> Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the i

> Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the info-dump, where there's a long description of the setting. Read anything self-published, and you'll probably find both of these problems. "Show, don't tell". As usual, the rules can be thrown out if you're good at it. A master writes whole chapters of introspection and makes them sublime and compelling. Woolf filled the entire middle of a book with description of an unoccupied house passing the years, featuring very little that could even generously be called action and hardly even any characters to properly introspect despite the whole affair feeling introspective, and it's excellent. An author even slightly below that level of skill and talent creates only trash of one variety or another, should they attempt anything similar. But the point definitely holds for most writers, and you're exactly right that you can dig through (especially, but not only) self-published works and easily improve most of them several times per chapter by swapping a tell for a show. I suppose one hallmark of what might be called literature—at least, the kind that truly deserves that label, not just any work that aspires to it—is that if you were to edit it in that fashion, instead of getting better, it would get worse. > There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong. Same here. See: Tarantino. He interrupted a thrilling, tense narrative to have a distractingly-famous actor who wasn't otherwise in the movie explain, directly to the audience, a bit about the chemistry of film, and somehow it worked. And that's not the only time he's done something like that. Don't do it... except if you can.