Good Storytelling and Bad

     Good storytelling requires two things: firstly, you need the audience to be interested in the story you're telling. Secondly, you have to keep them interested. The particulars on how to do so vary a bit genre to genre. However, one of the most effective ways to lose an audience's interest is to tell them things you aren't showing them. 

    What do I mean by that? Well, for example, say I'm watching a movie and five or ten minutes in the main character is described as "caring too much", but everything I've been shown about this character makes them seem flighty, immature, attention seeking, and a bit self-righteous. Now as an audience member, I'm immediately distrustful of anything I'm told going forward. Admittedly, Edger Allan Poe does an amazing job using the "tell something not shown" concept rather ironically in "Tell Tale Heart", so it is possible to tell a compelling narrative like that, but only if you're trying to show the protagonist as the liar they are.

    The problem is sometimes the person telling the story fixates on the plot they've developed to the point that they will steamroll their characters (and audience) to tell their desired narrative. This is plot driven storytelling in its barest form: where things happen because they have to happen, but not as a natural result of the characters' actions or circumstances. It is obviously, poor storytelling. So, how do you combat that?

    C.S. Lewis once said, "The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right, the readers will most certainly go into it." I think that's very true. People's thought processes are as different as their experiences and perception. You can't expect your readers' minds to flow through the course you desire while not providing them descriptions and narrative cairns to facilitate that end. 

    You do need to make things as clear as possible. However, you do not have to make things obvious. Dianne Wynne Jones, author of "Howl's Moving Castle" (and many other wondrous stories) was a master of that concept. Her books are never fully predictable, if they are predictable at all, but at the end of the story all the pieces fall perfectly into place and it is always a bit awe inspiring how deftly her tapestry of words is woven. I aspire to that level of storytelling. I think we all should.