very true, thank you for your quick reply

There has to be a balance of showing and telling. If we “showed” everything our book would be 10,000 pages long. Some things need to be told. Others? If we show, we leave the reader a place to infuse their imagination and fill in the blanks. We can harness subtext.

Whatever. I prefer not to be fed baby food. I like using my brain. And maybe I want to think. Maybe I want to explore the depths and instead of being TOLD someone is a jerk, I want to dig deeper and think that, “the desk may be understood as an altar dedicated to emotional healing, which is the esoteric property of mahogany. And a pagan priest is not automatically a jerk.” Maybe that puts my university educated brain to work.

Write what you want. There is an audience for everything. Aquila non capit muscas.

I’m between two stools on this one, although I confess I lean more towards story telling, but then thats what us writers are called aren’t we, i.e storytellers? Shoud we now be called storyshowers, and should children now ask their parents to show them, rather than tell them, a bedtime story?

A very good post though, and one which I will return to as I carry on writing, so please excuse me playing the devils advocate on this topic, it’s just that I can see both points of view

I am curious. You claim you want to write for intellectuals and yet they aren’t smart enough to figure something out on their own? You feel the need to tell them, “John was a jerk” instead of, “John sat behind an oversized and overpriced mahogany desk he’d had deliberately raised two inches above the ground. Anyone in the opposite chairs couldn’t help but be forced to look up on him, as if he were some pagan god dangling their fates in his hand.” Seems to me. “telling” is rather pedantic. I don’t need baby food. I don’t need an author holding my brain because I might be too “dumb” to get it. I like innuendo and the challenge of filling in subtext (which is the point of “show don’t tell”). Sometimes what is unsaid is more profound than what is.

But that’s just me.

Well, that is your choice. Then commercial fiction is not your audience. Plain and simple.

I hate reading mimetic stories, and so I only write diegetic stories–plain and simple! No one will ever be able to change my taste.