Another Reason to Hate Fanstory.com

Okay, so lately, I have been posting a story on fanstory. Not to worry - it's not a story my faithful readers haven't seen before.

Anyway, I got a review stating that my writing was more 'telling' than 'showing' and most of my dialogue was exposition. At first, I wasn't sure what the heck the reviewer was talking about, because I always understood that 'telling' instead of 'showing' was when an author summarizes events or conversations instead of explaining the exact circumstances by letting the characters act it out. This is something I used to be extremely guilty of, but I've worked hard and it's rare that someone can point that finger at me now without having their opinion dismissed (I think it's lame to write a play-by-play when boring stuff is going on). In this particular chapter, it was completely inapplicable. Most of the chapter was conversation, so I started thinking about what this guy said and maybe he thought that I had a higher ratio of conversation versus narrative.

Now I'm going to talk about the 'exposition' part of his comment. Without plot exposition ... there is no plot. There is no story. Personally, I always thought that putting the plot exposition in conversation was a way to get the reader to enjoy the exposition (explanation) because when two or more people talk about what's happening - they can flirt, make jokes, and build relationships. So, when we put plot exposition in a conversation we're killing multiple birds with one stone. I can't believe anybody would complain about this ...

Which leads me right into yet another reason why I hate fanstory. They advertise that you will get actual advice about your writing from the readers. I think this guy just spouted off that gibberish so that he would get the member dollars. He probably didn't even read my story. Wanna know why I think that? I wrote the guy back - very diplomatically - and asked him to clarify his comment so I could understand better, explaining why I thought his comment didn't make sense and that MONKEY did not write me back.

Sheesh ... I hate fanstory so much!