Use It All

It’s an Art form, not a puzzle

You are trying to tease readers out of dailiness and its attendant thoughtlessness by using the senses, and by trying to illicit their powers of imagining to enter a circumstance fully, in context, in terms of the story's canvas of being. And it can't be done with any one tool alone. Context is not only given in stipulation and actions as delivered in scenes; it is also provided with explanation, elegant summary, analysis, argument, passages of dialogue. It is given in no single gesture or element of the art and craft; not exclusively with any one thing. To insist on something like close third person in instances where one little line would set the context, to neglect to use that line, or refuse to do so out of some misplaced desire to be sooo dramatic and clever--when the line's absence makes fifteen lines necessary to establish a simple fact--well, you are using one element and excluding another and you’re doing so all to often at the expense of CLARITY, and the whole thing for the reader becomes an attempt to decifer something that has no real bearing on the true depth of the story, it's real matter, its essentials (except that most readers will quit well before anything is ‘decifered’ having to do with those essentials): What is happening and who is it happening to? Where are we and when are we and what the hell is at issue and why has the silence been broken in the first place?

It has EVER and ALWAYS been a matter of Show AND Tell, and the artistry resides in taking the pains to figure out where to do the one, and where to do the other, using every trick and deft gesture of the form.