Dogmantra wrote on March 25, 2023 at 5:20 PM

Interesting take! I'm not sure I'd 100% agree that the quoted passage is telling and not showing though. Clearly it is telling us a lot about what the character is thinking, but I think for example it also shows us their emotional state super effectively through the long, scattered, run-on sentences, repetition and so on. You can't just show! You have to tell some things to show others, and there is absolutely a depth to the quoted passage.

Moonside OP wrote on March 25, 2023 at 9:33 PM

My personal experience has been that a lot of what passes for "show, don't tell" ends up making people write more like movies are shot. Film can't show interiority like prose can, but a lot of middling genre and fan fiction has reaction shots written in prose.

Dogmantra wrote on March 25, 2023 at 10:55 PM

Can't disagree with you on that. I imagine something else that contributes is that video is super predominant now yet the most accessible way to create is to write prose - I am imagining there's a lot of backfeeding with people writing as if they were writing a film but as prose.