Unlocking the Mind’s Cinema: How Stories Play Like Movies Inside Your Brain
Your reader reads sentences one at a time, and each sentence (with rare exceptions) needs to be showing something that can happen in approximately the length of time that it takes to read the sentence. The key word here is “approximate”. If it takes three seconds to read it, and it’s half a second of action, that’s fine. Or if it’s ten seconds of action, also fine. Sentences like that are called “Immediate Scene” and they are the lifeblood of your novel.
But a sentence has lost its way if it shows something that would take ten minutes to play out in real life. When your editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in red letters on your manuscript, they’re talking about sentences like that.
