14 ms·

‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer

• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “For some of our students, “Don’t tell” repeats the abuse they will have endured along with its highest commandment: secrecy.” This is way too extreme. Surely people who have experienced abuse shouldn’t be treated like they are too frayed to understand the difference between a literary tactic and oppression of their suffering? Surely it’s not healthy to cast trauma victims and survivors in this kind of way? They can think for themselves like everyone else.
• ehutch79 7y ago
  My understanding of 'show, don't tell' is that instead of just telling the reader; he was nervous you show it through the prose like this; He hesitated. Wringing his hands together, shifting from foot to foot. "I... I don't think you're right. Maybe not about that." You shouldn't be keeping the stuff you're not telling secret. It's not about not letting the reader know things, it's about not being fucking boring about it.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    I agree with that you should show when you can. But at the same time a lot of the time people in real life don't show nearly all of what is going on with them. In that case "tell" either gets contrived - you end up with convoluted attempts at externalizing thoughts in way that bears no relation to how the character would act in real life, or you ignore the story. The former often leads to lots of monologues or contrived props to make the character show you things in ways that makes no sense. In the right setting that can work, but often it is just jarring to e.g. have a character talk out loud to themselves or otherwise act out things they'd be more likely to just have thought about. This seems to be why she is bringing up abuse, for example. An abuse victim writing about their experience can certainly "show" the abuse, but how do they show how it made them feel and what it made them think about, when they've often worked hard to keep a mask and not show the world how they were affected? It's good advice to show, not tell, on the basis that most people who haven't written much tell way too much and show too little. The problem is that it is then sometimes overdone. It doesn't always makes sense to show instead of telling. Either because showing becomes contrived, or for example because showing commands attention, and sometimes you want to tell to avoid drawing attention away from the main thrust of a scene or a work to some detail necessary to understand what is going on, but not important enough to show.
    • ehutch79 7y ago
      I agree with the last bit about how writing advice can be overdone. The slavish adherence to the hero's journey, aka the monomyth, is painful sometimes. When you start recognizing 'the rejection of the call' when the main character has no reason to reject the call to action, it kills any kind of enjoyment. In the end it's a matter of communicating what you want to the intended audience. 'show don't tell' is a tool to do it. but you're right, not everything is a nail you need to hit with that hammer.
      • smogcutter 7y ago
        Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of tail wagging the dog with use of structures like the hero’s journey. Campbell’s work was observational, not proscriptive. Using it as a template is missing the point.
        • CuriouslyC 7y ago
          Certain story structures are more engaging than others. Hero's journey is one of the most engaging well known story structures. Also, many elements of the hero's journey are "optimal" from a psychophysical standpoint.
          • smogcutter 7y ago
            I’m not saying the hero’s journey is bad or something, just that it gets misunderstood and falls into flat paint by numbers. As Campbell set it out, it’s less a singular structure than a catalog of common scenes and archetypes in heroic myths, not all of which might appear in any given story. It’s the overall arc of “hero enters magical world of story -> overcomes trial -> returns with power to grant boons” that’s constant. In Campbell’s observation, these stories have a cultural function - they’re usually about resolving psychological tensions and navigating liminal spaces. Just using it as an outline to fill in the blanks without understanding why and how those scenes function is going to fall flat every time.
    • Ntrails 7y ago
  • bobloblaw45 7y ago
    I think 'show, don't tell' is a mostly meant for inexperienced story tellers since it's an easy trap to fall into that can kill the story. There's a bunch of other rules like not mixing tenses or sticking to a single perspective that when they're broken by a writer that has some serious writing chops make for some really great stories.
  • cryptonector 7y ago
    But actually, "he was nervous" is much more economical than the alternative, and works for me. Perhaps "he was nervous, and it showed". Showing can make things vivid, but telling lets me use my imagination even more. I've taken "show, don't tell" to mean "don't have a character explain things for the reader", which is easier to agree with.
    • beatgammit 7y ago
      Telling is lazy and ruins the immersion, so it should be avoided where practical. That being said, rules are meant to be broken, and one of the marks of a good reader is knowing when to break them. For the "nervous" example, I think it's far better to make the prose make the reader feel how nervous the character is. It may be more verbose, but it'll leave a bigger impact on the reader if you do it properly. I really like Cormac McCarthy, and he does a fantastic job of using prose to create a feeling in the reader. When there's an intense action scene, words become simpler, sentences sometimes become longer (I've seen sentences span nearly half a page), and the prose moves along faster. When there's reflection/boredom, the opposite happens, with more complex words and sentence structure and generally slower moving prose. He's a master of using prose to convey emotion. When I read something like this: > He was nervous. Not the waiting in line to get your picture taken kind of nervous, but the first day at a new school in a new city kind of nervous. He'd been on dozens of dates, why was this one tying his stomach in knots? I just think the writer was too lazy to paint a picture of the scene and instead expects me to do that for myself. I would much prefer something like this: > He glances at his watch. 5 minutes to. He motions for another round. Sir, your table is ready. Thanks ma'am. Right this way. He checks the clock by the front door. 3 minutes. Plenty of time. He starts for his napkin, thinks better of it, then adjusts the vase. 2 minutes. He takes a sip, rolling it around with his tongue, and checks his watch. Still two minutes... Or something like that. I much prefer to experience a story than read about it.
      • watwut 7y ago
        I strongly strongly prefer the first version, the one you called lazy. The other is dawning the story in too many details that don't matter except for telling me he is nervous. It is the sort of stuff you skip over or stop reading entirely. It also kills joy of story, because the story is hidden behind too many irrelevant details. ------ On that matter, I think that "it is lazy" argument does not make sense and on itself is lazy. I care about how it reads and feels. I honestly don't care whether author worked hard. As far as I am concerned, author could write an hour a day sunbathing the rest if I like the result. Authors don't have to do things the hardest way possible for me. If it was easy to write I am ok with it assuming it is easy to read.
  • greggman2 7y ago
    Maybe it's different for movies. I thought show don't tell was at a higher level than "he was nervous". It's more you can tell "James Bond is a super spy, he's super fit, and he's super suave" or you can show him early on doing things that demostrate he's fit, he's suave, and he's a spy and so no need to tell. I'm no longer a Star Wars fan and these are not good movies IMO but this video essay on The Force Awakens vs Rouge One is a good example of show vs tell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsIQa7sH5_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsIQa7sH5_Y
  • anonytrary 7y ago
    A conspicuous hatch in the ground isn't that interesting, but when you cover it with leaves and twigs and give it a weathered look, it suddenly becomes the most interesting thing in the world.
  • watwut 7y ago
    I think that in this example, I prefer the "tell" version. The whole "Wringing his hands together, shifting from foot to foot" just to tell "nervous" makes for a boring reading. It is dawning what is important in too many details. I can instantly imagine nervous person and change how I perceive rest of communication and move on with story. The whole foot shifting is too indirect and I will likely ignore the nervousness when interpreting the rest of story.
    • dmitriid 7y ago
      If all people in the book are only described as “nervous” when they are nervous, “angry” when they are angry etc., that would make a boring book. Varied descriptions are what makes a character. There’s a huge difference between “shuffling feet” and “clenching jaws”, for example.
      • watwut 7y ago
        > There’s a huge difference between “shuffling feet” and “clenching jaws”, for example. What is the difference between the two? It may boil down for why you read, but this is really not what makes character interesting to me.
        • dmitriid 7y ago
          It makes character behavior and the character themselves believable. An otherwise stoic character who shows little to no emotion is nervously shuffling feet? This either breaks the character (and immersion) or speaks volumes about what’s coming next. Of course, this could be described as “uncharacteristically nervous”, but if we don’t even know what is characteristic of a character, such a description will not work. Language is a set of tools, and good writers wield all of them.
          • watwut 7y ago
            Not to me, really. It could be just described as "nervous" which is not at all in contradiction with stoicism. Internal state and what people show is not the same. The uncharacteristically is not present in descriptive version either, no reason to add it here. Whether the character is shuffling feets or have different tells is just a detail - effectively just synonym of nervous. Anyway, real world people don't do that, you usually notice different voice, speed of talking and subtle differences. It is a bit offtopic maybe, but shuffling feets is a bit distracting exmple because people nowdays don't do it. Just telling that emotio where it fits is one of tools that can be used.
  • mcv 7y ago
    I actually prefer "he was nervous". It gets to the point and keeps the story going. There are a lot of books that are unreadable to me because they refuse to get to the point and want me to dig up the point through layers of prose. I guess I like books that have a point, rather than just spend some time surfing on prose. Both are probably valid experiences, but I have a clear preferences. I tend to prefer older SF writers like Clarke and Asimov, which were pretty good at getting to the point. With modern writers I tend to prefer their older books from before they learned to bury the point under layers of prose.
    • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
      They're not trying to get to the point, they want to "paint a picture." Fiction authors are creating escape and entertainment just the same as movie and TV writers. So getting to the point is the opposite of what they want to do. This imo is the thing that distinguishes fiction lovers from everyone else.
      • mcv 7y ago
        I tend to love the plot more than the painted picture. Also, I'm a slow reader, and digging through that kind of prose slows me down a lot, because I keep digging for a point that it's probably trying to get across to me. This may also be why I prefer writers like Asimov and Clarke: they usually do have an actual idea they're trying to get across, rather than just fill some time with prose.
• aazaa 7y ago
  1/2 of the way in and the premise in the title still hasn't been explained. Not going to stick around for the next 1/2.
  • steev 7y ago
    Agreed. I didn't finish the article. I was hoping the author would tell me what "show, don't tell" means, why it is said, and maybe even an example. I have a guess of what it means, but as this is the first time I have encountered the phrase I'd like a concrete definition or description. I am always trying to improve my writing and most of the books I have read on the topic of writing well have a common theme: write clearly and simply. For someone who appears to think of themselves as a writer, I did not find this writing very clear and had to re-read many sentences. I also didn't know what "mimesis" meant, and although it sounds fancy I don't think it added anything. I guess I am not the intended audience of this article.
  • jfengel 7y ago
    They do get to it up front: the thesis is "show and tell" is better than "show don't tell". It's clear enough if you're the sort of person who reads lithub and has been exposed to "show don't tell" a lot. It's just another way of saying "actions are louder than words", even in a purely written medium. The idea is that sometimes you do need to tell rather than show, or do both, and there's no reason to throw that tool out of your toolbox. I believe she's missing the point: pretty much all writers start by telling and need to be cajoled into showing. It's a bit like the advice to "never use passive voice": there are times to use passive voice, but every time you want to, think, "Who is doing this, and why am I not saying that?" If you have a good answer to that, then continue to use the passive. If not, your writing will usually be more interesting as active rather than passive. But since most writers will speak passively by instinct, phrasing a rule as absolute -- before learning how to break it -- is good pedagogy much of the time. You can read the article and see if maybe the second half provides a good refutation to my take on it -- but otherwise I'd say you got as far as you need to in it.
• idlewords 7y ago
  This is written so incoherently that no one should be taking writing advice from this person, whatever that advice is.
  • oska 7y ago
    Agree. Indeed it reads like a parody of (self-obsessed & pretentious) bad writing.
    • Accujack 7y ago
      Agreed. I think the problem is likely that neither this teacher nor any students really understand what "show, don't tell" means, and tend to overuse it when they think they do. That's just a guess, though. This article is a pretentious mess.
  • partisan 7y ago
    This was the one and only thought that came to mind when I made an attempt to read the article. I do wonder if it's just a question of attention span. Does the author ramble or am I just incapable of following along on a long form article? Would I have read this article before the internet? I truly don't know, but I do know that there is literally a nearly infinite amount of material to read (relative to my time remaining in life to read it) and I can't waste time on writing such as this.
  • neoplatonian 7y ago
    Wow. It is only semi-structured, but incoherent? Surely not. For one, I got the point of the writer, and got it well. I could feel how she feels. Sure it doesn't follow some rigid way of "how things should be written*, but I trust a monologue that looks written as if by a human, with the rhythm of a human, than any polished, structured piece.
  • viburnum 7y ago
    I got halfway through, and baffled by how badly written it was, figured the author was writing ironically.
  • 7y ago
• mdemare 7y ago
  It’s in IKEA assembly instructions that this maxim shows itself in its most harmful form.
  • goto11 7y ago
    Works very well for Lego instructions though. I think the main difference is that people don't buy IEKA for the enjoyment and challenge of assembling it.
    • vidarh 7y ago
      I think the best demonstration of how fantastic Lego instructions are is to buy a set from one of their competitors. Nearly any of their competitors. I really drives home that is actually hard to get right. And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this. It's everything from ensuring you illustrate dimensions of different parts in a predictable way; choices of angles, and accounting for the fact people are awful at mentally adjusting for movements in 3d, so if you don't make it easy to align the drawings with "reality" things instantly get harder. Getting shading right. Not making the steps jump too quickly.
      • toast0 7y ago
        > And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this. Ugh. Assembling some (most?) non-IKEA flat pack furniture is so terrible. They often try to use the same pictures without word format, but without doing the drafting to back it up. The one IKEA experience I had that was truly awful was a two-box set that had multiple manufacturers; we ended up with box 1 from one and box 2 from the other, but both had pretty much the same content. Getting all of the first box back into the box after having built that was very demotivating. I now know to double check that all of the numbers match, not just the big number when getting a two box set.
  • shantly 7y ago
    IKEA catches so much shit for their instructions, but everything about their assembly process is way better than other cheap crappy flatpack furniture (say, the stuff at Target) including the instructions.
• CareyB 7y ago
  This is what happens when pretentious literati feverishly search for something novel to expound on. There is no magic spell with which to entrance your readers. Pick a method, practice, and develop your own style. If you’re really, really lucky, your style will coincide with the shopping lists of our various editors, and publishers, and you might make a living. Write on!
• sramsay 7y ago
  "Write what you know" -- while not exactly bad advice -- is also better when not taken too rigidly. "Write what you believe" is better, I think.
  • dawg- 7y ago
    This is true for most rules of thumb. "Show, don't tell" is great advice for beginning creative writers since most people struggle with that aspect of writing. But as you gain experience you learn how to break the rules gracefully.
• geoka9 7y ago
  > In the real world, watching our action would be akin to constant dissociation. Instead, we feel things, we say things to ourselves, and eventually we come upon subject matter and then to the scenes. I think that's why writing "I felt scared" is usually fine. But 'show, don't tell' is more about avoiding things like "she felt scared".
  • hnick 7y ago
    I'm always reminded of Futurama. "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!"
• friendlybus 7y ago
  The telling behaviour is falling out of our culture. The dispassionate army Sargent basically relaying information without care or cause for it's impact is telling. The kid made to get through class by doing an oral presentation and focuses on rapidly getting through the content that needs to be said without caring about it's delivery is telling. Telling is the most basic form of communicating. Most of the information we used to "tell" each other is done over computers now, there's no need to boringly recite football scores or updates on the weather. The communication we do in real life is more focused now. I don't know in what places a formal and functionary 'telling' mode still is common. Asking a person who 'tells' to show more encourages them to see the words as if they describe a visual. Show the reader the details in a way that the mind's eye could reconstruct it. It's not the end all or be all of writing, for sure. If you're going to use 'show, don't tell' to silence yourself, then yeah that's not going to work.
• leftyted 7y ago
  I think "Show, Don't Tell" is excellent advice and not just in writing: it's even more valuable for filmmakers. You should be able to watch a movie with no sound and follow the plot. Of course there aren't actual rules and the best writers break the not-actual-rules all the time. But a lot of really bad writing does seem to involve telling rather than showing. And isn't the goal of writing classes the elimination of really bad writing? I'm very skeptical of the idea that someone can be taught to be a (good) novelist. I don't think that someone can lend you their model; I think you have to develop your own. Cormac McCarthy explained his use of punctuation with "There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate." I find that quote hysterically funny. I don't have a strong opinion about whether he's right. Rather, I think the whole point is that he has a strong sense of what good writing is and it's his.
  • goto11 7y ago
    > You should be able to watch a movie with no sound and follow the plot Why?
    • inetknght 7y ago
      In my experience, movie plots are usually so shallow that sound doesn't really add to the plot.
      • glitchc 7y ago
        You need to watch better movies.
    • olah_1 7y ago
      Because visual storytelling is the whole point of the medium. Yes, there should be a symphony of sound and visual working together. But the whole point of the medium of Motion Pictures is to tell stories through... motion pictures.
      • the_af 7y ago
• impalallama 7y ago
  I always considered as something that applies to filmmakers more than writers. Sure you could through natural storytelling demonstrate that a hobbit hole is comfortable place to live Or you could use your greatest strength as a writer and just tell me "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
  • vidarh 7y ago
    I think this demonstrates the opposite of what you want. Saying "a hobbit hole is comfortable" would be telling. It's not explaining or showing what makes it comfortable, or why it is comfortable - it's one abstraction up and just declares it comfortable. For what we know at that point in the story, a hobbit likes worms and oozy smells and finds that comfortable. But instead he evokes those images, and gets you to imagine something different; something probably closer to our idea of comfort, because the reader now has seen that hobbits ideas of what isn't comfortable is at least somewhat aligned with ours even though the live in a hole. I'd consider this a fantastic example of how to show without having to be boring and prescriptive about just describing what you might see, but how you can also show through creating emotional response and through exclusion. That said, good writers will know when to break the rule and tell. Tolkien certainly does tell a lot even if I don't agree that is an example of him telling. A lot more than many, if anything. But of course he gets away with that because he was a fantastic writer. The advice to show is beginner advice more than anything.
• darepublic 7y ago
  I was given this advice but could never follow it, I would take the reader by the shoulders and shout into their face.
• kieckerjan 7y ago
  Many great writers tell and don't show, if that is what the situation calls for. Read a couple of pages of Tolstoy and you will notice. What is the reason this mantra became so engrained, most notably in creative writing courses? I think the reason is that it is very hard if not impossible to teach people how to write beautifully, but it is relatively easy to teach them how to write acceptably. The main trick is to teach them to avoid common pitfalls and mistakes. Among this is the basic stuff like: don't switch perspective or time midsentence, be wary of adverbs and adjectives, etc. It also includes the tricky stuff that can easily go sideways. A fledgling writer had better stay away from sex scenes, to mention an obvious one. "Show, don't tell" fits this category as well. The idea is that "telling" done badly is a sure way to bore the reader out of her skull. And it often is. It invites lazy characterization. "Amy was nervous," does not sound very exciting. The problem however is that "showing" can get quite boring as well. There is, for instance, this whole hackish vocabulary of observations that signal emotional states, which has become a drop-in replacement for telling. Instead of nervous, Amy is now fidgetting, her heart is pounding and her palms are sweating. These are the worst examples of course. Better writers go out of their way to avoid cliches like this, but they are still beholden to the idea that Amy shall not be described as nervous. That can become problematic if working around it ruins the pacing of a text or diverts the attention from what the writer is getting at. Tolstoy often feels so wonderfully to the point because he dispenses with the obvious stuff by just telling it. Showing and telling are tools. Like in many other endeavours, you should use the best tool for the job.
  • smogcutter 7y ago
    I think part of the reason this advice gets overemphasized is introductory screenwriting books. Show, show, show gets drilled into you. For obvious reasons it’s more true there than in prose, but still gets people into trouble for similar reasons to the ones you list.
  • spats1990 7y ago
    Chekhov (possibly apocryphal): "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." You can tell things. You just have to tell the right thing.
• yoz-y 7y ago
  I've only skimmed the article. However I can't help myself but thing about the recently posted article: https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of-commoditized-excellence/ https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of-commoditized... Blog posts complaining about a "concept reduced to a few words" that did not help them would make more sense if the author first explained how they approached "the thing", what they expected to get out of it and what were they ready to sacrifice.
• jkmcf 7y ago
  The way I was taught to write, with a hostile reader glaring at me, implied that nobody would care what I had to say anyway. This is far more disturbing than the main premise. I can also relate.
• xaedes 7y ago
  Recently bought "Self-editing for fiction writers" as it was recommended as a good book about not only editing but also writing itself. The first chapter is named "Show and tell". Here the authors also state the "show, don't tell" rule. They also show the difference between the two and give the advice to alternate both styles and in which context which style would be appropriate. So yea "Show, don't tell" isn't a law you must strictly follow, but a rule, a guideline. As all rules it can be broken. At some point you should ask yourself "But when?" And this is how the rule invites to do further research on the "Show and Tell" styles.
• alan-crowe 7y ago
  I think of "Show, don't tell." as a mnemonic name, comparable to the mnemonic names for instructions in assembler language. Obviously LDA loads the accumulator, but does it also clear the carry bit? You cannot divine from the name. You have to be familiar the details of the instruction from the manual. Similarly, can you ever "tell"? You go to the "Show, don't tell." chapter in the "learn to write novels" book, and re-read the section "Sometimes you have to tell.". You cannot work it out from the three word phrase. It is not just that it is too short. The internal structure is merely mnemonic. "show" doesn't mean "show". "tell" doesn't mean "tell". They are just reminders of the more subtle concepts explained in the chapter.
• danso 7y ago
  I agree with other commenters that the author’s interpretation of “Show, Don’t Tell” seems off, and/or contrived. In any case, maybe the piece is meant to be meta, like Alanis Morrisette’s “Ironic”, because it seems the author went out of their way to not show any actual examples of how “Show, don’t tell” resulted in inferior writing.
• jamesrom 7y ago
  It's not those three words that almost ruined you. That much is clear.
• Animats 7y ago
  It's all about me, Me, ME! Better article about "Show, Don't Tell" on TV Tropes.[1] [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShowDontTell https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShowDontTell
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > In fiction, internal narration—the telling Internal narration, done well, is showing—demonstration of the character and their relationship to and the effects they experience from the context and events—not telling. External narration is telling.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• arandr0x 7y ago
  Well yeah "show don't tell" is terrible memoir advice, but memoir isn't fiction, and memoirs about abuse, your own thoughts, or crying a lot are terminally boring (but important). "Show don't tell" is how to write entertaining fiction, which is not to say that you can't write dry non-fiction about weighty subjects. That said, this: > When I was taking a sculpture class in college, I sewed a > kind of wall hanging about secrets I had to keep. I wrote > things on pieces of paper and tucked them into bumps and > layers in the fabric. I sewed pockets shut. is showing. This is not to discourage those authors whose favorite subject is themselves and their feelings. As an avid reader of fiction, however, if you really must write about your inner feelings, I would suggest making it magical realism or using plot devices where your inner thoughts influence real events, and not subjecting the reader to two hundred pages of your thoughts. Make it a therapy session or a deposition if you must. Or gimmicks. _Trainspotting_ is boring life stuff and the dude going on about how life sucks without heroin, but it's written in a Scottish accent, so it's interesting. (And to be clear it also has plenty of showing. A lot of the scenes of the family life of his friends, etc are pretty indicative of their social environment without going "we were all poor and disenfranchised".)
  • chachachoney 7y ago
    >> Or gimmicks. _Trainspotting_ is boring life stuff and the dude going on about how life sucks without heroin, but it's written in a Scottish accent, so it's interesting. If all you got from Trainspotting is that it's 'boring life stuff' save for being written in multiple patios, you probably shouldn't be giving advice to fledgling authors.
    • arandr0x 7y ago
      The author of the original article is lamenting that "show don't tell" is making people reluctant to write about the personal traumas of their life, and instead have to write "action-packed" scenes. There are like three action-packed scenes in Trainspotting and they're all well within the lived experience of the average first worlder. It's "boring life stuff" in the sense of being about on the other extreme from a Michael Bay movie. Sometimes people don't talk in precise terms about art they consume. I was using it as an example of a novel about life that has nothing action-y happening and where many scenes don't directly advance the plot, but remains both a page turner and not particularly preachy.
• geebee 7y ago
  I've been enjoying Stefan Zweig lately. I suppose Zweig figured he could show, not tell by writing scene where the first person narrator meets someone in the lobby of an expensive hotel, who then relates the bulk of the story. In short, Zweig shows someone telling a story ;) Zweig's style to me is almost like a friend retelling a movie or long novel, but to a very high level of detail and with excellent recall for relevant descriptions and quotes, when needed. Sometimes he sets this up through brief shell of a traveling narrator meeting the subject of the story (who then provides the main narration), sometimes he dispenses with this and just relates the story. This technique is used here and there - now that I think of it, "interview with a vampire" works this way. This sort of writing can be very effective. At times, I have to wonder if it isn't a way to break through writer's block or free yourself from the difficulty of writing fiction - you, as a writer, place yourself in the position of a stranger meeting an interesting person, and then you imagine the story being narrated to you. You could keep the shell, or discard it and just keep the inner story as first person narrative.