SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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SciFi stories that begin with exposition - a fan or not?
YouKneeK wrote: "Skipping prologues because they might be poorly written or misused doesn’t seem like a very rational choice. The entire book might be poorly written. With that attitude, one might as well stop reading altogether. Why skip something that might prove to be an integral part of the story and deny yourself the opportunity for a richer reading experience? I’m pretty difficult to please when it comes to the endings of stories, but I still read the endings of every book. I’m not going to stop reading the last chapter of every book just because I’m afraid I won’t like the ending."This is a superb summation. I think if anyone is afraid to read a prologue, they should consider that maybe the author could just call it "chapter 1" and trick them into reading it. And if she's especially sneaky, she could just put the prologue in chapter 2, thus rendering it a midlogue, making chapter one a situation of starting the story in media res, which would likely garner immense praise from the gullible prologue-avoiding readership.
Most Tolkien enthusiasts/copycats start their books with prologues because he did. And Tolkien's prologue is terrible. Which may explain some of the dislike for prologues, because Extruded Fantasy Product is by definition worse than LotR.
Then there's Brandon Sanderson, who just said, "Screw it!" and put seven prologues in one of his books.
Brenda wrote: "A story should be like chocolate chip ice cream. The nuggets of fact should be evenly distributed. If you bought a carton of chocolate chip ice cream and opened it to find a bar of chocolate lying on top of vanilla ice cream, you would have a legitimate cause of complaint."You have weirdly specific dislikes. Something to do with order, apparently.
You must hate dinners that come in courses. Salad then soup then the entree and then dessert. God forbid it's a layered dessert.
Anything can be done badly, from dinner to dialogue. That's no excuse to not eat or not read.
Trike, I was totally thinking about Brandon Sanderson. He's a heavy prologue user, and even throws in some interludes from time to time. Structure and style aren't universal. As long as I'm enjoying the story, i don't care if it has chunks.I just started reading The Time Machine, which has no prologue, but starts with a fair bit of repetitive exposition regarding the nature of dimensions and time. Its interspersed with dialogue, but it's still exposition, and still useful to make sure everyone is on the same page so that the action can begin.
Tommy wrote: "I'm curious, to the prologue haters, Do you feel the same about every medium, or just books?"I'm not a prologue hater. In fact, I sometimes enjoy them. It is true they are very much out of vogue and agents and editors alike will try to discourage writers from using them but they definitely have their place.
Sometimes they are a quick (and sometimes dirty) method of setting the scene for a story. This isn't always a bad thing and some prologues are incredibly famous (Remember "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."?). The alternative is to drop the reader straight into a strange world and let them work it out for themselves (some readers love this, others hate it).
Sometimes they provide the "framing" for a story. Framing is where a story sits within another story (George Turner's sci-fi classic "The Sea and Summer" is a brilliant example of doing this really well.) and the prologue part is normally matched with an epilogue that brings us back to the outer story and wraps things up. It used to be a very popular literary form (think of the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs) but is not much used now.
My, I got quite the debate going! Excellent *Palpatine smile*.The reason I asked is, of course, that I'm writing an SF novel and gauging the reception towards prologues in the audience.
The story is set on an extrasolar colony 1000 years after landing, and I sent the first couple of chapters to a few friends. Nearly all of them said that they felt the pace was too quick, and that there should've been a little more exposition and setting up the world before the start of the story. So I wrote a brief one pager starting off with things like "In 2106, the first blah blah..." and then continued as if a historian was summarizing the events which occurred. Not encyclopedic, more flowery. That was received well but I couldn't help but feel that I was cheating somehow.
But then I read Cyteen afterwards, and I saw that Cherryh had actually started the book in the same way, so felt better about my method. What I would really like to do is set up the information in that one pager as a short story set on Earth in the last days before leaving, from the POV of an important character involved in the colonization effort.
So would a short story based prologue be better, which would be probably be longer, or a shorter summation of key events?
The problem with neither is that the first POV is not very well versed in history, and her story as it is right now is not conducive to talking about the past, especially a thousand years in the past, and some exposition might be needed to better drive the reader into the story.
Start the story at the beginning. How do you know you have the true beginning? When you can't begin it any later, and still have it make sense.Think about how you tell a story in an informal context. You hop onto Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and say, "I was on the subway this morning and OMG! A woman was carrying a dead dog in a plastic bag!"
You see how you began that? You gave the minimum back story and moved straight on the the meat of the thing.
It is perfectly OK if you don't have the beginning right now. You may well have to write the entire thing, to know where it ought to begin.
I disagree with that. The story should begin where it makes sense for the story, which might not be the beginning.
The only problem I have with that is that it implies there is only one way to tell a story and I cannot agree with that.If seeing the person carrying a dead dog was a random occurrence in an otherwise ordinary day/life, fine.
But what if something happened earlier that made that person seeing a dead dog a bit different than us seeing a dead dog. Maybe his mom was a vet? Maybe he was raised by wild dogs and if we didn't know that we wouldn't know what seeing someone carrying a dead dog might mean.
Maybe their Facebook friends know this, and get it, but we don't. And so, if we don't go to their bio and see about their unusual upbringing, we don't understand the entirety of the story.
Sid wrote: "What I would really like to do is set up the information in that one pager as a short story set on Earth in the last days before leaving, from the POV of an important character involved in the colonization effort.So would a short story based prologue be better, which would be probably be longer, or a shorter summation of key events? "
However you do it, make sure the stuff in the prologue is pertinent. Anything that isn't absolutely germane, cut. Cut, cut, cut.
One of the worst movies of all time, Event Horizon, had an infodump at the beginning which lists off a bunch of things that literally have nothing to do with the story. For the DVD release they removed 90% of them, because they apparently realized it was ridiculous.
It's even easier to change the text in a book, but you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, so you might as well do it right the first time. I would definitely suggest reading the prologues to Dragon's Egg and Code of the Lifemaker. They set the tone and are vastly entertaining in themselves.
Then you have the prologue from Logan's Run:
The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength.
By the early 1970s over 75 per cent of the people living on earth were under twenty-one years of age. The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage.
In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 per cent.
In the 1990s, 82.4 per cent.
In the year 2000—critical mass.
That's it. You really don't need more, and the entire book reads that way.
The Uplift War has a prologue that I felt went on too long, but it definitely sets your expectations for what's to come. The first chapter of Jack L. Chalker's Midnight at the Well of Souls serves as prologue and infodump wrapped in the tale of a mass murder on a distant, long-dead alien planet, which introduces the two primary bad guys of the piece, so it serves multiple purposes. Chalker just never calls it a Prologue, but that's what it is.
Would the Prolog or Preface be the bait to hook the fish? If you're reading history you'd know the story before you read the book. If you're writing Sci-fi it's in the future.
Personally I prefer a little bit of background.
Tommy wrote: "The only problem I have with that is that it implies there is only one way to tell a story and I cannot agree with that."Exactly. As a filmmaker, I'm a big proponent of "show, don't tell" because I typically hate narration. But in novels it's gone too far with the SDT folks trying to hammer down anyone who prefers a different style. And at some point in most stories you have a moment that is 100% telling rather than showing.
I had this challenge with my book, Immersion. Instead of writing the long backstory, at the beginning of each chapter I have excerpts from fictional books/works/reports from the future-past. This way, the reader is brought right into the action, however as they go along some of the sci-fi toys and backstory is unwoven. It also allowed me not to overwhelm the reader with trying to learn too much at once.
I read them.Always.I begin reading at line 1 of the text.I truly did not know that it wasnt "cool".Nor do I care,now that I do.Write what you want to write.
Sid wrote: "My, I got quite the debate going! Excellent *Palpatine smile*.The reason I asked is, of course, that I'm writing an SF novel and gauging the reception towards prologues in the audience.
The sto..."
Personally, I don't really like expositional prologues. As a reader, I like the challenge of finding out more about the world as the story progresses through the eyes of the characters. I do always read the prologue, but I prefer when prologues are scenes to help set up the stories, rather than straight information.
I feel like exposition shouldn't be in the prologue. But there are still plenty of good prologues. I recently read Allow of Law and prologue isn't really part of the main story more the end of the previous chapter of the main characters life that very much shapes his actions in the main story prologue spoilers (view spoiler)As far as exposition I like it better when it's slowly revealed and revealed though the perspective of the characters themselves. Aka nobody thinks about the way a combustion engine works just because they are driving it, but if they are in a car chase the way it handles and it's acceleration suddenly become very important.
If you need exposition at all, either throw it at the back of the book in a glossary, that way if I can't piece something together I can just flip to the back and see what they are talking about.
^^^This is what Malazan needed, and gets fulfilled well enough by fan guides but still.
God, Malazan could've used a little exposition. That's one of the reasons I only made it through half of book one. I had no idea what was going on, there were too many characters, too many story threads, nobody was explaining anything in any of them, and I didn't have the patience to muscle through thousands of more pages before having an inkling of what the story actually is. I hated having to keep flipping back and forth to understand what was going on when the text refused to explain itself... so I refused to do it. And the book ended up with a 1 star rating for it. -----
Regarding the writers asking for opinions here... I'm not an author, let alone one who's had any real success, so I'll pass along advice from someone who has: Here are some of Stephen King's relevant thoughts on writing:
First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”
Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart."
(Advice I wish he'd have taken himself before writing Mr. Mercedes, but I digress.)
The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”
Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”
Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”
Nathan wrote: "Number 3 is a little more gray. I LIKE stories with a lot of detail, a lot of research, deep technological macguffins. At least as long as it's accurate and not mere technobabble. But yes, it should not swamp the story, but the story needs to be stronger, not the research weaker. NEVER weaken the research, the detail, to favor a weak story. If the detail is overshadowing the story, improve the story! "I think #3 is right on the money!
There's one series of books (had to DNF) where the author used to be a map-maker. He had tons and tons of detailed maps in the book...and tons and tons of "travel" scenes. It KILLED me but the guy obviously had done his research on how long it would take to walk from here to there and....he put that in his book(s?). But the result was a drag.
Also, another great example is David Eddings. He eventually published the "research" background details he'd written for himself. The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon There was tons and tons of stuff in this book that Eddings cut from the originals. Great stuff, too. But I can see that including this stuff would have taken an already slow series and turned it into molasses in January.
I agree, Nathan. The details make the story, and the more realistic the better. But I liked #3 for the concept. If a character is taking a train somewhere, for instance, and it's a train and a route that exists in real life, the author should probably do his research to know the schedule and route, the stops, the meal service (if any), the kind of engine (steam, or electric, or whatever), etc. The author should know that so that when he or she includes that character A took the train from City Z to City H (or the subway from stop B to stop D, whatever) and ordered a coffee while en route, it's accurate. There's no need to specify that the train has been running this route since 1983 except for a brief stoppage when the engineers went on strike for better pay in 1990, and since then there've been an average of 3,000 passengers a day taking the route from Zzzzzzzz.... If it's a technology thing - then they should do even more research, but apply #4a to it, and just leave out the boring stuff. There's no reason that fiction can't be entertaining and detailed. It just needs to be done right.
MrsJoseph wrote: "It KILLED me but the guy obviously had done his research on how long it would take to walk from here to there"A good example.
Also, I love LOTR, but it makes me think of this:
(Click for site with full size image.)
I'm currently reading a great story that started with an "info-dump" prolog. I almost put the book down because to that boring thing.The author dumped everything he "knew" about the "world/universe" he'd created -- most of it not necessary to the enjoyment of the story. Yes, the author has to know EVERYTHING about his creation, but that doesn't mean he needs to inflict all the details on the reader. Good prose consists, in many instances, in what an author leaves out.
When I review/rate it, I'll take away a star because of that nasty thing.
Nathan wrote: "The prose should never be boring. I know nothing about the story you are describing, but my gut reaction is that the sin was not including the info, but making it boring. I take away points for be..."The best way to include such information is during the action. And don't assume the reader is stupid.
For instance, if you're trying to explain how a planetary empire came into being, forget it. Just mention the "emperor" and the reader can make the connection that the story takes place within an empire.
If it's all that important that the reader understand how the empire came into being, write a prequel that shows it (and make it a good story) and publish it first.
I know one author who was faced with just that problem. His prequel will probably come out in the near future -- THEN he'll finish up the story he started out with (he was 2/3 through it when the need for a prequel became obvious).
Al wrote: "If it's all that important that the reader understand how the empire came into being, write a prequel that shows it (and make it a good story) and publish it first."But then people, like me, will be annoyed that to get the full history and thus the full story that the author should have told in the first place, we now have to pay for two books rather than just one. And so, I would either 1) read the main book and not get the full story, or 2) read neither because stuff like that seems geared just towards more book sales rather than telling a great story and it annoys me.
It depends on how interested I am in the story which option I'd choose..
If you can't figure out how to include it seamlessly, then maybe it's not supposed to fit in and needs to be cut. Not everyone is Tolkien and needs to publish their extraneous writings and indices.
You should NEVER be boring. It is extraordinarily dangerous. Because your reader has email, yes? And Facebook, and Twitter, and cable, and Netflix. And maybe Stephen Colbert has a really cool guest on this evening. And his mom is baking an apple pie and OMG, the whole house smells great! The number of distractions and diversions in your reader's world is huge. You have to be more interesting than ALL of them. Give him an opportunity to close the book, and he will. Don't give it to him.
Becky wrote: "Al wrote: "If it's all that important that the reader understand how the empire came into being, write a prequel that shows it (and make it a good story) and publish it first."But then people, li..."
The idea is to write two INTERESTING stories which are worthy on their own. They don't have to be cliff-hangers; just related.
If you can SHOW the backstory without a prequel, so much the better, but PLEASE avoid the info-dump.
Someone said s/he posts "history bits". That's a great idea. Herbert did that in DUNE quite well, quoting several "sources" (like the memoirs of the Princess Irulan [sp?]).
I didn't say anything about cliffhangers or how interesting either bit of the story is. I'm talking about the trend in publishing which is to split stories up into as many parts as possible to sell more books. That annoys me, and I will generally steer clear of them. If it's a choice between reading some exposition or being required to buy a trumped up "prequel" that sets the stage, I'll take the former. Or I'll read the main story and live without the stage setting. No skin off my teeth.
My time and my money are finite, and there are plenty of other books out there that don't require a multi-volume commitment before getting a full story. *shrug*
Becky wrote: " I didn't say anything about cliffhangers or how interesting either bit of the story is. I'm talking about the trend in publishing which is to split stories up into as many parts as possible to sell more books. That annoys me, and I will generally steer clear of them.If it's a choice between reading some exposition or being required to buy a trumped up "prequel" that sets the stage, I'll take the former. Or I'll read the main story and live without the stage setting. No skin off my teeth.
My time and my money are finite, and there are plenty of other books out there that don't require a multi-volume commitment before getting a full story. *shrug* "
ALL of this.
You'd have to be a favorite auto-buy trusted author to get me to do buy those extra books. And I only have one auto-buy author. And SHE puts 99.99% of those little bits on her site (and various other sites) for free.
Otherwise it's off to the library or (as Becky says) either I read book 1 or I don't read any of them.
IDK about most of you all but THIS reader is sick and freaking tired of all the prequels, sequels and million book series.
I give in. I quit. I've been beaten into submission.
The biggest problem with an info-dump start is that BUYERS often sample a book before buying. On Amazon, that means they start at the beginning.If time is important, they'll read until they get bored or hooked. If it's an info-dump, they'll probably get bored and go on to the next offering that attracts their eye.
Rule: You have to hook them in the first chapter if you're not an established author with a big following.
Let's look at a beginning with a good hook:
As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him I killed him.
Now, this particular author has a HUGE following, but he never forgot the "rule". Many will recognize the first paragraph from Friday by Robert Heinlein.
If you don't care about selling books, then by all means, write whatever you want and get it out of your system. Your mom and really close friends may read it. If it sells a bundle, by all means, come back here, stick out your tongue at me, and say "Nya, nya; told you so." I'll take it like a man, then go into a corner and cry my eyes out.
This makes me want to start a new thread on hook chapters so I could show off the hook chapter of my book. But that would be selfish. =)
Lucky for authors that there are still people like me that don't sample, but buy on recommendations of friends or a good cover, or even just hype. (Unluckily for me, all of those things can let me down from time to time. Still, I prefer to go into a book with as little info as possible, so no pre-reading or reading reviews. ) Luckier still for authors is that there are people who, like me, are still more tolerant of exposition than of books with none.
Perhaps less lucky for authors is that I am a stickler about writing. My initial impression of that opening trio of sentences is not "What happens next?" it's "Where are the missing commas?" ("I killed him as the door contracted behind him." makes a much better sentence if one doesn't want to use a comma - but then the sentence loses a bit of its punch.)
I know that this isn't about writing/editing, but a hook of a first line isn't the only thing that is going to determine whether someone keeps reading a book past the first lines. I'm not impressed by that opener, however famous the author may be, and it certainly hasn't moved Heinlein up my TBR. If I'd already bought it, I might carry on and read it simply because I'd already spent my money, but I buy enough used books on the cheap to not have qualms about ditching a book anyway. (I quit a book that most people think is fantasy gold after just 30 pages because the editing was so bad that it was impossible for me to ignore. )
I read quite a bit of Historical fiction, non-fiction, literary fiction, classics... all of which can be slower and rely heavily on exposition. Maybe that's formed something of a tolerance for me, so I'm less likely to dump a book if it takes a little bit to get going. I stuck with Gardens of the Moon for a month before calling it quits when it didn't pick up and start making sense to me, and I think that book could have used a lot more exposition. I also gave a month of my life to the first half of Ghost Story (the one by Peter Straub - not Jim Butcher) - and that one had a ton of exposition. But both bored me because neither one got to the point fast enough for me, despite the amount of exposition they contained.
TL;DR - I will give exposition AND boredom more of my time than I'll give bad writing.
Every one has their own tastes in life. If we all wanted the same thing, we'd fight like mad all the time.People raised on classic writing are more tolerant of slow starts than today's television -- instant gratification generation. TV starts have spoiled us. The murder takes place in the first scene and the rest of the 1-hour story is the hunt for the murderer. This attitude has pretty much migrated to books as well -- but not completely as we can see from Becky's note.
50 Shades of Porn is so hot, they made a movie out of it. BUT the writing is, purportedly, terrible; especially the punctuation and such. The reviews range uniformly from good to horrible, -- BUT the story itself is, apparently, engaging and it sells.
To each his own. I try to appeal to the greatest number of fans when I write. I write what I like (under a pen name), but I also write to sell as many copies as I can.
And when I work with authors, that's what I stress. It's all about my background in publishing where SALES, not literary excellence, is king.
Every one has their own tastes in life. If we all wanted the same thing, we'd fight like mad all the time.People raised on classic writing are more tolerant of slow starts than today's television -- instant gratification generation. TV starts have spoiled us. The murder takes place in the first scene and the rest of the 1-hour story is the hunt for the murderer. This attitude has pretty much migrated to books as well -- but not completely as we can see from Becky's note.
50 Shades of Porn is so hot, they made a movie out of it. BUT the writing is, purportedly, terrible; especially the punctuation and such. The reviews range uniformly from good to horrible, -- BUT the story itself is, apparently, engaging and it sells.
To each his own. I try to appeal to the greatest number of fans when I write. I write what I like (under a pen name), but I also write to sell as many copies as I can.
And when I work with authors, that's what I stress. It's all about my background in publishing where SALES, not literary excellence, is king.
I rarely watch TV. I just don't have the attention span for it. LOL I don't fault anyone for wanting to sell books. If people didn't write books to sell them, I'd be in a world of trouble, because I couldn't survive without reading material. But I think that people should write stories that want to be told, and they should write them the way that they want to be told.
It's idealistic, sure, but I just cringe at the thought of killing a prologue that works beautifully and helps the story come full circle or otherwise be complete just because the trend right now is not to use them. Trends change, and I think people should trust their work. And tip their editors.
I'll be here all week. :D
Thank you all for your suggestions! I've enjoyed the lively debate here. I feel pretty amateurish alongside you all, considering the handful of books I've read and the pretty basic style of writing I've done till now. But I feel like I have a little more confidence in my ability to judge what you guys seem to like. I think I'm going to keep writing the real story first, try to sneak in as much exposition as SDT would allow, and then decide if there is any need for a prologue and what kind would suit it best. I'm not sure if this is against the rules, forgive me if it is, but I've uploaded the first three short stories here: http://projectmonolith.weebly.com/sti...
If anyone's interested! They're about 1000-3000 words each, so 3-5 minute reads, I'd guess. I'm using the short story format as training wheels to help me develop my skill so that I could join these and other such shorts from different POVs together to form a composite novel/short story cycle kind of book. Eventually!
Thanks for your input! Please let me know if I should get rid of my link from here though.
Funny to see the comments about the Malazan books. The being dropped into a world and having to figure it out and keep up style is my favourite (I also love Glen Cook's books, and he does this too.) Because let's be honest, most of the time the characters don't have any better idea than we do what's going on.I really hate books that give me huge explanations about everything, especially in the prologue. Sometimes the level of detail is ridiculous in relation to what you need to know to keep up with the plot. It'd be like The Great Gatsby beginning with an expository lecture on the nature and workings of the internal combustion engine, just because a car is going to be important to the plot at some point later on.
It's often particularly egregious when it's a character doing it, for instance where an uneducated village farmhand somehow manages to explain a complex and highly detailed magic or political system to another in an "As you know, Bob" moment. Why would this character know this, in this level of detail? And why does the person they're telling care for all this minutiae?
It can be even worse, in one book I read, they didn't even explain it to anyone, instead a young woman sat in a cafe, looking out the window at the view... and musing to herself the detailed inner workings of planetary politics and diplomacy, for an entire (loooong) chapter. And perhaps 2 small sentences were relevant to the plot, the rest just came off as an exercise in "I thought up all this background info, in order to make the bits that are relevant work, so now YOU MUST KNOW ALL THE THINGS".
Most of us could, if asked directly and put on the spot, provide a decent high level summary of how our national political system works or how a car does. A mechanic could tell you in detail but unless they are explaining to another mechanic, they'd probably just give the same summarised version anyone else would. But at least they'd have an excuse for knowing more.
All of which is a bit ranty, but what I'm getting at is, the prologue is not the place to show off how much research or behind the scenes world building you did, if that's the only point to it. Despite my liking for being dropped right into the action, I can deal with necessary levels of relevant exposition, from contextually appropriate sources (or fine, an omniscient narrator, if you must). It's just that so many books I pick up lately apparently consider "all of it" to be both necessary and relevant when it so often isn't.
Just because you have created the whole megilla does not mean you have to tell the reader. We have all read (or put down unread) those books that are gigantic lumps of milspeak technobabble, or pornography, or descriptions of gowns, or faux history, held together like the nuts in a fruitcake by a thin batter of story.You should keep most of it, like 90%, to yourself. Like an iceberg -- only a small part of the background is visible. The rest of it is underneath, holding the thing up.
Sid wrote: "Thank you all for your suggestions! I've enjoyed the lively debate here. I feel pretty amateurish alongside you all, considering the handful of books I've read and the pretty basic style of writing..."Short stories are a great way to hone your skills. You have to throw out absolutely everything that doesn't help the plot along and be concise and to the point.
For a LOT of info on the process of writing/plotting/etc. go to: https://alkalarediting.wordpress.com/...
Krazykiwi wrote: "Funny to see the comments about the Malazan books. The being dropped into a world and having to figure it out and keep up style is my favourite[...]"And there ain't nothin' wrong with that, despite my gripes about it. :) Everyone has their own taste and preference... which is kind of my whole point throughout this thread - any story is going to work for some people and not for others.
Write a prologue, a prelude, or a foreword, and people will love it or hate it. Don't, and people will love it or may feel like it was missing something. Use exposition and people will love it or hate it. Don't and people will love it or may feel like it was missing something. Use similes and metaphors and people will love it or hate it. Or don't... Use adverbs or don't. Use commas or don't. Use quotation marks or don't. Use paragraphs or don't. Write in first person, or second person, or third person, or only in memories or epistolary or have the dog narrate... or don't. Etc etc etc.
There's no way of writing a story that will make it universally loved. Only ways that will cater to current trends.
Al Philipson needed to explain something to his readers in his Children of Destruction, so he crafted a clever classroom scene that actually worked (much to my surprise).
Exposition I feel is fine, but I don't like it when books start with it.
Of course you're right, Becky, there's no one right way. Using Gatsby as an example earlier was in fact poking fun at myself, I can't stand that book, despite it being a beloved classic. But I do think there's a point where infodumping of pure exposition is going to be more or less too much for any reader -- I hope our authors here reading this thread, are very far from hitting that point.I think, for me, the problem specifically with starting with exposition is, I simply don't care yet. I don't have any context, I don't understand the relevance. It's just a dry infodump of a lecture. So if that's how you're going to start the book, it has to be something really spectacular for me to keep reading, or I'm just thinking "well that's great, so what, which bits of this do I need to remember?".
I need to engage with the characters first, and hopefully like them well enough to want to find out more. By then, when the exposition comes, I'm actually interested and likely to retain what's important a lot better too. Again, just for me, I find what's really important by then, is generally what's important for the characters to know too, so it's a lot easier to slide it into the story without having to infodump it.
I also agree with the advice to write short stories, I suspect learning to prune that hard has a lasting effect on your ability to see what really is just cruft. Exposition sans cruft pretty much has to be more palatable to all kinds of readers than the fruitcake version of Brenda's analogy!
Krazykiwi wrote: "I think, for me, the problem specifically with starting with exposition is, I simply don't care yet. I don't have any context, I don't understand the relevance. It's just a dry infodump of a lecture. So if that's how you're going to start the book, it has to be something really spectacular for me to keep reading, or I'm just thinking "well that's great, so what, which bits of this do I need to remember?"."This makes total sense, and definitely there's a difference between just disliking exposition for its own sake, and disliking how and when exposition is used. I tend to like a history of a culture or a recap of a series of events which led up to the current situation that we'll soon be plopped into, but too much info, and even my eyes will glaze over, and I'll be shaking the book and wanting to know why they couldn't use SOME context...
So I do agree that there is a limit to the amount of detail in exposition. It should be relevant and progress the story, not bog it down. Like my train analogy before (and your car analogy) - if all you need is to say that a character is taking the train, then I don't need to know the history of the whole railroad industry (or car mechanical theory).
I think you also make a good point in your previous post as well - that the explanations need to fit to the audience. Two specialists are going to relate very differently between themselves than they would relate to someone who isn't knowledgeable in a particular topic or area. They would explain things a bit more, use lay terms, etc. (One of the issues that I had when reading Blindsight was that this book did not do that, and just plopped me into the story (twice) and made me figure it out and catch up. And some people like that they aren't coddled or spoken down to, but I was massively out of my league on that one. The word 'topology' is seared into my mind now, and I still am confused by it. There's no help for me. LOL)
Nathan wrote: "Number 3 is a little more gray. I LIKE stories with a lot of detail, a lot of research, deep technological macguffins. At least as long as it's accurate and not mere technobabble. But yes, it should not swamp the story, but the story needs to be stronger, not the research weaker. NEVER weaken the research, the detail, to favor a weak story. If the detail is overshadowing the story, improve the story! ..."I agree with Nathan. I also agree with Trike that it often works to write Chapter One as the hook and Chapter Two as the backstory (what you'd put in the prologue).
I'm reluctant to disagree with Brenda's expertise, but I just have to. If you're only writing to appeal to ppl who are distractable by TV and Facebook, you're not writing for me, or for others interested in something more substantial than the latest pulp thriller. If you're writing because you envy James Patterson's or Clive Cussler's riches, I'm putting you on my 'will not read' shelf.
Also, let me note that I just finished our current SF BotM, Cloud Atlas, and the whole first half is basically exposition/ info. dump. And yet lots of critics, readers, and movie-goers apparently love this book... I'm confused. I definitely think NetFlix and apple pie would have distracted even me from this.
Also consider (as Becky says) current trends, vs classics and vs the way that works for you. Frankenstein started with a frame that has basically no connection to the story itself (quick, who are Robert Walton and Margaret?)... and The Time Machine, in which our hero hosts the irrelevant dinner party. These are still beloved and influential books. Could it be they have relevance to this discussion? Or are they not actually examples of the kind of book you want to read?
Maybe that's what it comes down to. Why do you write? Who is your audience?
Cheryl wrote: "[...]and The Time Machine, in which our hero hosts the irrelevant dinner party."Coincidentally, I'm reading this right now, and thought of that very thing, though I was hesitant to bring it up because I am listening to the audio, AND I've been sick, so my attention span (iffy on a good day, lol) has been pretty OOH LOOK, A SQUIRREL the last couple days. So, I didn't know if I could be trusted to accurately represent it.
I should probably just start it over at this point, actually.
Krazykiwi !!!! I wish I had you in my book club. I recently joined a book club, the last book the three others in the group raved about because of the political concepts about a present country, about the things that had been done etc .I kept saying that the story had to be interesting no matter what political/philosophical points were being made. The first hint I had of a problem was the looooonnnnggg first chapter setting up the story.
But, the others said, but it was well written. I pointed out that exceptional grammatical expression is not the only thing needed for a good story.
I was out voted.
I will stick to these threads I think
Well, remember that there is no rule in writing that has not been broken, and magnificently. It's your book. Write it the way you have to write it. Be the one that is the exception, and makes everyone agree that, gosh, she really made the five prologues and two prefaces fly!
Cool... I like that. I don't want to read parts of this, but PM me when the book is published, if you want.
I love to jump right in, and prefer background details to emerge gradually, as a natural part of the story. I really enjoy books which take a more subtle approach, treat the reader as intelligent and don't spell everything out. Putting together all the elements like a puzzle, with constant surprises and interesting new information, is part of the fun of reading good speculative fiction. Great chunks of background info tend to disrupt the flow of the story, and for me the story is always paramount. Even the most interesting world building has to be backed up with great writing, well developed characters and an involving narrative.
Interestingly, *both* our current group BotMs start outside the main story, in a way.... In In the Night Garden it's called a Prelude, and you skip it at your peril....
SciFi and Fantasy Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
In the Night Garden (other topics)Cloud Atlas (other topics)
Blindsight (other topics)
The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon (other topics)
The Uplift War (other topics)
More...
Do you feel the same about every medium, or just books?
i.e.: open spoiler only if you've seen Tron Legacy.
(view spoiler)[In Tron Legacy, and bear with me, I've only seen it once. We start with the main character as a kid seeing his dad for the last time before he gets stuck in the machine. It's a pretty solidly executed scene and, to me, adds to the movie.
Next scene, would be chapter one, I think, starts with a BANG big motorcycle chase! (hide spoiler)]
Does that bother people too, or is it strictly when it happens in prose?