Sorry, I know I haven't been in on these things at all up to this point and am now showing up just to criticize, but this post hits a couple of huge peeves for me, and I think it conveys some bad lessons.
First of all, you appear to be conflating "show don't tell" and descriptive imagery. All people mean when they say "show don't tell" is that you should
demonstrate important things as much as possible, rather than simply
stating them. So you're spot-on in this paragraph:
I could tell you Hiccup is a nice guy, but how do you know? How does the camera show us that Hiccup is a nice guy? Well, instead of killing a dragon, he nurses it back to health. Instead of having Toothless beat back all of the other Vikings and escape the kill ring, Hiccup convinces him to stand down. It’s through events like that, that the reader begins to see what kind of character your characters are. Don’t tell us that John is a little selfish, because the camera can’t see that. You have to come up with events that show the reader.
Yes, good, that's exactly what showing vs telling is. However, it has absolutely nothing to do with this:
I’m going to see if you can read the goal of a scene, and answer the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how. These questions are essential to showing.
Just not true. There are any number of ways you can answer those questions; it's got nothing to do with "showing." And showing vs telling
really doesn't have anything to do with this:
“John was a boy with shaggy, dark brown hair and green eyes”, and you would get your point across. The reader now knows a little bit about what John looks like. But I have one word for that, BORING. That’s one dry sentence right there. Showing is all about taking the little details, and sprinkling them within the story. It might seem hard at first, but you’ll get the hang of it. Now, let’s see how we can sprinkle in the fact the John had dark brown hair and green eyes. “John paused for a moment to brush his dark brown hair out of his eyes, green eyes.” Bam, there we go. Is it perfect? No, but it’s a good start. Rather than having John suspend there in space as the reader gets a picture of what he looks like, we now have him doing something. Albeit, he’s brushing his hair out of his face, but at least it’s better than doing nothing.
Showing has nothing to do with details.
Nothing. All you've done here is weaseled some physical description into a more active sentence, which isn't a bad thing--one of the first steps for new writers looking to improve their use of description is to move from simply barfing up a list of everything you can see about something into integrating it better with the scene. But it's not a show vs tell problem. I mean, what do you think the second sentence is even
showing? It's still
telling us the color of John's hair, eyes, etc. And there isn't, for that matter, any way to
show the color of a character's eyes; you're always going to have to straight-up state it, one way or another. Again, showing vs telling is concerned
demonstrating a trait versus
stating a trait. You can
show that a character is pretty without saying anything about his appearance, simply by paying attention to how you have other characters act towards him.
Annnnd the second peeve actually has nothing to do with showing vs telling but your physical description example there. The whole, "don't just have a character stand there while you talk about them" thing is, as I said, is a good first step. But the hair-brushing example is just as bad a sentence--maybe worse. I guess you could argue that it's a little less boring, but it's an even more bloated waste of time. Now we're wasting 17 words on information no one cares about instead of only 12.
The problem with "John was a boy with shaggy, dark brown hair and green eyes" is not that it's just a bunch of adjectives in a row (still bad), but rather that you aren't really considering what's important. You don't solve that problem by looking for a more roundabout way to slide John's hair and eye color into the narrative. You solve the problem by considering what the reader
needs to know to either have enough knowledge to follow the plot or get a proper sense of the scene in their heads. It's not much!
Look at it this way: there are an infinite number of things you could mention about any given scene, any given character. I could write an entire thousand-page book describing in minute detail my room, everything in it, how the quality of the light changes over the course of the day, how it swelters like an un-air-conditioned hell in the summer (*fistshake*), and so on, but not only would that be hella boring, but it would be far less effective than one or two sentences giving a couple of handpicked details that capture its
essence. Your job, as a writer, is not to capture in detail all the qualities of a thing; your job is to act as a filter on the world of your story, dictating that your reader sees
only what is necessary to get the message you're trying to convey from the scene.
This is hard! This is why writing is hard! Just putting down a big list of everything you notice about a place is something any person can do; correctly choosing which elements of those list really
define the place is where most people struggle and wherein the artistry lies.
So returning to the sentences you're using as examples, John's hair and eye color are almost certainly pointless details. They say nothing about his actual character; theyr'e just window dressing. And like all irrelevant details, readers are going to completely forget about them almost immediately; it'll be like you didn't even mention them at all. Wasted space! You should've spent that time on something someone might actually care about. I mean, consider this quote from JK Rowling:
I met a really clever reader the other day, and this is what's wonderful about books; she said to me, `I really know what Neville looks like.' And I said, `Describe Neville for me.' And she said, `Well, he's short and he's black, and he's got dreadlocks.' Now, to me, Neville's short and plump and blond, but that's what's great about books. You know, she's just seeing something different. People bring their own imagination to it. They have to collaborate with the author on creating the world.
See? The reader didn't even get Neville's race right! (If we take Rowling's mental image of Neville to be the "right" one, anyway.) And what does it matter. Not at all.
Not one single iota. Spelling it out would just be pointless detail.
People don't remember that ♥♥♥♥. They pick up on Neville's character traits and use that to construct some sort of mental image that corresponds to what
they think a person with those traits would look like. It is not important that readers get a mental image of a character that exactly aligns with
your mental image of the character--what matters is that they're able to create a mental representation of a character whose
essence is as close to what you envision that character's essence being. Something like what color eyes they have is almost never going to be helpful in achieving that goal.
And by god, if it actually
is relevant, then just spit it out already. If your character's super-special purple eyes are actually important to the plot, then: "John's purple-striped eyes made him an object of much ridicule, but he couldn't cast his Stu-magic without them." (Look at that, we get to see how they're relevant right off the bat!) Please not, "John blinked his purple-striped eyes, wondering what he should have for lunch." What is the adjectival phrase even doing in there? You just really wanted me to know his eyes are purple, but then you went and threw the detail into a completely useless sentence and give me no indication of why I should care. I'm going to forget that in approximately two sentences,
and you just went and padded out your manuscript with a sentence that contributes nothing to the narrative. So if you're going to describe something, describe it, please. No weaseling.
I'm oversimplifying that quite a bit, but if you're faced with the problem of "I have all these little details that are going to be boring if I just talk about them," your solution shouldn't be to go, "Hmm, how can I include all these details without it being boring," it should be to ask yourself, "Hmm, do I really need all these little details?"