Hi Hamaniacs!
In this installment in my Writing Tips series to help all of us libertarians write better fiction as a way to influence culture, I am putting a twist on the tried and true adage “Show, Don’t Tell”. While generally good advice, like all things in life, hard and fast rules are meant to be broken from time to time. This is a hard one to figure out at first, but once you get it, you’ll never write the same way again and your prose will really start to take off. The book that really did it for me is “Understanding Show, Don’t Tell: (And Really Getting It)” by Janice Hardy. If you don’t have it, stop reading this and buy it now! So I like to modify the rule to be: Show, Rarely Tell
Explaining is also a form of telling and should be avoided. But sometimes, you will want to tell and explain in your writing for the sake of pacing and not boring your reader with every single detail. Speaking of boring, Hardy’s book will also help you with the passive voice. In general, passive is boring. Active voice engages the reader. While there are other ways to construct the passive voice, 95% of them use the “to be” verb. Hunt down the “to be” verbs and murder them! Usually, just changing the main verb to the simple past tense or switching the object and subject does the trick. However, there are times you have to use the passive and that is mainly when describing setting. But when it comes to characters taking action, DON’T BE PASSIVE.
In liberty,
Tyrone the Porcupine Hobo