When you’re joking around and one homie takes it too far and ya gotta look at him like https://c.tenor.com/FsD1MijyJEEAAAAM/cut-it.gif

The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable. I literally can’t progress in the game without gunning down civilians or shooting white phosphorous at the troops™

The justification is “not playing the game is also a choice” which is very silly, you can’t do an artistic message that involves the 4th wall like that (at least in Spec Ops’ particular case; obviously just not playing the game isn’t an option IRL, so it undercuts its resonance with reality).

I’m pretty anti-MFA but I’m not sure on this one. If it’s a historical fact, sure, but the way “show don’t tell” is employed now by amateur critics/writers doesn’t usually have any political content (which the article notes as well: it ossified despite no longer having CIA involvement).

Chuck Palahnuik makes this archetypal argument for the rule:

Typically, writers use these “thought” verbs at the beginning of a paragraph (In this form, you can call them “Thesis Statements” and I’ll rail against those, later) In a way, they state the intention of the paragraph. And what follows, illustrates them.

For example:

“Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline. Traffic was backed up from the bridge, past the first eight or nine exits. Her cell phone battery was dead. At home, the dogs would need to go out, or there would be a mess to clean up. Plus, she’d promised to water the plants for her neighbor…”

Do you see how the opening “thesis statement” steals the thunder of what follows? Don’t do it.

But that this is totally subjective and has no argument attached is lost on Chucky. This is what many bad critics do: they do not have the acumen to point out macro-flaws in shallow/unrealistic characterization, cliches, banalities, all things that can be cogently argued & debated, so they hone in on minute flaws that, usually, only appear to them as such. I once read an article where someone said contemporary fiction was bad because their introductory sentences were too long.

But “Steals the thunder” here means nothing: I could just as easily argue that, given the first sentence, the following sentences are superfluous, so one obviously would have written the paragraph differently to begin with. “Little” Chucky can’t even leave his own style of writing for the sake of arguments. SAD!

If nothing else, cut the opening sentence and place it after all the others. Better yet, transplant it and change it to: Brenda would never make the deadline.

Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.

This is ironic, considering that how a character thinks & believes are actually far more indelible to a potential reader than their physical details. I used an example recently of trying to describe Satsuki Kiryuin without using her name: it’s impossible, because any non-weeb reader will imagine their own version of long black hair/thick eyebrows/stern face woman.

This is not true of “Brenda knew she would never make the deadline.” Moreover, knowing about a character allows one to set up later “show” moments, because then the reader objectively knows enough about a character to think “ah, I think this is what their expression means / what they’re thinking”. I’ll make a separate post on this later, maybe, but consider this: a character looks at a dead cat. What are they thinking?

Well, better hope I make that post to answer that.

Don’t tell your reader: “Lisa hated Tom.” Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail. Present each piece of evidence.

That all of this is devoid of context tells you enough, but I should note this is a fine introduction: not a great one, but a good serviceable one. A thesis statement’s purpose is to set up a story quickly. And, again, telling leads to far deeper, more subtle, and greater characterization than permanently showing.

But the reason Palahnuik and amateur critics do this with literature is, I believe, more insidious. The popularity of television & movies (worthy artforms in their own right) and subsequent crowding out of literature has led to the implicit view that it is sort of a subhuman version of art. Books that only show are easier to adapt to film/television, because they more aptly mimic it, which is what all literature aspires to anyway: besides a few old boring classics. Words are boring & plot is fast: why read when you can watch?

The obvious corollary that if you are writing a novel, you are in the only medium where you can tell, so why not use it, never occurs to these people.