Personally, I tend to stop reading a book that's mostly tell. Otherwise the narrative has to be pretty darn compelling to hold my interest. I do read a fair amount of non-fiction where the author is telling about something or other and laying their views out. I will hang in there with telling fiction if the world of the story is really interesting to me. Some classic espionage stories fall in this category.

I love this post. I love all your posts. Let me ask you a question about dialogue tags. It gets tired for me as a writer and as a reader to feel the need to ""describe"" to extract emotional meaning or to highlight tags ... when all I really want to do is let the characters talk for themselves. There is a school that poo-poos the ... he said ... she said ... but honestly it works to keep the words flowing while giving the reader a pause.

The question is: when is it too damn much to give each dialogue tag such importance when we can just stick to "smirk" or "smile" and get on with what's important ... what the character is saying ?? Hope you get to me later 🙂