It's not that there isn't any truth to it. Fiction, of course, is a dramatic art, and you do need to show things, to dramatize them, to appeal to the reader's senses. In the first writing workshop I ever enrolled in as a student, more than twenty years ago now, a student wrote, "An incredible feeling of happiness washed over her," to which the professor said, "First, get rid of that 'washed over' cliche, and second, if in the course of an entire novel you can evoke an incredible feeling of happiness, then you've really accomplished something." The professor was right. To say that someone is incredibly happy is a "trust-me" sentence, and though the reader may want to trust you, s/he won't. To say that an apple is "lovely" is not the same thing as evoking that loveliness, and one of the things a good fiction writer does is evoke beauty, loveliness, and other such things so that the reader actually feels them. It doesn't follow from this, however, that a writer should never tell things, that his or her job is simply to show. Telling is an essential part of fiction. I will elaborate on this point the next time I blog, but for now, suffice it to say that fiction is different from movies and TV, it does different kinds of things, and as someone who teaches writing I see the unfortunate consequences of people listening too carefully to the "show, don't tell" edict--lots of unnecessary description, a filmic sensibility that doesn't belong in fiction writing (you can see the camera panning), too many adjectives--you know, the typing sentence, the one that includes every letter in the alphabet--"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs," which is a perfectly good sentence if you want to learn to type but not a particularly good sentence if you're a fiction writer. OK, more soon on this and related subjects.