Black Gate

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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I was reading Martha Wells’ excellent The Cloud Roads the other day and I was struck, as I often am when reading something very well written, by how few explanations there were. One of the most difficult things writers of Fantasy or SF face in creating a new world, and alien beings, is to find a way to give their readers necessary information seamlessly, and Wells has done a great job here. There are plenty of things about the world of the Raksura I still don’t know and plenty that I had to figure out for myself. I know there are some readers who don’t want to do any work when they’re reading, but it’s a fact that you value and remember the information you had to work out for yourself a lot more than stuff that was just handed to you.

Yes, I’m talking about that old writing class cliché, “show, don’t tell.” And as important as that advice is when we’re creating sequences involving action and emotion, it’s doubly important when we’re handing out explanations.

Explanations have a bad rep, and justifiably. There’s the ever unpopular info-dump where all forward motion grinds to a halt and the author tells you everything you need to know – ever – about anything – or so it feels like. There’s the equally unpleasant and not-as-rare-as-you-might-hope “As you know Bob,” a dialogue oopsy, more cleverly disguised on TV than on the page. Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered why all those CSI guys tell each other what they’re doing all the time when they must already know. I know you have. But that’s the classic “As you know, Bob.”

There are situations (crime shows being one of them) where readers and audiences are becoming more knowledgeable about certain basics, to the point that explanations are no longer needed. But the unfortunate truth is that some of these back-handed ways of doing things still turn up from time to time, usually in the hands of amateurs in the field. The problem is that there are certain things the readers simply have to know and our jobs as writers is to find a way to tell them, without stopping the forward flow of the narrative and without having characters explain things to each other that they already know perfectly well.

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One of the most common questions I hear from readers and non-writers is Where do you get your ideas? A lot of writers I know have a glib answer like: my cat, my muse (often the same critter), my subconscious (but in other words, we don’t know), or my favorite: a P.O. Box in Spokane.

But sometimes, authors — and I think especially SFF authors — will say a book idea came from two or three separate things considered at once. When they’re brought together, sparks fly and an idea flames up. This happened to me with my latest novel.

It began with serendipity: the discovery of two endlessly fascinating nonfiction books I found on my husband’s book shelf. One was about the British Natural History Museum and the other was a history of the British Raj in India.

I started one, which was a little slow, and while I tried to decide whether to plod on, I began the other book. Then the first book picked up speed and sank its hooks.

I jumped from one to the other so I could keep reading them both. In one, I was reading about the part of natural history museums you don’t realize are there (the research offices and store rooms). There were these eccentric scientists with nicknames like “trilobite man” and “beetle man.” If women had been more welcome in those rarified offices, I might have read about bird woman, or more likely, gopher girl.

In the other book, I found out how the British established an empire in that unlikely place, India, and the stunning arrogance of the Raj. Although colonialism’s stain spread widely on the continent, I was surprised to learn that even as late as the early 20th century, there were people in villages in India who had never heard of the Raj or Queen Victoria. India is a big place.

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