Too many authors took "Show, don't tell" way too literally
You're writing a book
You're, definitionally, going to be doing a lot of telling
Lady, EVOLVED 
@coriander see the thing is that “show, don’t tell” is actually a piece of cinema advice but most authors wish they were making movies
@Lady I've noticed that in a lot of books I've been reading lately where I'll read something and it's so obvious it's something that would work in a movie but falls flat in a book
@coriander there are reasonable arguments that movies are entirely to blame for third person limited as a narrative viewpoint
@coriander anyway, people can and did spend pages and even entire chapters doing exposition and had it be good writing; there are in fact entire genres of writing whose entire purpose is exposition and there is no rule against using those in a fictional work, and people have, if you read anything written before the advent of cinema
mary shelley did not give a fuck about “show, don’t tell”
you won’t create POPULAR writing that way, because many contemporary readers likewise are not looking for excellent writing so much as escapism into a film playing in their brains, but you can create GOOD writing
