Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

"Show don't tell" is one of those rules you hear early in the writing life.  And it has its points.  It's a very odd story that can be told well without any showing, and a scene shown is almost always more dramatic than a scene told.

Still, there are places.

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What will your character see?  (Once, that is, he has light enough to see by.)
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He didn't know it, but he would be dead in fifteen minutes. . . .

Ah, the flash forward. Rarely seen -- and with good reason.

Once in a blue moon, I have seen it used effectively. A first-person narrator is doing something and comments that afterwards, people who watched him noticed this, that, or the other thing that it would be implausible -- or ridiculous -- for him to notice. Occasionally, a chatty narrator -- whether first-person or omniscient -- can get away with it, if it fits the voice, and the voice is interesting enough to lure me along without suspense. Because that's the fundamental problem with it. You might as well wave a flag and announce, "Hey, Readers! I can't think of making this suspenseful or interesting, so I'm going to bait this with what's going on ahead."

Even Ciaphas Cain, much as I enjoy the books, can be annoying when he declares that if he had only known that his careful selection of the safest-looking place would precipitate him into danger.

And in third-person limited, where there is no narrator to be chatty or who knows how it will turn out, it just doesn't work.

Take Joy:  A Writers' Guide to Loving the Craft by Jane Yolen

If you are looking for an orderly, systemic book dealing with all the major aspects of writing, this may not be what you are looking for.

However, it does hit on a lot of the major aspects, often with sideways approaches that hits portions that a more systemic approach might not manage to encompass.  And it is eloquently written and in some interesting treatments -- it contains not one but two writer's alphabets.

I am particularly fond of the section on voices.

The muse is very interested in what I read.  In fact, sometimes she's so interested in what I read that I have to coax her into letting me file off the serial number.

But I've been reading Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain books* lately.  (A Warhammer 40000 book, but you can read it without knowing about that game setting.)

It's the adventures of a self-professed arrant coward who keeps on -- completely by accident, he assures us -- getting himself cast into adventures and playing the role of hero.  He always has an explanation for his acts that appear heroic, but the intriguing part is that maybe one time out of ten, he is explaining to the other characters how he has to do this (which is the safest thing, he thinks), but nine times of ten, he is explaining to the reader that the apparent heroism was self-interest -- and when that fails -- well, once he and other soldiers were under attack in an underground complex.  They blast a hole through the wall, he and another escape, and the walls collapse, trapping the others.  Cain says he must have been in shock before admitting that he threw himself at the collapse trying to dig through to the others.

The thing that inspires my pondering however, is that it is a retrospective account by Cain.  Or rather extracts from it by another character who features in some of the tales.  She writes that she has let the main account stand, but puts in explanatory -- or justifying -- footnotes on occasion, and interpolates excerpts from other works when she thinks Cain's doesn't explain everything.

I like this kind of writing.  I like these books, I like C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, I like Sorcery and Cecelia, I like The Moonstone.  But I'm not even sure that I can say I can't write them because I've never tried.  My muse, who finds so much intriguing, doesn't find this technique intriguing.

* Hero of the Imperium (which is an omnibus), Death or Glory, and Duty Calls.