Board Thread:Site Questions/@comment-26268104-20151017165941/@comment-26908800-20151022065206

FrenchTouch wrote: Yeah, I think that would be the most exposition you can give, after that, it generally becomes too much exposition, from what I've read before.

Honestly I find modern publishing/editor guidelines confusing, contradictory, and add nothing to actual literary merit.

To show as opposed to tell depends a lot on the POV and the style of writing.

First person journel style of writing: "The doctors said my dad's condition could only be treated with high doses of chemo, but in his state it would most likely kill him. So I start to research alternative methods of healing, the more I read the deeper it went. Until I find something from the native peoples of the Carribean..." [Strongly implying cannibalism.]

Third person omniscient: "Little Johnny was beside himself when the doctors said his father's lung cancer was beyond treatment. In their cold clinical way they told him his father was being sent home to die. But Little Johnny's gifted mind was a steel trap. Little Johnny started to study the wisdom of older, wiser, cultures. In some of the older tomes like Paulus' Journeys Among the Anziques he discovered a solution. Over and over he read, "flesh makes flesh, bone makes bone, like makes like..."

Do you see the difference between the two styles of showing? One is more telling, the other is more what publishers would call showing.