making breakthrough

Watched me some more Gurren Lagann last night. The show just gets better and better is about all I can really say. Where I thought Godannar was like mecha anime given a massive dose of viagra, Gurren Lagann is like mecha anime given a massive does of testosterone.

Since I decided a while ago to tweak how my novel, MitL, is structured, I've been doing some work on it. What I've decided is to have the more traditional sci-fi elements regarding the "brain in the box" be contained in a prologue and epilogue. The main story then will be the two strands and the prologue and epilogue act to give those stories the other level.

That all sounds more complicated than it is, but basically I've been working on the prologue and it's all proving a bit of a 'mare. I've been trying to "workshop" the piece to some degree using urbis. I've been putting it up, getting crit and then reworking it.

The problem is that what I was really aiming at when I started was a stark, narrative style to the piece. Also, I wanted it to be quite short and to the point--the idea is that it's a mysterious little taster that is only really made clear in the prologue. The problem is that that's not really how you're supposed to write fiction nowadays.

What you're supposed to do is "show don't tell". Which is to say instead of having "He lost his brother at an early age--cancer, the big C. It coloured the rest of his formative years." You instead have proper scenes showing these things.

But it's a novel--if you expand everything up into scenes, you get an immense tome that documents every minutiae of your character lives. So there has to be compromise. If the brother's death is important to the story (and it sounds like it is) then it should be expanded on. If not, then telling is more okay, though obviously still not great.

This is especially true for sci-fi, where you get lots of "accoutrements". If I simply want there to be something that has anti-gravity capability jerry-rigged to it in my story then do I need to have an entire set of scenes devoted to its construction? Or do I just tell you that the something has "jerry-rigged small anti-gravity pods strapped to the sides"?

Well, unless it's key to the story, it's the latter, obviously--because really the above is more like description for sci-fi. It's more like me describing the surroundings than it is me 'telling' you the story. It's not really violating show don't tell.