by InspiredWritingResearch

Created on: January 07, 2008

"Tell me not that the moon shines; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Anton Chekhov

This Anton Chekhov quote encapsulates in a nutshell a whole world of rules for Fiction Writing. A plethora of advice regarding plot, descriptive writing, poetic prose, narrative, scene-setting and character-drawing can be skipped by writers who understand the illuminating tips contained in this one golden nugget. The nugget paints for us an atmospheric night-time street scene of Victorian lamplit Russia.

The advice to "show, not tell" is often given to new writers who often try their writing skills for the first time in the area of Short Stories. This writing genre is particularly well served by Anton Chekhov's quote, requiring as it does the skills of precision, clarity,action,dialogue, brevity and colour in as few words as possible.

Interestingly, Anton Chekhov was himself a master of the Short Story writing trade, using revenue from these successes to help fund his medical training. His stories display the purity of simplicity - the kind mentioned in his quote regarding broken glass.

Simplicity in the plain telling of a tale is something almost intangible and at times imperceptible and hard to capture. Many new writers despair of ever being able to achieve the un-self-conscious style that past masters can make look so effortless. Yet it should come as naturally as speaking. Writers, as Anton Chekhov points out in his quote just need to let go of unnatural superimposed writing styles, open their eyes to see and then have the confidence to "tell it like it is !"

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