Show, Don't Tell

Plenty of blogs have tackled this subject (even I have, in this link here), so I won't bore you with it again.  But today, I ran across a fabulous quote that tells WHY showing is so much more valuable than telling.  It's because you want your reader to be active, not passive.  You don't want to spoon-feed them information and tell them everything.  You want to show them, and let them decide for themselves what's happening, how a character feels, why a character just made that decision.  Let the reader participate, feel like he/she has some hand in the process.

Here's the quote:

"Don't give the audience 4.  Give them 2 plus 2."  ~Andrew Stanton, Director of WALL-E

Wonderful Quote

J.K. Rowling, talking about her first Harry Potter writing experience:

"I wrote the book... in snatched hours, in clattering cafés or in the dead of night. For me, the story of how I wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is written invisibly on every page, legible only to me. Sixteen years after it was published, the memories are as vivid as ever as I turn these pages."