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Here's some insightful comments to me from an author whose work I praised. Judging from the absolute masterpiece of science fiction he recently finished, followed by a flawless piece of fantasy a few weeks later, I'd say his journey from tell to show has been overwhelmingly successful.
I almost gave up. My early writing was so infected with nonfiction syndrome and I was so lacking in engaging storytelling skills, I seriously considered looking for a ghost writer or a collaborater.
"Well it's taken me more than 20 years of unsuccessfully trying to get published to finally accept that I don't think anybody is going to buy a story by me that has characters explaining things. In the last couple of years I've basically had to start over, re-learning from scratch what to do, studying the stuff that's being written and published today (instead of the classic stuff from 50 years ago) and unlearning a bunch of bad habits I picked up from the golden age authors.
As a result, I feel like my writing is much better now than just a few years ago. It's challenging to get the sophisticated ideas worked elegantly into character action and story development, but I think it produces a story that people are much more likely to want to read. And really, what good are the ideas if they never get communicated because they're in a form that nobody is interested in anymore?"
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These insights from the same author are about the tell syndrome in my environmental story.
"To answer your questions, I wouldn’t go as far as saying that the story comes across as propaganda. But at some point as a reader I realized that the bulk of the plot consists of a slide show about the environmental crisis and I had to ask myself how this story is different from a slide show on the same subject. I mean, if your objective is to communicate the ideas, then in some ways an actual slide show, without the story parts, would actually be more effective. So not propaganda, but it’s clear that the plot and “story” parts are totally in service to the ideas—like the characters and events and scenes are just a vehicle for communicating the ideas, rather than the other way around.
Incidentally I have a similar problem with my own writing. I come up with cool ideas and want to share them in a story, but then I wind up with a story that is thin and characters who don’t have a lot of depth, but who do a lot of explaining. In the early days of SF this kind of stuff was pretty widespread and standard. Asimov basically made his career on it.
But in the current market, characters explaining things seems to be widely considered as “old fashioned” and maybe even as a sign of amateurish writing. Even though a few of the old-timers apparently still get away with it (Like did you see Jim Aikin’s piece in the December Asimov’s? Ugh.) the stuff that is currently getting published from new and beginning writers appears to be about minimal explanation, or exposition through action only, with fast-moving plots driven by strong characters and their decisions."
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