For Show and Tell I’ve Brought This Joke That Made Me Mad
I guess the inevitable result of decades of standardized curricula being forced onto bored students without any attempt to justify itself is millennials thinking they’re owning their teachers by pointing out that a guy who predates the novel breaks something they think is a rule.
WRITING TEACHERS: Write in English!
HOMER: This is all in Greek and also it was probably passed down through the oral tradition.
Got ’em! Silly writing teachers.
Like, it’s absurd on the face of it to suggest that a 400-year-old popular playwright is the be-all end-all of literary talent, but—
ok, it’s just now occurred to me I may be taking this too seriously and this is not in fact an indictment of English class curricula that position Shakespeare as the godfather of English literature…
…and that people are thus convinced that if they find a contradiction between Shakespeare and modern writing lessons that they’ll finally prove to their high school Writing teacher that they rule and their teacher drools.
And maybe, but the fact that the tweet is addressing the teachers and not the rule itself still has me thinking that this isn’t a self-aware joke about the malleability of literary standards but is actually trying to be a gotcha, in which case…no.
(And don’t even get me started on people trying to prove a point with a “Shakespeare quote” and then they bust out a Polonius line. You know what I say to that? “Get thee to a nunnery!” See, you gotta now, ’cause Shakespeare said it.)
(And just as tangentially, don’t get me started on people who are all “PC cancel culture, you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today,” like, dude, you’re not Mel Brooks (and definitely not Richard Pryor) just because you throw around the n-word in casual conversation.
Setting your guitar on fire doesn’t make you Hendrix, it makes you an idiot with a burnt guitar. The tangential point being just because Shakespeare broke a “rule” doesn’t mean you can do it and suddenly you’ll be Shakespeare.)
(And to be clear, “show don’t tell” is not a hard and fast rule. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” is one of my favorite opening lines in all of literature, and that’s as telling as telling can get.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” is also one of my favorite opening lines, and that’s showing, but in a telly sort of way.
The point being you very obviously can’t apply “show don’t tell” in any sort of straightforward way to every single sentence of every single story. You should understand it if you want to write well, but it’s not a rule. It’s a technique, a tool, a strategy.
And one which maybe is used differently in a literary tradition which until relatively recently favored soliloquies and other such expository narrative conventions. Not just going back to Shakespeare; consider, for example, the Greek chorus.
I mean, there’s a reason “Show don’t tell” as a phrase doesn’t enter literary theory until the 20th century. Because up until that point telling was fine, actually. But aesthetic best practices change over time, and telling had fallen out of fashion.
You can see this across genres and mediums, and I suspect that playwrights of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were being influenced by this newfangled medium called a novel. Oh hey look it’s that thing I mentioned 14 tweets ago, it’s almost like I planned this.
I didn’t, but imagine if I had.)
~FIN~
Originally tweeted by me (@noplotr) on Jul 18, 2022.
If Everyone Is Super Then Maybe They Won’t Die as Much
I feel like there should be more stories where the protagonist gets tragically injured and/or killed and not just all of their friends, family, and romantic partners.
Like, why are so many of our heroes standing on a pile of their loved ones’ bodies?
When I was a kid I read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. There’s apparently a whole third act that I don’t remember at all about like a prophecy and a demon war and whatnot, but what’s always stuck with me is the first part of the story.
(What follows is mostly from memory with some help from Wikipedia to make it coherent.)
A young woman recovering from an illness discovers a recipe for a salve or ointment that protects the wearer from flame. She sets about figuring out how to make this stuff, does a lot of experimenting and whatnot, and ends up defeating a small dragon. Yay!
A little while later a big dragon shows up. So she gets set for battle, gets all slathered up, and rides out to fight the dragon. And then shit gets real.
The battle is hard, and brutal, and she does win in the end, but she’s horrifically burnt, and barely makes it home alive.
And that, as far as my memory goes, is where the story ends. And I’ve always really liked that story. And I wish there were more stories like it. I guess I wish that story was actually like that. She ends up becoming an immortal queen apparently? Which is worse.
Anyway, point is, I want a hero who actually takes the hit, not one who just watches their friend get brutally murdered by an immortal queen I mean immortal billionaire THAT’S RIGHT THIS WAS ALL A SUBTWEET OF HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST.
Ok so I did just play That One Quest, but for real though, it is especially noticeable in video games because it’s usually due to the player having their agency arbitrarily taken away.
But hey Carrie-Anne Moss showed up so that’s cool.
Although speaking of which as much as I like the first Matrix movie I really appreciate that none of the shipmates in Matrix 4 get murked. Nice change of pace.
If there was a conclusion to this it was like 3 tweets ago. Honestly I could’ve stopped at the 2nd one and it would’ve been fine. It’s like 90 degrees and there’s no breeze through my window.
Originally tweeted by me (@noplotr) on Aug 31, 2022.
The Problem with Stories 2: Death Is a Lesson and Life Is a Tenured Professor
On a related note, I’m starting to think we generally have a problem with using death/tragedy as a didactic tool, as if the only way to learn things is through trauma.
Take, for example, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” A kid gets eaten by a wolf and the lesson is that it’s bad to tell lies. That seems…harsh?
Imagine the version of the story where the villagers, maybe after a bit of grumbling, still come running, and they save the kid from the wolf. I feel like that kid probably would stop crying wolf, right? But also, not be dead, which seems like an overall better solution.
The real lesson of the original story, to me, is it’s better to be mildly inconvenienced than to let a child be eaten by a wolf because you find their childish behavior—the behavior of, and I cannot stress this enough, a literal child—kind of annoying.
I may have gotten a little off track here, I didn’t really have a plan for this. Anyway, if I had to synthesize all of this I guess it would be:
We should have more stories where people learn lessons through kindness and empathy rather than trauma, and stories that are about trauma should consider not using other characters as human shields to keep that trauma away from our precious protagonists.
(And maybe don’t tell kids stories about dead kids in order to keep them from experimenting with various forms of social behavior that are not inherently immoral despite what some moral absolutists would have you think.)
I’m not trying to propose Rules for All Stories so much as just Strong Preferences For Stories I Want to See Going Forward Because I’m Feeling Kind of Done With How We’ve Been Doing It Up To This Point.
Anyway, Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a mediocre game, YUP GOTCHA AGAIN THIS WAS ALL ABOUT A VIDEO GAME I JUST PLAYED.
Originally tweeted by me (@noplotr) on Oct 8, 2022.
But Also Capitalism Sucks
This is an interesting analysis, though I’m suspicious of it being presented as THE explanation. I don’t think the fundamental problem is deregulation and monopolization, though that’s obviously part of it.
I think the fundamental problem is that the people in charge of cultural production don’t have the goal of making art, they have the goal of making profit.
Certainly this is exacerbated when those people are the CEOs of the three megacorporations that are responsible for 90% of all media, but the problem is endemic to our economic system regardless of how much regulation is in place.
This is also part of why the problem can’t now be fixed by regulation and demonopolization. As OP says, the demand will still be for more of the same. But that demand only matters if you’re producing based on what you think are the safest business decisions.
If they just stopped making remakes and only put out original content, people would watch it, because people like going to movies, they like watching tv. But they’re not going to stop so long as those decisions are driven by profit, not artistic value.
(As one of the managers at work put it in a way that I thought oversimplified my very specific point and was unnecessarily condescending: “So the problem is capitalism? Haven’t heard *that* before.” But yes, the problem is capitalism.)
I also don’t know that consumerism is actually the only explanation for nostalgia-based consumption either. I have a co-worker who’s watched her least favorite Marvel movie 4 times, but hasn’t seen Everything, Everywhere, All at Once despite being a huge Michelle Yeoh fan.
I know I find myself rewatching things a lot more when I’m stressed and depressed, and I wonder if part of this is just people dealing with societal collapse by clinging to familiar escapism.
Originally tweeted by me (@noplotr) on Oct 18, 2022.
Certain of Eventual Failure 