Malik
Auror
That's not showing, that's just telling with style!
When someone says "You're telling, not showing," what they mean is "You're not telling this in a way I find engaging."
That's it. That's all it is.
It's unengaging. Fix it. Don't go to "Deep POV" or whatever the flavor of the month is. If you're telling, not showing, your writing is flat. That's on you. Get better. Read new things. Drink. Read more. Make notes. Then bang your head against your desk until brain make gooder words go.
The taste of rum made Logan remember his Foreign Legion unit and how they'd all nearly been killed in North Africa. He raised his glass to the memory.
^ Actual lines from my sh*tty first draft of Stonelands. "Telling" AF. Flat, unengaging, but gets the point across. Good enough to get the story down. (I have a recurring nightmare that I'll lose my flash drive and someone will release my first drafts and the world will see what a fraud and a crappy writer I really am.)
4 drafts later, it's become arguably my strongest passage to date, and I've been doing this for almost 40 years, now.
The rum was everything Logan remembered—and many things he’d been working to forget. Tobacco, figs, and oak carried him to a bar in Djibouti City; 13e Demi-Brigade, la Légion Étrangère, Squadron Reconnaissance. The elite of the elite. Heady days of khaki shirts and kepis, of bar fights and beautiful women and rum and cigarillos and holy shit, Algeria: sixteen Legionnaire Commandos Desertiques and a twelve-man American Special Forces team, backs to the wall in a Biblical-era fortress outside Tamanrasset against a battalion-strength horde of jihadis. Screaming for air support into four radios in three languages. The dropping of hearts into guts as ammo belts clinked up their last few links, bolts slamming home dry as anti-aircraft cannons mounted to the beds of Toyota Hiluxes started to light up the walls.
He raised his cup. “To absent friends.”
I told you enough details to put the picture together yourself. Now you, the reader, know his background and likely what motivates him. With these two paragraphs--one very short--we can get on with the rest of the novel. And if I did it right, it was engaging to read.
Lots of writing tips on my blog. Enjoy.