On Writing and Giving Advice Thereof · 3:46am Jun 13th, 2017
So, the following blog post is, at least partially based on the writings of others. Primarily, I recommend you peruse SoloBrony’s (unfortunately incomplete) writing on art under ADPA. I must also acknowledge that GhostofHeraclitus wrote a blogpost that has a similar theme in addressing the same problem. I recommend that, after you read this, you follow up on those sources, to get a fuller idea of the material I’m working from, and similar attempts to tackle the issue at hand.
This post has been sitting unpublished for a long time now, but given con season and a whole mess of panels and discussion is underway once again, and it just does no use to anyone sitting in my Gdocs, I decided to publish it despite my trepidation in opening my big fat lip.
Thank you.
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I have never liked reading other people’s attempt to give advice of writing. As a rule the advice given has always been… less than useful. It’s often vague, abstract, and worse, repetitive. It’s also very often wrong.
There is a habit of writing gurus to boil their beliefs about writing into absolutist rules, and to also call on old bromides of writing. I’m sure you all have heard them at some point. “All stories need conflict” “All stories have three acts” “Show, don’t tell.” Thus I am constantly reminded of 3rd Grade English.
Then of course comes the following part where, especially with more author or genre specific rules, you hit the issue of having read and loved a story that openly defies their dictums, and I have found an unfortunate trend that if you confront these gurus with this issue they will usually defend their formulations in a couple predictable ways. One is to create No True Scotsmen, eliminating stories as somehow valid counter-examples based on ad-hoc categorization usually stemming from the author’s personal tastes and hangups. The other is to state that a true master of writing can break all the rules he wants.
This leads us to an ontological paradox: If rules define what you should and should not do if you want to produce good written art, and if the true hallmark of a master is that he can violate the rules of writing, if great writing is defined by how it doesn’t follow the rules, how can they be rules of writing at all?
It’s a frustrating idiom for me.
As of late though, I think I can finally formalize the issue at hand. This is in thanks to a large part to SoloBrony’s own efforts in this field, and is based mostly off of his work. In his ADPA work he puts forth the thesis that art is a form of communication. It’s purpose is to convey something from the artist to the audience. Drawing from this is an implication: if art has a purpose, than it can be designed to work better towards that end, which means it falls under the first rule of designing anything: Form Follows Function.
In short, there are no rules, only results.
What does this mean, exactly, for writing? When you write fiction, you want your audience to experience something; an emotion, a theme, a thesis, an idea. This is a pretty natural observation; after all, we constantly discuss what various works of art are “about.” Stories can convey things as abstract and simple as “Rainbow Dash is kind of cute when she’s nervous and in self-denial” to things as a complicated and specific as the psychology of fascism. Since these works are trying to convey different things they, very naturally, use different techniques in writing them. Different tricks used in writing: repetition, irony, exposition, different perspectives, style. All of these and many, many, many others can be used to guide the reader’s focus to get them to think about situations the way you want them to, so they carry away the experience you want them to have. This is what I mean when I say there are no rules, only results. What matters is what your art is about, and how your techniques and elements help the reader come to that end.
There’s actually a great example of this at play in My Little Pony. Consider the start of the episode of Canterlot Wedding. We meet Shining and Cadance in short order, and have Twilight exposit to other characters her relationship, but she actually does so in radically different ways. With Shining, she sings a song, but with Cadance, she simply speaks over a flashback. That contrast is interesting when you think about it. We have two similar situations, two arguably similar narrative needs in the same work of art, by the same team, yet they chose two divergent techniques. The answer though is simple; they wanted the audience to feel different about Cadance than they would Shining Armor, so they introduced the characters in different ways.
Music engages with the audience emotionally more easily than simple performance. In contrast, simple spoken exposition is famous for being alienating to the audience. Show, don’t tell, right? The fact is though, the staff wanted the audience to be more emotionally connected to Shining’s relationship with Twilight than Cadance’s so that they would empathize with Twilight’s protectiveness of Shining and her hostility to Cadance. They wanted Cadance to feel a bit like an outsider so it would be easier to follow along with Twilight seeing her and treating her as one. That said, they also went to the trouble of expositing how nice Cadance was so the revelation that an impostor had moved in wouldn’t come out of left field, and also so we could more readily connect with the real Cadance. All in all, it’s a clever little trick that serves the story in a lot of subtle ways, and we can see how in this case the way the story is told (it’s form) serves to convey the story the creators wanted to tell (it’s function). We also, conveniently, have an example of a story directly violating Show, Don’t Tell to it’s own advantage.
There are no rules, only results.
So, what does this mean for giving writing advice?
You need to always consider what the author wants, and therefore, how best to achieve it. Helping people is often about them, not you, and giving advice on art is no exception. That doesn’t mean your perspective is useless, mind you, especially if you’re trying to explain why a particular thing did or didn’t work for you. Introspect and consider at what points the story really engaged you, or disengaged you. Consider when, and why you got detached, or annoyed, or excited, or disappointed. Understanding how a work’s techniques affected you is a good first step for discussing them directly, and this helps with giving broader advice down the road.
Which brings us back to our original issue with people giving broad, overreaching lectures on writing filled with rules. If you’re going to give broad advice, do so with the context outlined in mind. There are not rules that breaking or following makes your story bad or good. There are techniques that have certain effects on people, and contexts or goals that those effects would benefit or hinder. To that end, the panel on dialogue Applejinx hosted at Bronycon this year was fantastic. They were always careful to explain what a given trick or style would do to an audience and were always ready to admit that there was always That One Story that used even generally counter-productive techniques to some advantage. If you can find a recording of it, it’s a good example of how to give an audience more broad, fuller advice on how to write a story.
There is also another reason why I feel this paradigm is important for people to embrace besides just making for more informative blogging and panels. The fact is, when we set up arbitrary rules for what makes art good and what makes it bad we close ourselves off to new experiences a priori.
Let us assume for the sake of discussion that Tolkien is a good writer. That what he wrote and how he wrote it were good, and if we emulate his success and avoid the things he avoided we too shall make good literature. That we can flood the world with good stories if we simply follow along with his example.
The problem with that scenario is simply that the world is bigger than Tolkien. Consider some of my own fiction. Making An Old Lady Cry is, at the time of publication, the 434th story on the site by ranking. It is, according to Fimfic’s admittedly arcane metrics, in the top .4% of stories in terms of rating. People, apparently, think it’s a good fic. Yet, if we were to only do as Tolkien did, that story would not exist. Tolkien did not write stories in first person past perfect. He did not write, punchy sarcastic stories. He did not write short stories just to develop a certain character. Furthermore, if you tried to write Old Lady as Tolkien would have, it probably wouldn’t be as good. The humor, the pacing, the wit, all of that serve to draw the reader into the perspective (or are supposed to - 6 people have publicly disagreed at the time of writing) of the narrator, and thus make us empathize with him and how he sees Celestia. If you were to take all that away, the story would at the very least be much longer, and probably far less fun without much in the way of approachability gained in the exchange.
I have seen, time and again, people get shown cute, funny, smart, thoughtful, or beautiful stories and react with anger, dismissiveness, or condescension because it violates some “rule” that the critic has chosen to cleave to. We create these rules because they are useful in our experiences. Showing rather than telling forces the audience to engage more directly with your story, and conflict is a very basic way to bring out otherwise hidden or undiscussed issues and perspectives. The thing is, if we forget that these rules are only useful insofar as the things they promote are useful to promote and the things they avoid useful to avoid, we harden our hearts against art that thrives because it breaks the rules. We cut ourselves off from pushing our own boundaries and from appreciating the work of others, and thus we cut ourselves from two prime ways in which we grow.
That, in my opinion, is tragic.
There are no rules, only results. When we speak of how to better construct a written work of art we must consider what the author wants to say and thus, by implication, how they will say it. We must engage art and criticize it on it’s own terms, and teach others to do the same of their own art as well as they art they in turn would criticize. This is how we will improve not just our stories, but, honestly, ourselves.
Thus there are no limits, only places we choose to be.
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Thank you all for reading. I hope it helps. If you liked it, if you can, please spread it along since I'd like to start a discussion about this here if I can. If you didn't - comment, and maybe I can make it clearer, or, at the very least, everyone will know I am a big fat doodoo-head who can't blog for shit. Either is useful.
Nyronus~
I really, really liked this, Ny.
A+ advice.
People get fixated on finding what "the" way to tell a good story is, and don't realize that there's no one size fits all solution.
I think they do that in part because it would be so much easier if there were! Just find the one way to write a good story, and you're set! Learn all the rules, use all the rules, get instant success! Wouldn't that be nice.
Alas, it is not so easy as that.
Well reasoned. I can tell you have been thinking this over for sime time, and i thank you for sharing.
I know we talked about this last night, but it's still a good-re-read.
This is some good stuff, yeah.
Insightful. If they didn't do this on purpose, they should have.
You'd think this wouldn't be controversial, wouldn't you? At least not for writing. Writing is putting words on paper, words whose purpose is to communicate meaning. That's all they do. Yet we live in a time when professors at Yale, Harvard, and the École Normale Supérieure deny (in words) that words do, or even can, communicate meaning, and so we have creative writing professors across America insisting, vehemently, that stories should not communicate--that communicating something is a sign of a naive story.
The irony of rules is that if you go to a scriptwriting program, you'll get a set of rules which produces standard Hollywood movies:
- Have a sympathetic, likeable main character who has a character flaw, an external problem, and a goal.
- Near the ending, the main character must make some attempt to solve his external problem which requires partly overcoming his character flaw.
- Resolve the external problem in a dramatic climax.
- Have a happy ending.
If you go to a creative writing MFA program, you'll get a set of rules which basically just says "Don't do anything a Hollywood movie would do". e.g.:
- Have an ambiguous main character of no definite character who thinks she has a problem but doesn't know what it is or what she wants.
- The main character must never solve the problem, to show that problems in the real world are unsolvable so long as we are alienated by capitalism.
- Avoid any dramatic action.
- Have a tragic, ironic, or intellectual and abstract ending. Better yet, have no ending at all; just trail off with the implication that life is messy and inconclusive.
The rules are mere opposites of each other. It's like how the Republicans and Democrats never agree on anything: if one side likes something, the other must hate it just to distance themselves from there enemies. This is because each set of rules corresponds to an ideology, not just about stories, but about life.
Ironically I logged in intending to write a blog on why I think Ursula LeGuin's essay, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", on the essence of fantasy, is so dumb. She says it's all about writing style and the style in which the characters speak, and not at all about content. So her "rules" are to use a certain elevated and distancing style, and to write dialogue in a way she can't explain but only give examples of, which she says will make your story a fantasy. She shows extracts from famous fantasy stories, and whenever an extract communicates something important in making the story a fantasy, she ignores it or attributes the successful communication to the style and not to what was said. This is (part of) why her Earthsea Trilogy is also dumb.
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I really, really, really, hope that's why the show writers made those choices. If not, they were some incredibly lucky ducks.
This makes me glad I took creative writing at a community college. We learned about word choice, impact, and proper, helpful criticism, not whatever nonsense those guys were spouting. I mean both trite Hollywood and whatever pseudo-intellectual nonsense writers are "supposed" to write are bad. IF done wrong. As Nyronus said, in the end, it's all about results. If it didn't work, then find a different way. If it did work, congrats. Besides basic grammar, style is really a personal choice as are the contents of the story. I find that stories that are written to sound intelligent usually aren't and grim, post-apocalyptic stories do get tiresome after a while...
It would also explain how, I, who had read almost the entire school library at that point, had absolutely no interest in continuing the series. Maybe because I could never really remember what the first book was about. Which is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a book, especially one that's supposed to be an epic fantasy.
I agree with what you're saying, but here's the thing: This point of view puts more pressure on a writer to both understand what they're trying to do and to understand techniques to use to do it. Which is, well, how it works! But there's a reason that's often presented as kind of "Writing 201: Breaking the Rules:" I think beginning authors often don't know what they're hoping to achieve, don't know a lot of techniques to achieve it, and on the regular occasions when they're successful anyway, they don't know how to do it again.
In my mind, a writer (or a critic!) doesn't need to learn rules, they need to collect rules, and the reasoning behind them. Even the contradictory ones. Not because they have to use them, but because it helps us shape how we think about our stories and see what it's possible to achieve, what we want to achieve, what worked and didn't work, and why. Rules give us context to start from (a map, as Ghost put it in the blogpost you referred to.) Sure it's the results that matter, but a writer has to start writing (and sometimes write for a very long time) before they get to see the results. Rules are the series of paths we share to start from, in hopes it helps us get to the result we wanted 10,000 or 100,000 words from now.
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It's kind of interesting since Earthsea is a product of the 60s/early 70s, long before the 'Pop culture fare vs Literary Circlejerk' thing was in full full swing (Though you could argue the latter has existed since almost forever probably plausibly).
Of course, arguably they're both wrong. Like:
Wonder Woman has a sympathetic, likeable main character - except all she really has in-story is a Goal. She has a series of obstacles in pursuit of that goal, but I wouldn't really say she has a 'Flaw' she has to overcome, nor an external problem that's stopping that goal from being attained.
Dramatic climax? Sure. Happy ending? ...Mostly? But it definitely dodges that paradigm and is all the much stronger for it because it shows you can break all those rules and make a good movie.
Similarly, Logan just did the same thing, breaking a bunch of the Superhero rules and doing a genre blend that produces a much stronger work.
And, well ,I have no problem saying the Literati side is wrong, since 'Complex, nuanced, no good can come of it' work can have a purpose in limited amounts (Stimulating interesting philosophical discussion) but it shouldn't be a goal in and of itself.
People like rules because they simplify complex issues and situations. If you make yourself a rule that "X" is always bad, you don't have to put any more thought into something than what it takes to find that it contains "X" and is therefore bad. This applies to art, philosophy, religion, politics, science- everything really. Therefore, I posit that any individual who is unwilling to at least consider the possibility that there could be an exception to their rules is an ignorant pig whom I need not put any more thought into either, unless I'm feeling especially generous that day.
This only works if you know on what terms said art was constructed, and the creator and consumer have perceptions that are not at too great a variance. If the creator is unable or unwilling to adequately explain their creation, then they must accept unfair or "off the mark" criticism as only natural, and there will always be people who perceive differently and will not see a creation as the creator does no matter what.
I was going to speak up, and note that this is the reason I think it's more useful to talk not of writing "rules" but of "signposts in a wilderness" … but that's exactly what GoH's post was about, so I guess I ought to just point at that instead.
The other thing is, those warning signs serve many different purposes as you grow as a writer. Kind of like ski slopes with a bunch of black diamonds. When you're just starting out, if you ignore the signs you're gonna faceplant and slide down half a mountain. If you've built up some expertise, you can throw yourself past them and have a good chance of making it to the bottom cleanly regardless. If you're at the top of your game, the signs aren't warnings but invitations.
Hell YEAH!
Hmm. I have rules I follow in identifying stories I will hate. Its not absolute, and i have rejected awesome stories I come back to later. Thing is, there are way too many stories to not create rules.
On the other hand I don't really complain about these issues unless they happen partway through and ruin what had been a great story.
I find it's probably a bad idea to open a blog post about writing advice by ranting against people who give writing advice. If I believe your blog, I shouldn't listen to it then, right?
And you're boiling a lot of things down very simplistically. It's not about following the rules. It's about knowing why they're rules so you can understand what happens when you don't follow them. That way you're making a conscious choice that you're fully cognizant of instead of taking on baggage you didn't even know was there. The point is to succeed because you broke the rule, not despite it. Yet another rule: know the rules before you break them. It's a good one that extends far beyond writing. In fact, the first time I had someone say it to me was for music. It's incredibly rare that you apply a rule like "show, don't tell" to someone and they respond with a reasoned argument about why they think what they did works better for the situation. Most often, they don't understand why that's standard advice, so they're ill equipped to flout it. These are probably not the people who need to be told to disregard writing advice. Point taken that a good reviewer will work with the author to make it succeed how he wants it to, more or less, but that really got buried.
It's also dangerous to start equating famous authors with what goes on in this fandom. It can be illustrative by example at times, but a lot of people use that as an excuse instead. They say that because Hemingway did something, everyone can, but skip the step where they're nowhere near Hemingway's level. You learn what works and when and why, and you build that up gradually, not decide nobody has anything to teach you, so you go out and pen your magnum opus on the first try.
It might be more accurate to say "There are no rules, only techniques." That is to say, there are established methods of achieving certain results, but you're not forced to use them all.
But yes, I wholeheartedly agree with the notion of focusing on the result of clearly communicating a good story.
I agree with 4570754, actually.
Mind you, the blog makes fine points -- but it's for somewhat advanced, or experienced authors. I'm all for breaking the rules; not just literary, but grammatical, too. Stories IMO are about sending a message or evoking a particular picture or event, and the story should always make sure to be written in a way that maximizes said message, picture, or event. If you gotta break a rule to make it work, them do that.
But here's the thing: you gotta learn the rules first.
I think literary advice tends to be directed towards somewhat novice-ish authors, who simply don't even know what "Show, Don't Tell" means. To break one of those rules properly you need to understand it first -- this means that they aren't rules per se as much as they are literary techniques or "ways to write X", but it's true that if done well, they do what they're supposed to do.
To me writing -- and art in general -- is about learning the rules, and then learning how and when to break them. 'Cause if you do that, you understand the effect of each rule, and what will happen if you don't follow it.
So those things are important. They're a first step that I find to be almost essential when it comes to sharpening your writing skills. They're just not supposed to set in stone, and eventually you need to outgrow them. Apply them when you need to or when they help the story, do something else when they don't. But yeah, there's no real dichotomy IMO. This:
This ain't a paradox, as long as you realize that here "rule" doesn't mean "thing you MUST do". It means "proven method to achieve a particular result (that you probably want)". Once you've mastered the rules to the point where you actually, truly get what they do to your story (and what they don't do) you can start ignoring some, or outright breaking them in the most egregious way possible, because then you're doing it with a purpose.
So yeah, great writing can be defined in how it doesn't follow the rules. It's mostly about how, and why, it breaks the rules.
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To everyone who liked what I had to say: thank you! I am glad what I had here was useful or insightful, or at least rang true to many of you. I do recommend everyone read Solo's ADPA though for a more detailed look at where I'm coming from, and to spread these ideas if you can.
Seriously though, thanks for reading!
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It is true that I am asking for honest effort from both the artist and the critic - but if you don't want to put effort into your art, either creative or critical, you can't be surprised when it stagnates or is just bad. No one can make people improve, these ideas are here for people who want to improve.
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That is a natural reflex. Humans are empirical learners. I don't read crossover gore/clop fests with only 7 upvotes and 8 downvotes even though, in theory, it could secretly be amazing and happenstance could have colluded to ruin it's reception because... that is almost always not the case. That said, I try to keep an open mind in general and approach stories my friends recommend regardless of genre or preconceptions. It's also good you keep an open mind as well. In the case of my essay though I am talking very specifically about actively giving and receiving criticism, which is a much more active field than selecting leisure reading and has different needs to be met.
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Unfortunately there are a lot of problems with this kind of multi-stage teaching methodology. If what's important is teaching a writer to understand what they want, and the variety of ways they could get it, then we should teach that first, not last. This kind of teaching style, where a student is taught a simplified, reified version of the subject, and reeducated later, is something I think does tangible harm. For one, having to relearn a subject when an older way of knowing it has become ingrained is just more difficult than doing it fresh. For another, until they get their "real" education, the education they get is of only limited use, and the perceived shallowness of it can drive people away. When I took college math I was ordered to memorize a formula and perform it on command or else I would be failed on the next test. When I asked why the formula worked, because I always found it easier to do math if I understood the internal logic of it, the professor blew me off and gave me what I later learned as a factually incorrect excuse/explanation of why they couldn't be bothered to explain what it really meant - and that's not an isolated incident. Most math taught to me my whole life in that fashion. Memorize the trick, perform it for the grade, then, if you're most people, forget it. I bet a lot of people in your life consider it an easy punchline that most higher math is a pointless exercise, and unsurprisingly, math is another field America is falling behind in compared to the rest of the developed world.
As for collecting as opposed to following rules: you are, essentially agreeing with my thesis here, that the cause and effect of these techniques supersedes dictum. I just have a problem with calling them rules in that case, because that’s not what the word means and the awkward attempts to make them fit that word causes some of the problems I have talked about. People do shoot down stories for breaking the “rules” precisely because they feel these are rules that are sacrosanct. If that language construct is both inaccurate and causing problems because those inaccuracies mislead, then it should be done away with.
And while it is true that writers can take a long time to get feedback, that doesn’t mean they should be given a poor foundation to start. If anything, the opposite is true. They should be given the best education they can from the word go. Granted, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of us, the enthusiast blogger and amature writer randos on the internet, to teach adults how to compose fiction. This is a problem that starts in school, and it needs to be corrected there as well. Thing is, if the opportunity, need, and inclination arises, we shouldn’t do a disservice to people who come to us for help and look up to us as writers of quality by feeding them a cardboard version of what is even then only half the story.
Teach them first and teach them right. That’s how it should be done.
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So, to preface my reply, I admit to finding the ending paragraph on Hemmingway baffling. At no point did I suggest such a thing. In fact, I suggested the inverse - that citing the old masters as the only way to write simply because the old masters had done so was poisonous to writing better stories. If you felt I was unclear in making that argument, I would like to know why so I can revise my phrasing in the future.
Now, as for the meat of your grievance, I admit to also having some confusion because you agree with me the cause and effect of the technique is more important than it being a rule, and then insist on framing it as a rule despite the fact that by definition a rule that can and, even in some cases, should, be broken is not in fact a rule at all. I reject the idea of a rule that you can break the rules because that just doesn’t make sense ontologically, as I hope I clearly outlined. Once you strip away the baggage of whether or not we should frame these issues as rules, what you are saying is that there are trends and reactions to given writing techniques and people need to learn them to apply them wisely, which means we are in agreement as this was more or less my entire thesis.
Now, you are right that many people lack the kind of theoretical background in human psychology and art theory to go screwing around with something as fundamental and powerful as show, don’t tell - which is why I suggest we work on educating them as to that background rather than telling them it’s just wrong to do that. When you tell someone their work is bad because it broke a rule, you aren’t really helping them master the art of writing, you’re just telling them to not to try writing that way in the future. Even if their work is bad, and even if it’s bad because it used that technique inappropriately, they don’t know why it was inappropriate here, or when it might be otherwise. Worse, if their work is bad for reasons other than that cited “rule” and all they get is feedback on what rules they break? They can’t even begin to fix the real problem.
Miseducating people causes actual harm. It is true that what I am suggesting is more difficult than simple citation, but what I am suggesting is also just simply being an actual critic. To be someone who engages with literature in a critical fashion, who can analyse and describe the working of it on an intricate and deep level. I simply suggesting we do it more honestly, more accurately, and do it more thoroughly than has become generally acceptable in our society. I suggest this because I care. Because this community does great things and I don’t want it held back from doing more by anything as silly as a turn of phrase assigning authority when there should be theory. Because even though to you this may seem like a stupid semantic argument I am making, I have seen it waste people’s time and cause frustration and stagnation time and time again. I want there to be better writers, and I want there to be better critics so those writers can becomes even better.
I want to help, and I think this will help, so I have made an effort for it to exist.
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As I discuss with Bookplayer’s response, I heartily disagree with the idea of teaching someone half the story and then trying to correct it later. I also disagree that my analysis of the ontological paradox is incorrect. For one, Dr. Google cites a rule as being “one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere,” meaning the real definition is essentially “things that you must do.” For another, even if we agree this is what this word should mean now, we also have a problem that people do take it to mean “things you must do” and will waste people’s time behaving accordingly, as I discussed in my reply to Pascoite.
I don’t think any that matters though, because your attempt to redefine what a rule means in this context doesn’t actually contradict what I ultimately want anyway - it’s just not English as I’ve commonly experienced or seen defined. If that is what you feel these rules really are, then all I am proposing is merely that we be honest and accurate and dispense with the idea of calling them rules to instead calling them what they are: techniques. Educate people on what those techniques are, how they work, and don’t hold them as some kind of sacred privilege that only proven masters can interfere with.
Since Show Don’t Tell is a popular one, consider this: authors Tell all the time and get away with it. There is often emotionally meaningless but significant throwaway info that the reader needs to know. So we’re informed and they can move on. Since I also already dragged Tolkien into the mess; consider Sauron. We are told Sauron is bad and we never see him on screen after that point. We see his minions being evil later, but even that is often breezed over and doesn’t tell us much about Sauron as a character. Is he Pure Evil? Is he a well intentioned extremist? Is he actually somewhat noble but feels helpless to change the centuries of violence in orc culture, and so he’s stuck pandering to their bloodlust while trying to mitigate its negative effects and channel it for useful ends? We don’t know. The extent to which Sauron is a poorly developed character is so great his name is now a shorthand for the trope of a boring doomsday villain who menaces a setting for no or little reason. Yet none of that matters, because the story isn’t about Sauron, it’s about Frodo, and thus Sauron is only relevant in how his distant existence informs Frodo’s behavior. He is a MacGuffin, basically, much like his ring. An item to inform the plot and move it forward. He gives Frodo’s quest context, and gives him motivation to keep struggling even when it seems pointless and miserable. Even showing his minions being evil only reminds us of the consequences of failure, and thus press Frodo and the reader onward. So, since we don’t need to puzzle over or empathize with or even really care about Sauron as anything other than something Frodo is scared of happening to the people around him, Tolkien does not bother to expand on the topic, calls him a bastard, and gets on his merry way with the story, albeit at his own… idiosyncratic pace.
That breakdown is much more useful, I feel, to helping an author understand why one wants to show vs. tell. By telling someone where and why it is appropriate as well where and why it isn’t you open them up right away to applying it reasonably because it’s a tool they need to reasonably be able to apply because it comes up. Just telling them to not do the thing and then turning around and telling them what I just laid out anyway just doesn’t make any sense. It is misleading and it wastes people’s time.
Focus on what works and what doesn’t work in the immediate context, guided by the desires and intent of the author, because that’s how this all really works. Dispense with babying people and trying to take shortcuts. Be straightforward, be critical, and be complete.
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You're getting really hung up on the semantics of whether to call anything a rule or not, and that's entirely immaterial. The point is that "show, don't tell" is an accepted guideline because it generally works, but part of it is that you don't have to show all the time. It's also not accurate to say learning it means having to relearn the exception later. Learning that it's okay to tell builds on showing; it doesn't contradict it. You learn to add. Later, you learn that multiplication is a shortcut to doing lots of addition. That doesn't mean it was wrong to learn addition in the first place. It just means you learn something more. Since showing more often fundamentally works than telling, it's the more important thing to learn how to do well. Once you've mastered that, you learn when it's okay not to show. The fact that telling works at times doesn't invalidate that mastery of showing. It just means you're more judicious in applying it.
Take your own example of math. You admit that you'd have been better equipped if you learned why the formula worked instead of just memorizing it. I don't see how "show, don't tell" is any different. If I'm reviewing a story that has lots of problems with telling at the wrong times, and I suspect the author doesn't have a good grounding in what that means, I'll explain it to him, at the risk of wasting my bandwidth for someone who already knows. Isn't that the exact scenario you're describing? If I tell someone how and why showing works, he's better equipped to use it well. Yet it seems like you're arguing against even mentioning it to him in the first place, because IT'S A RULE and RULES ARE BAD.
Now if what you're really getting at is that "show, don't tell" is fine as long as that explanation comes along with it, then what you're really complaining about is the difference between a bad reviewer, who will throw "show, don't tell" at you like it's a self-explanatory brick with no exceptions and expect you to pick it up on your own, and a good reviewer, who will make sure you're expanding your toolbox. If so... well, that just seems like common sense. Find yourself a good reviewer instead of a bad one.
It's fine to learn that "show, don't tell" isn't an absolute, but since 1) showing is harder to learn and understand then telling and 2) a story that shows too much is, on the whole, likely a more engaging one than a story that tells too much, it's the more important side of the skill to work on, and then you can dial it back once you get the hang of it.
The bit about Hemingway was to stress that it's not okay to skip learning rules just because you can find examples of people who didn't follow them. It's interesting you refer to him as "old guard," since he does a number of things that are generally considered things to avoid, but he can get away with them or even make them pluses because he has the skill. But it doesn't matter who I'm talking about. It can be some new up-and-comer writing in a very contemporary and groundbreaking style. Just because they can do something doesn't automatically mean everyone can.
In a very simple example, take this rule: spell correctly. Yet there can absolutely be valid reasons to spell words wrong. That doesn't mean that if I point out a typo, the author can just say he's seen typos in published fiction before, so he obviously doesn't have to worry about it. Now it's an excuse, not a selling point.
Maybe I'm just reading all this wrong, but it sure sounds like you're saying that what's the point in learning rules when you're going to be told to break them later on. That's the way most other people seem to be taking it too, like bookplayer and Aragon. And that I don't agree with. Rules (and arguing about whether to call them that adds nothing) are there because they work the majority of the time, so it's a good idea to achieve a high comfort level with one before you go poking at its exceptions. Being aware that exceptions exist up front is fine, but get the stuff under your belt that's going to work most often. Same thing with "collecting" rules instead of learning them. Semantics. It's just another way of saying that it's important to have an understanding of those traditional guidelines so you're making informed decisions. And being informed requires information, like what the rules are.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
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TL;DR
This... is quite a useful way of looking at things.
Thanks for the lesson, I'm taking it to heart to improve my own original work. :)
Thanks again!