I’ve been rejected from agents for this before, specifically, with the first book I ever wrote. Most writers I know hate this advice. Or rather, love-hate it, in that they agree with the spirit of what it means, but wish there was a better way to word it. To most, this phrase really summarizes a bundle of a few relevant topics. After countless hours of obsessing over it myself since that faithful rejection a while back… I’m excited to share my lessons.
Old school SFF used to open with a wall of world building text. “And the gobbldeygucks hated the humbumdrumtums because of their galactic war 30 years ago, and they had an intractable difference in their tastes of grapes,” etc. This no longer flies. Why, you ask?
Because this isn’t relevant. And while relevance isn’t always such a straight forward thing to determine, anything that is relevant to our POV character is always relevant. If our main character is a gobbldeyguck on a dinner date with a hunbumdrumtum trying to decide on which selection from the grape (or wine) menu they’d like to share, you can bet your ass I want to know about their intractable difference in tastes in grapes. Inversely, if there's no good reason to mention this here, then I don't want to know, period. In brief, things that are relevant to our character, are relevant to us, and therefore (as long as they adhere to the rest of my below advice) are usually safe from becoming boring ‘telling’ moments.
Now, much more sparingly so, other things are occasionally relevant as well. For example, the occasional sentence or two to set ambience and setting for the reader, are directly relevant to the ‘mouth feel’ of the story. Likewise, narration can fall into this as well. Additionally, extremely hard earned plot/character arc moments can (on rare occasions) get a pass. If we spent 250 pages working up to this point, yes, you can tell me a few brief things once we’ve arrived. Lastly, on very very very rare ocasions, straight up just telling the reader something in a sentence or two (ala ‘telling’ style) can be relevant as well. (More on that later.)
Writing is the art of the slow drip, the trickle of detail. Readers rarely want a brick of information, nor will they cooperate when handed one. Just because your character has entered a room in a house does not grant you an excuse to describe it for 2 straight paragraphs. Do the floor boards creek? Have your character notice by walking across them. Is the room dusty? Have them sneeze. Is the thermostat way too high? Have their armpits sweat through as they linger too long.
Relevance is a prerequisite, but it isn’t enough. We also need concrete interaction. This can be mental as well. You can be sure that when a plumber bends down revealing his gnarly sweaty ass crack fixing my sink in my apartment, that my revolted self has some real concrete mental interaction to chew on and consider. This is true for dialogue between characters as well. People tend to think when things are said to them, which is great, because that gives our POV characters things to interact with and consider - even if they're just ideas.
This is a strength of writing as a form of media! Not a weakness. Not only is describing everything in great detail unnecissary, you don’t want that. All you have to do is tell them there’s a dark dingy castle, a flash of lightning, and a vampire - and most nerds will already have a pretty damn vivid image in their head. This is awesome!
That being said, this gives you an advantage when in lockstep with cliches, and a disadvantage when not. It gives you an advantage in small intimate scenes between characters, and a disadvantage when the stage gets flooded. All of this is a double edged sword. The fact that, the closer you are to a cliche, the less work you have to do to describe for a reader what scene you’re trying to set. And inversely, when you try to do some wildly creative unimaginable confusing setting, you've got a whole lot of work cut out for you. There is no right answer about how to use your knowledge of this fact. How much you want to bring out the same old tired trope, or reinvent or subvert existing tropes, or forge a new beaten path entirely.
My advice? What I have found, is that using ‘new ground’ and venturing far from any known trope or comfort is a lot like using an exclamation point. People want a few really good potent ones, and they want breaks in between. They want to feel grounded and have a firm grasp on things before venturing out into that dark night, and once they’ve put in the work and seen some bad ass stuff, they want to return back for a respite. This balance, what you want, is up to you. But regardless of your choice, readers always like grounding language.
Let’s take an example, Lovecraft. The (infamously terribly racist) king of incomprehensible horrors. Or, to be a step even more pretentious, let’s take the book The King In Yellow that famously inspired him. This book is full of incomprehensible dread and fear and horrors. But in between those points, what does the real footwork for readers are:
In other words, relatable concrete interactions with these horrors. Our experiences as they relate to these things.
There comes a point where it’s just easier to tell the reader something. Fifty pages of hinting that a pet is a cat, is usually more annoying than just calling it a cat (but not always!). “The Fire Souls were the cream of the crop, that which all others aspired to be,” saves both the reader and author endless amounts of time and energy. As opposed to fifty pages of hints. Do this very sparingly, but when it’s relevant, this is a tool in your tool box you can use on sparing occasions. And in those occasions, if you can keep your ‘tell’ to a single line or two, it might even work quite well!
Do you need to say that? And, do you need to say that there? Sometimes the information isn’t the problem, the cadence is. Hopping back and forth between dialogue and description five times in every paragraph can be hellish for readers. Interrupting a good flow to throw a proverbial brick of information at the reader can really suck sometimes. Sometimes, relevance and concrete interaction isn’t even enough to justify bringing something up. If you just had a massive internalization two dialogue tags up, it’s probably not the best time to drop another. At some point, cadance and flow are mechanical things, not conceptual. If it’s slowing the reader down from progressing along the throughline of your scene, they will feel this.
Likewise, this has an equal root in prose. At some point, what you write matters. Being long winded when you could be short, having a different balance of taste than someone else, even the vocabulary you pick - these can all contribute.
Keep it relevant. Keep it a slow trickle. Rigorously scrutinize if it’s well at home in your character’s POV. Concretely interact with something you want to tell the reader about. Less is almost always more, except for when it isn’t, but those are usually big moments. And - if you are balancing all that fine enough, think about balance and flow. Grammar, prose, and all that mechanical stuff.
Enjoy!