That's a great question.
I would assume you always show, never tell, but there are probably exceptions to every rule. I just can't think of any at the moment.
When do you show vs. tell? I seem to be having a problem with this.
Not at all. There are plenty of times to tell instead of show.
Why wouldn't you just skip the scene if it wasn't important? Why bother explaining at all? If nothing important happens, I skip to the next important event.Not at all. There are plenty of times to tell instead of show. Such as brushing over a bunch of unimportant events to get back to the meat of the story. For example, I compressed an entire day of waiting (and hiding) into a a very small scene, because if I'd shown every little non-thing that happened, it would've dragged the story down. After you've shown a fight or two of a major combat, you'd probably want to summarize most of the other battles. No one wants to see every single combat in detail. You could also use telling to de-emphasize something that should be important, to show how unimportant it is to the characters, though in most cases you'd probably want to show their (non)reactions instead.
Why wouldn't you just skip the scene if it wasn't important? Why bother explaining at all? If nothing important happens, I skip to the next important event.
Why wouldn't you just skip the scene if it wasn't important? Why bother explaining at all? If nothing important happens, I skip to the next important event.
What problem?
Do you not understand the difference? Or are you saying you do understand but you do not know when to choose which to use?
Try here (in addition to Chaos' link).
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18540