Black Gate

Simple. When giving the explanation ruins things. When what you don’t tell is as important as what you do tell. Or, at times, when it’s who you tell, not what you tell. After all, magicians’ assistants generally know a great deal more about the trick than the audience does – though there might be things even the assistants don’t know, at least not at first.

Most exposition deals with items and details known to the characters, which then have to be conveyed to the readers. What about things the characters don’t know, but the readers must? When we talk about exposition, and giving explanations, along with the how and the when, we also have to consider the who.

Writers are like magicians in this sense – we’ve got to keep our secrets, at least until the right moment when all (ahem) will be revealed. But here’s what makes our lives trickier than those of stage magicians: our readers are both the audience and the assistants. They’re watching the trick unfold, even while they’re participating in the unfolding.

Probably the most obvious example of this is the use of dramatic irony. You know, when the audience knows something the other characters in the play don’t know, because we’ve witnessed action or events that took place when they were off stage. Plays and movies manage this by, well, moving the other characters off stage – or by soliloquies if it’s Shakespeare (think of the beginning of Richard III, where he tells us what he’s going to do, and the other characters don’t know).

[Aside: ever notice that it’s always the bad guy who tells you his plans? That’s because it’s the bad guys who have plans. Good guys are just minding their own business until the bad guy acts up. I’m sure there’s a language in which “good guy” means “has no particular plans.”]

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Or so said Walter Jon Williams as he rushed, late, into the World Con panel I was telling you about last week. And he’s right, breaking up an extended piece of exposition with bits of action (or dialogue) is a great way to handle it. Besides, we’ve already cut the exposition down to the necessary, right? We’re not just putting stuff in to let the reader know how much research we did. I mean, I love swords and I’ve watched them being made, but you’re never going to learn how to make one from one of my books.

We’ve talked about using first person and that might be the easiest way to make exposition interesting for your readers, but plenty of writers – like Jack McDevitt – never use it, so what do they do instead? Whichever narrator you use, make the voice interesting and, perhaps most important, interested. If the information is vital to your character, it’ll be vital to the readers. This is why the stranger-in-a-strange-land trope works: the readers learn at the same time and pace that the character does. We take it all in.

Internal monologue, though, doesn’t work as well as you might think. Whenever my beta readers tell me that things feel a bit flat in a particular part, it’s almost always because I’ve got my characters mulling something over. That’s just about the worst way to show the readers character, and not so hot for other things either. Need the readers to know that slavery exists and that the main character might be in danger of same? Include a scene that shows it; don’t just have the character think about it.

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That’s what Tanya Huff said when Michelle Sagara suggested there was quite a bit of paranoia surrounding the idea of writing exposition – you know, all that explaining and informing stuff that I started talking about a couple of weeks ago?

As luck would have it, there was a panel on this very subject at World Con, featuring Jack McDevitt, Tanya Huff, Karl Schroeder, Walter Jon Williams, and Michelle Sagara (aka Michelle West), so rather than go on with my own prepared remarks, I’ll take this opportunity to relay their wisdom on the subject. They touched on many of the points I raised last time – notably the use of first person and the stranger-in-a-strange-land trope – and I’ll no doubt be referring to remarks made at this panel over the next couple of posts, where relevant to the specific subject at hand, but I’ll give you a short summary here.

What could be truer than the quote I use above – which, by the way, you should imagine being said in the most reassuring tone, the tone that says, “You can do it.” As writers, we hope never to write anything the readers find uninteresting. As readers, we know that there are parts we skip, don’t we? Just keep in mind that we don’t all skip the same parts. Setting aside how easy it might be to just do your job, think about what is being said here. It’s not your job to educate the readers. It’s your job to make whatever you do decide to tell them interesting.

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