Review: Tell, Don’t show - the Nuttall approach to stories.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2014
He presents interesting ideas, but primarily as lectures to the reader instead of stories.He tells the reader what is happening, instead of showing them the tale.An article in Wikipedia provides a good example of the difference:Ernest Hemingway was a notable proponent of the show, don't tell style. His famed Iceberg Theory, also known as the "theory of omission", originates from his bullfighting treatise, Death in the Afternoon:If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.Creative literature (as opposed to technical writing or objective journalism) in general hinges on the artful use of a wide range of devices (such as inference, metaphor, understatement, the unreliable narrator, and ambiguity) that reward the careful reader's appreciation of subtext and extrapolation of what the author chooses to leave unsaid, untold, and/or unshown.The "dignity" Hemingway speaks of proposes a form of respect for the reader, who should be trusted to develop a feeling for the meaning behind the action without having the point painfully laid out for him.Source: [...]