Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Aphoristic Dangers of Show Don't Tell

On a recent paper for a philosophy of religion class I had a distinctly new comment about writing:

"My only significant problem is stylistic. Because of your aphoristic style, you often leave many things unsaid."

Now this is in no way a bad thing to be THE only thing wrong with a paper, but it got me thinking. On every writer's tips list I have seen they usually list "Show Don't Tell" as a major style problem of many writers today. I have tried being diligent to this, but now I see that as with pretty much everything else; moderation is key.

Let's expand on aphoristic style real quick (from Answers.com, Webster's Dictionary):

Aph·o·ris·tic·al , a.In the form of, or of the nature of, an aphorism; in the form of short, unconnected sentences; as, an aphoristic style.
The method of the book is aphoristic.

 So I was in a way showing too little and saying too little. I have seen authors (Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Robert A. Heinlein, and Oscar Wilde) use this style with success, but this is a slippery slope to walk. If we, to burrow a page from Kolakowski (the guy the paper I got this comment on was about)--should we take show don't tell too far eventually we can end up saying too little.

This is not suppose to make you go out and stop warning about show don't tell problems (I know it is more common than too-little-tell problems). This is just an observation that falling too often into an aphoristic style can lead to disjointed sentences that lose their original meaning.

Writing is communicating with someone else. In a way writing is laying your soul and mind open for someone to pick through--hopefully with the intent of transferring something. Be that Something love, anger, memory, or a fart--a writer's foremost importance is being a communicator.

That's all I gotz on that thought for now, but I had another...

I think I want to start a writing project. Instead of writing on it once a week very intensively (like my current projects have been) I want to do a very minimal amount of writing but do it daily. So I am proposing to start writing 250 words everyday on a novel project for 90 days and posting it here. I know I won't do it every day probably, but my hope is to do it enough that after 90 days I can be proud of whatever I make.

--Because of finals this week I will probably start doing it on Sunday.

On that note, hope to see you back here on Sunday!

*Edit/Update April 5th, 2011--yeah let's reschedule the one-page-a-day-novel till life is not insane...