beyondxmeasure

[beyondxmeasure]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[beyondxmeasure]

Anti-Fascist Queer Book Recommendations

Find these books and more queer reads:

[beyondxmeasure]

ohsivanwonder: 𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕪 𝕤𝕥𝕪𝕝𝕖𝕤 𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕠𝕟 𝕥𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝟚𝟘𝟙𝟟/𝟚𝟘𝟙𝟠

[beyondxmeasure]

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

[beyondxmeasure]

[beyondxmeasure]

“Show Don’t Tell”? Not Always. Here’s When to Use Summary.

I was inspired to write this post after getting a great anonymous question in my Ask: “What’s your opinion on the whole ‘show don’t tell’ advice? Do you have any tips for when to show and when to tell?”

Here’s my response:

I honestly think that “show don’t tell” is one of the most over-quoted and least-understood pieces of writing advice out there.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, “show don’t tell” means that instead of explaining or telling something to your reader (“Sheila was reckless and impulsive”), you should show Sheila’s impulsiveness through action or dialogue. For example, “Even though her rent was overdue, after she got her paycheck Sheila spent $400 on an antique toilet.” This would allow the reader to draw the conclusion that Sheila was impulsive for themselves, rather than being told.

Theoretically, this is great advice for new fiction writers, who, left to their own devices, tend to write their stories entirely in “telling” mode.

But summary (telling) has a place in fiction as well, and it’s an important one.

For one thing, summary allows you to pace your story. If everything is shown in the moment, a story can sometimes seem to be unfolding with breathtaking speed. Alternating with a bit of summary allows your reader to slow down for a break every once in a while.

Secondly, scene takes a lot longer to write than summary. In the earlier example, it might take several scenes or hundreds of words to thoroughly show and convince the reader of Sheila’s impulsiveness. Whereas the sentence “Sheila was impulsive” takes three words. So summary can allow you to fit more into your story or novel and keep it a reasonable length whereas if you wrote every single little thing that happened in scene your story might be prohibitively long.

So summary helps control the pacing of the story and also helps the writer moderate the story’s length.

Even the most fervent supporters of “show don’t tell,” as far as I know, do not dispute that every story can make use of and benefit from summary.

Try it yourself: Pick up your favorite story or book off of the shelf and see if you can locate parts of the story that are told, explained, or summarize to the reader. It’s there. It’s part of the package. Good writers use summary, and they know how to use it well.

So how do you decide when and where to use summary?

The answer is in itself another question and topic. But here’s a quick guideline:

Use summary to give the reader any information she needs which is not important enough to the story to warrant a scene, or to show the passing of time between important parts of the story.

Example #1 Using summary to quickly present inconsequential information.

If the fact that Sheila is reckless and impulsive is a central part of the story—maybe this is a story about how Sheila, your protagonist, learns to overcome her impulsiveness, for example, or maybe in this story it becomes a major issue in Sheila’s relationship that she is impulsive, etc.—then by all means show Sheila’s impulsiveness in scenes.

But if Sheila is, for example, a minor character who is only mentioned by two or three times in passing, and whose behavior doesn’t really affect the story one way or another, then go ahead and summarize Sheila’s behavior. For example, if Sheila is a distant cousin of the protagonist and is only mentioned in a few sentences when the protagonist bumps into her at a family reunion. She is not a central part of the story, but for whatever reason it’s important for the reader to know a few minor details about her.

Example #2: Using summary to show time passing between important scenes.

If your story is about a couple being trapped inside a cabin for a long winter, by all means show the bitter cold days in full scene. That’s the essence of your story, you wouldn’t want to summarize it and deny the reader the chance to experience it.

But if your story is about two friends who share a friendship at summer camp every year, you might want to recap the winter that passed between their visits in a paragraph or two.

Another time to quickly summarize time passing is to use a sentence or two when characters transition from one important location to another, e.g. “They left the movie, drove back to the house, and started dinner.” Again, check up on your favorite writers. I promise you they are not showing every single tiny action blow-by-blow. It would be tedious as hell and make it almost impossible for the reader to figure out what’s important and what’s not.

A few final words about “show don’t tell”:

If you’re having a hard time deciding what to put in scene and what to put in summary, you might not understand your story well enough yet. Go back and make some notes, or have someone you trust read your story and give you feedback.

Everyone has different levels of tolerance for summary and exposition. Find out yours. You want to be the kind of writer that you would want to read, right? Go through your favorite short stories and novels with a highlighter and highlight any passages or sentences that are telling. Are you the kind of reader who loves a page of summary about the snow falling outside, or do you prefer your stories to be more action-heavy?

There is a lot of bad advice out there about showing versus telling. Some writers would have you write: “She sighed deeply as a single crystalline tear gently glided down her face, tracing the line of her button nose before splashing onto the yellow formica countertop” instead of “She cried.” “She cried” is not telling! Cried is a verb: it shows. “She was sad” or “She was upset” is telling.

Similarly, beware of anyone who applies the “show don’t tell” advice prescriptively, or who seems to be repeating it like a parrot. Those people usually don’t know what they’re talking about. They heard that advice somewhere, and they’re just repeating it. Anytime anyone reads your writing and says, “You should show more,” without giving any further explanation, question them. Get them to specifically tell you what they’re talking about. If they can’t, find someone else to look at your writing.

Summary doesn’t have to be boring. When it is appropriate to summarize, look for ways to add verbs and sensory details to your summaries to keep them more vivid. Give your reader something to visualize. “My father was restless” is hard to visualize. “My father was like a squirrel on cocaine. By the time I woke up, he’d been out in the yard for hours, stuffing Easter eggs into his pocket like they were acorns,” is, well, absurd. But easier to visualize.

/ / / / /

@theliteraryarchitect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler, a writer and developmental editor. For more writing help, download my Free Resource Library for Fiction Writers, join my email list, or check out my book The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.

[beyondxmeasure]

Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer outside the Bridge Theatre tonight (February 22, 2025) [x]

[beyondxmeasure]

So talented

[beyondxmeasure]

You’re never too old to collect figures.

You’re never too old to be in a fandom.

You’re never too old to play video games.

You’re never too old to listen to music.

You’re never too old to enjoy things.

[beyondxmeasure]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[beyondxmeasure]

guys my parents are back together 🥺🥺🥺💙💙

[beyondxmeasure]

[beyondxmeasure]

Hot men in suits and different positions of power, intimately dominating each other in public spaces—where the risk of being caught is always dangerously high? Who would draw such thing! 👀😇 Oh boy, I have so many kinky things planned with these two :3

Patreon

👉COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN👈

[my social media links]

[beyondxmeasure]

[beyondxmeasure]

i hate seeing people drink the openai/chatgpt koolaid 😭😭😭 genuinely feels like watching someone get seduced by scientology or qanon or something. like girl help it's not intelligent it's Big Autocomplete it's crunching numbers it's not understanding things i fuckign promise you. like ohhh my god the marketing hype fuckign GOT you

[beyondxmeasure]

Hi, Dea! I'm sorry, I'm on mobile and can't link, but can you analyze "TheHug" from the Sheffield show? Specifically Louis' shrug before they hug. Thank you.

Ok, here we go. Link to the slow motion video.

Louis’ shrug was never big deal to me. Why? Because I don’t read it like something negative. I read it like “ok, let’s do it”, like they both expected this to happen and now is the place and time to do this. So it’s not negative or positive gesture, just something neutral “ok, here we are”, “come here then” or “go ahead”.

The hug itself is more interesting to me:

First thing first. Do you see their arms when they are walking in each other’s hug? they are open, ready, familiar… Louis face isn’t tense, he even looks straight to Harry’s face. 

Then the fucking “pull” happens. The pull you ask? Yes the fucking pull. Do you see their grip? Yes? Yes, that very hard, tight grip on each other. The arms with the mics are still and very strongly pressed around each other. Harry’s even jumps by the force. But. Do you see how Harry almost trips at the beginning? How he falls in Louis embrace? Yes, that’s Louis’ doing. His strong force startles Harry and then happens the most painful thing on this planet. He stills. Louis completely stills. The moment he strongly pulls Harry to himself, he stills. Watch it. If you blink, you will miss it. He stills, he is still. He is just there in Harry’s hug. Then Harry starts patting his back, which is very “yeah bro” movement and he starts doing that too. But it’s a tiny bit fake, tiny bit too much force behind that patting, if you know what I mean. The grip and the closeness should tell you how intimate the hug is, yet the pat-pat is camouflaging something, I think they tried to hide the intimacy… (In my opinion.)

Now. Let’s talk about their bodies. The upper parts are very close, heads turned to each other’s necks. Intimacy. 

The end of the hug is a bit awkward, because they get control over themselves. And Harry wants to hide his facial expression with some weird mouth movement. Though his eyes are smiling.

Let’s talk more about their facial expressions. Louis is happy, content, tight lips, smile and closed eyes. I wonder what he is thinking about. And you can see the grip from this angle better too. I think this hug was huge for him, that it meant a lot to him. For him to show to people that yes, he does not hate this boy.

Harry was literally grinning, with his eyes closed too. His face is turned into Louis sweaty neck and shoulder and he doesn’t care. He is happy being just there. The grips on their mics should also tell you how hard they are hugging. Harry’s grip has the gentle aura too, which is almost fascinating to me, because if you look at the video, there is just force. But now. This hug meant a lot to him too. 

Long story short, those are not two enemies hugging, trust me on that. 

Their love is a powerful force.

[beyondxmeasure]

One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)