In over twenty-five years of writing more or less seriously I’m still to come across a more stupid diktat than “show, don’t tell.” Unless you are making films this advice makes no sense.1 I would argue that a writer’s job is actually to tell;2 but this is not even the problem here. The problem, to put it very simply, is that there are no one-size-fits-all answers to the question of how to write well.3 And although not all writing diktats are as stupid as the one above, all of them suffer from the same problem: they are one-size-fits-all answers. Folk, if you haven’t realised this already let me tease this idea for you: it’s never about what you do but about how you do it and why.
