love to enjoy talking about how show don't tell is a CIA-funded writing workshop technique :-)

yep, this gets discussed in “cultural cold war” literature like Empires of Workshop
interestingly enough, the CIA has also propagated books like orwell and koestler (leftists alienated by the ussr) and also bizarrely enough funded abstract art https://twitter.com/otterseaborne/status/1349646114408914944

indeed, the cia was so pervasive in literature you could stake out a group of writers who have unwittingly gotten ties to them
james baldwin, richard wright, gabriel garcia marquez, and ernest hemingway were p famous
there’s a ton of really good writers who were exploited by them

but going back to show, don’t tell specifically — this banal advice which has ruined every writer’s sense of pacing since it was introduced came about in order to eradicate a mode of historical storytelling in narrative
this is extremely important as it devalues leftist writings

leftist writings generally are about exploitation and the only way to really talk about exploitation is to talk about the history
you can’t get a sense of the scale and structure of oppression without storytelling techniques that compress long spans of time into a manageable rate

take novels like A Grain of Wheat which beautifully writes about nigerian history and how it compresses time
if it takes it to show and linger, these episodes will be detached from the history of oppression
so yes, show don’t tell is a bizarre anticommunist writing technique

even discounting the cold war overtones, we can also notice non-white writers especially getting marginalized from this writing advice because it is so unnatural and stiff to their storytelling traditions
they get criticized for not following “proper” writing procedures

so if you’ve always thought show don’t tell is bullshit but can’t seem to figure out why, now you know
it’s literally anti-leftist shit propagated by the cia
enjoy getting woke on random writing forums

p.s. woops, i got the book title wrong
it’s Workshops of Empire which deals with the iowa workshop https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609383718/workshops-of-empire
the literature review in the beginning is also a good resource for people interested in the cultural cold war the cia participated in

p.p.s. and in case anyone thinks i wrote it to disparage “showing”, i am talking about the last two words “don’t tell”
those words are the CIA-funded invention because it devalues writing methods that play with time and history
no one is criticizing “showing” as a technique https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1349760246068117504

it should go without saying both “showing” and “telling” are legitimate strategies but the writing workshop advice of “show, don’t tell” is not only CIA-laced but also a ridiculous misunderstanding on pacing and atmosphere
let’s write up a short story example to see why

let’s say you are writing a story where john is going to orlando
john takes the bus
would you 1) “show” the entire bus trip, 2) “tell” the trip 3) go straight to orlando
if your answer is 1) but can’t find a good reason to really discuss why the bus trip is interesting, lmao.

this isn’t some example i conjured up out of thin air
i used to be an editor for an AWARD-WINNING student writing magazine and was a tutor for fiction writing too
a lot of beginning students took show don’t tell to heart and just elaborated on everything they see

i have read tons of beginning writers completely wasting readers’ time by describing the luscious bushes while on bus trips and thought with every other student editor there,
“Why in the world is this shit not cut lol.”
and unfortunately we all know it’s show don’t tell’s fault

if you don’t care about the hilariously insidious cia connection to show, don’t tell, the bigger issue with this advice is that writers don’t understand pacing anymore
they need to make every scene immersive and involving, thus even a random bus trip gets a few paragraphs

this takes away from buildup and catharsis in just ... using both showing and telling
a classic american/hollywood narrative would tell for buildup and show for the climax
of course, the reality is every story uses both but the point is you need a purpose to linger on something

if you show/linger on something, the reader thinks your bus trip is important as hell
but if nothing happens on this bus trip, then why even write it? why stop the plot’s momentum?
why don’t you go to the good stuff which is getting to disneyworld and seeing mickey mouse kill?

you could as easily write the bus trip through telling (I rode the bus and went straight into the commercial heart of Orlando, Disneyworld) or just cut it entirely and show mickey mouse murder on-scene
but show don’t tell has completely distorted the narrative beats

show don’t tell has murdered the pacing sense beginning writers have because they are just randomly restricted from one important mode of storytelling
so they elaborate and expound on everything without purpose
so yes, the cia made so many people bad writers to stop communism

there’s a ton of writing advice which is both terrible and useful in equal proportions (never write in passive voice or just anything in Elements of Style) but i can’t see anything but Harmful Shit in show don’t tell
learning it was cia-funded made this advice a joke lmao

it took a lot of reading outside american fiction — for example, japanese fiction prefers telling over showing and the novel 火花 has only two and a half scenes it’s ever fully depicted — to finally convince me that show don’t tell is a genuinely alien concept to storytelling

read fiction that isn’t in the united states — hell, your uk neighbors mostly ignore that advice — and you’ll see people both tell and show
but since the advice “show and tell” isn’t catchy as there is no “don’t” attached to it, that crappy advice will never go away

so for now, sit back, relax, and tweet about how the cia funded the iowa workshop which created show don’t tell and cause people to rethink about their writing habits or tweet at you about not getting the point of how harmful this advice is :-)

just one final note: i have not in any way suggested marquez, hemingway, or abstract art should be canceled or are cia stooges, just that they are unwittingly manipulated by the cia and capitalism
if leftists aren’t reflective of how they’re not immune to capitalism, lmao.

oh yeah, i haven’t fact-checked this since i don’t really know chekhov but wikipedia said this and it’s kinda interesting
ok bye https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1349950228158312448