Show, don't tell

So, Equestria Daily (a FiM fandom site) has what they call The Editor's Omnibus for fanfiction authors submitting to their site. In this Omnibus is a section called Show vs. Tell. In this section is the first time I've seen someone actually explain what that old adage means.

Show, don't tell.

The Omnibus sets a small scene for us, and gives an example of telling and an example of showing. Guess which example is vastly superior? The showing, of course. And as I said, this is the first time I've seen the "show, don't tell" principle actually explained. It was very eye-opening for me.

Here's a link, if you want to check it out:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WMMs8H-GpFIXPsQeC0RNu8V-Cq6uyGl_UERpOUK_6KY/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6qkzsww2jkrr

So, I haven't been around for a while...

But I haven't been slacking on the writing. No, sadly I haven't been working on the story I spoke of in my previous post, although that's on my list of things to write.

Nope, I've been writing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction.

Shut up. I'm awesome.

It happened like this: April happens to be the month of Script Frenzy. Well, I got that story idea discussed in my previous post right before Frenzy started, so I knew I'd have to shunt it aside for at least a month. Then the question of what to write for Script Frenzy came up. At the same time, one of my friends was asking about the possibility of me writing some FiM fanfiction, and I thought, hey, two birds with one stone, right?

So I wrote about sixty pages of a script. I hated it. Not the story, the format. My stories are meant to be novels, or short stories, not scripts. Script is not a format I enjoy writing in, at all. So why was I doing Script Frenzy at all? Let us just say a cute girl was involved and leave it at that.

So I stopped at sixty pages. But the story wanted to keep coming. Well, I'm not one to deny my muse when it's actually trying to motivate me. So I novelized the story. I rewrote the sixty pages of script, ending up with about 40 pages of story (although I'm not entirely caught up yet, and an entire sideplot got tossed for being stupid).

I also got inspired to write a second story about one of my favorite side characters in the series, Princess Luna, ruler of the night and formerly the evil Nightmare Moon.

I've done more writing in the last month than I have since the last time I finished NaNoWriMo. This is despite finding a new job that cut out much of my free time.

Anyway, one last thing before I go. FiMFiction.net, the site where I post my FiM fics, has a blog feature. Now, I don't intend to replace this blog as my primary outlet for writing-related content, but I had a writing blog post to write that was relevant to that site, so I posted it there. Here is a link to that blog post (non-bronies need not fear, I don't actually talk about ponies in that post, I just squee about the high quality of a certain story and then ramble about one of my goals as a writer).