Gary Kleppe wrote:

OK, overall, could've been worse, could've been better. The storytelling
was quite thick with explanations that tended to crowd out the drama and
humor. Try to concentrate more on the story and characters and keep the
exposition to a minimum.

    I think I have to disagree with Gary on this.  That "show it,
don't say it" bias on the list is just that: a bias.  It ignores the
fact that professional writers often use extensive exposition, and are
as prone as any to skim over scenes rather than scripting out
everything with character dialog.

    As an example of this, I'll point to Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein,
"the dean of science fiction", would spend pages of his books
explaining in excruciating detail how some apparently obvious thing
worked... in "The Rolling Stones" he put in two or three pages
explaining how an internal combustion engine worked, and almost all of
his books have similar examples in them.  In "Friday" (I think that's
the book), he even spent paragraphs of loving detail on explaining the
wonders of why traffic signals exist.  Two of my all time favorites,
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Starship Troopers", are hip deep
in pointless explanations.  It doesn't seem to stop people from buying
the books, generation after generation... or me from replacing my
copies as they wear out.

    My point in writing this note?

    Everyone has different styles of writing.  Instead of saying "your
way of writing is wrong", why not say "okay, if you want to write that
way, how can you write it so that it works better?".  Explanations
have their place in writing, whether or not any individual personally
cares for them.

    For the record, this was the only thing I disagreed with.  I think
the rest of his comments were dead on, especially the comments about
characterization.

    Ja mata,
    Larry F