Rebel Style

I'm somewhat of a rebel when it comes to obeying rules and style guides.  Standing in the dock now, facing the judge and jury.  I plead guilty on multiple counts.

I refuse to ditch all adverbs from my writing.  It doesn't make me lazy.  Adverbs are a legitimate part of language and they have their place.

I utterly reject "Show, don't tell" and I've blocked people on social media for criticising my stance as regards this.  While I get that info-dumping can be tedious for readers, I remain of the view that a book is a book and not a movie.  There's a great example of over-showing that I saw recently on a writing tutorial blog, whereby someone "showed" the exact procedure needed to get into a car and drive it away.  It was a long, overly detailed paragraph which I have dubbed a "show-dump".  Then underneath there was the simple sentence "She got in her car and drove away".  There are many things that we know without being spoon-fed them in the showing way.  You can cut a lot of tedious repetition out by using a short telling sentence.  I don't need or want to "see" a character preparing a meal, for example.  It's enough to say that they made lunch or dinner or a snack, whatever.

I refuse to cut out dialogue tags.  Yes, I cut down on them in the editing stages and try to insert other methods of attribution, such as nodding, shaking, shrugging, etc.  As a reader, I dislike pages of dialogue without a single tag or action.  It gets confusing, especially when the same person speaks twice without the other person saying anything, or when there are more than two people speaking.  It also makes for heavy going.  It's unrealistic too, because people do move around, fiddle with hair, clothing, phones and other items, or take a sip of a drink, a drag of a cigarette, etc, during a conversation.  They also sigh, laugh, smile and frown at intervals.

I refuse to cut out all descriptive or introverted passages.  As a reader, I like to know what a building (inside or outside, depending on context) looks like.  I like to get inside a character's head and have a sense of their inner thoughts.  I don't buy that every scene has to include non-stop action at breakneck speeds.  Interspersing action with more thoughtful scenes varies the pace and adds to the story.  It's a case of balance.

So there you go.  I await the verdict.  Will it be ten Hail Mary-Sues or the delete key?