals the reader doesn't like or want to hear or making the assertions ignorant) or they're trying to evoke worn emotions with old, recycled experiences.
It has nothing to do with the act itself of making the reader feel emotion or consider ideas, which is all the phrase makes it sound like. The way it's interpreted and wielded makes authors think they shouldn't try to purposefully elicit any emotion or thought at all, that their job isn't to define that experience for the reader. Which is hogwash.
So the phrase is stupid and I hate it.
