This thread is subjective. It may have been a result of me getting annoyed. But tell me, what advice have you heard a million times? Those that are just parroted cliché advice that is loved to be used by pretentious know-it-alls. I'll start:
Show, don't tell.
In my opinion, this is the stupidest and most cliché advice that people like to throw around without understanding it. A book is not a movie nor a script for one. The author must tell the reader what is happening.
Most of the time, the people who use this overused phrase don't even know what they mean by it. Instead of explaining their point, like that instead of writing down, "Alice was angry." the writer could have written a scene where she does something out of place, a reaction to the event that made the character angry. But no, they just, at best, throw out the "Git Gud" phrase of writing and then do fuck all to explain what even their issue is. Probably because they don't even know what their issue was besides disliking something.
This leads to the following:
Then, there is the point when the author describes the land where the story takes place. I am seeing a pattern nowadays that people can't handle scenery descriptions and a bit of lore before any dialogue even takes place. I mean, the introduction to a new world, how it gets the "show, don't tell" people to show up like flies to a fresh pile of shit. The same people who then compare the writing to Tolkien's LotR, for what they are expecting, where scenery and lore descriptions took up 15 pages at a time. This further reinforces my belief that people don't know what they are talking about.
It is a catch-22 because I also see that if the "tell" phase is left out of a book, readers tend to fill in the plot with their preconceived ideas and then ruin their own enjoyment, drawing the wrong conclusions. Usually, because they expect the author to show them the rules in chapter one, the same rules you can't show them yet as it wouldn't make any sense plot-wise. For that, the story needs to advance first, but they bail because they weren't shown nor told. Now what?
So, instead of the useless advice of "show, don't tell," it would be much better to advise the author on where to change. Where to use descriptions and descriptions of action. Where to write down that a character is evil, and when should you replace it with writing a scene of the character kicking a puppy.
