It's Not Them, It's Me: Figuring Out Why I Dislike the Writing Style of the Older Generations of Writers

 "Show, don't tell."

"Start your story with a hook, or the reader won't want to continue."

Advice that, as a new fiction writer back in my late twenties, I took to heart. I always begin my novels with an engaging "hook," and I never write page after page of "telling" what a character did. I'm an awesome author 😉, and do my best to "show" the action. If it's not important enough to show, I'll either tell it in a brief paragraph or through a brief dialogue between characters.

Because I don't want my work to be boring.

SCREECH! Wait a minute. Hold everything. "Boring." Sounds like a subjective judgment, doesn't it?

It began with Grace.

Grace Livingston Hill, that is. J and I have been listening to the narration of her classic, Marcia Schuyler, a couple of chapters every evening, and for the first few days I had nothing but criticism for it. The story drags on. There's hardly any dialogue. Too much telling. I thought it must have been one of her earliest books, because other of her books that I've read were much more engaging.

Though, at certain places in those books, I've had similar criticisms.

Come to find out, Hill had been publishing for almost thirty years when Marcia Schuyler was published. And though it was still somehow one of her earlier books (when did she start getting published, at age ten??!), it was actually published the same year as The Girl From Montana, one of her other novels that I read and thought was a lot better written.

But wait! That's not all. I also discovered that the novel J and I have been listening to was her first big success! Readers back then loved it!

Even though she'd done it all "wrong."

My revelation.

This got me to thinking. First, I thought about my husband's criticism of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, how the romance between Edmund and Fanny was only implied, never shown (I've never read Jane Austen myself, so I can only take his word for it). Then I thought about Danielle Steel. She is notorious for telling instead of showing in large sections of her novels. But being twenty years older than I, she would have read books written more in the style of Grace Livingston Hill, because that's how authors wrote stories back then.

Moreover, back before the 1970s, and even a little later, readers enjoyed stories with more detail and slower pacing.

And, it hit me: The writing style of these authors wasn't "wrong." I've been viewing their work through the current line of thought about what makes for a good story. Come to find out, there's nothing objective about that. But because someone back in the '70s or '80s decided on the story formula that is most likely to turn into bestselling books, authors began writing that way, and those of us born in the 1970s and later got used to that style of writing, that type of formula (which is called "The Hero's Journey," in case you didn't know).

Add all that to the fact – yes, the scientific fact – that the intelligence of the human race is declining, not to mention our attention span, the sum of it is that there is nothing wrong with the way authors of one and two centuries ago used to write.

It's not them, it's me. It's my perspective, my bias, my education. My brain has been inundated with the modern style of writing, the Hero's Journey. And I've been taught that lengthy descriptions and glossing over long periods of time by "telling" what happened is evil.

A time to criticize, a time to enjoy. 

I've been immersed in judging and criticizing other authors' works based on my narrow perspective. Time to stop thinking that my way is the right way, and anything else is wrong. I decided I'm done with that. Time to enjoy the types of entertainment around me. After all, what fun is entertainment if you don't let it entertain you?