How Do You like Your Exposition?

[[deleted user]]

Michele wrote: "I like mine poached - "

Placed, of course, on a firm foundation of crisply toasted English muffin, hammed up a bit and smothered in something cheesy.

This egg metaphor seemed a lot cleverer a few days ago... :)

[Allynn]

@Michele, the egg metaphor is actually a tasty way to talk about it. There are so many ways to enjoy a meal based on the simple egg just as there are so many ways to enjoy a story. I like generous amounts of ham and cheese occasionally but hold the Hollandaise, please - that's a bit too saucy for my pallet. Loving this discussion.

[Marina]

Guys, stop! you're making me hungry!

[Mary]

I'll observe that a chunk of exposition doesn't have to be at the beginning. Poul Anderson was a master of slipping one such chunk somewhere in the first chapter.

He tended to do that while the viewpoint characters were thinking somewhat along those lines, and he had an excellent style so the reader could slip right into the exposition and out again without noticing it, as smoothly as a swan slipping from sunlight to shadow and out again. And, of course, he'd primed us to realize the information was important, so we'd be curious.

[[deleted user]]

what drives me nuts is when a author "makes up" words, and I can't dope out their meaning, and it's never explained...Philip K Dick did that alot in his novels...

[[deleted user]]

Spooky1947 wrote: "what drives me nuts is when a author "makes up" words, and I can't dope out their meaning, and it's never explained...Philip K Dick did that alot in his novels."

Tanj! You don't grok PK Dick? Not in my karass, muggle!

[[deleted user]]

G33, you represent only the best kind of IDIC, but an IDIC none the less!!

sorry dude, but you walked into that one... :D

[Brenda]

A real expert in exposition is a joy to read. Heinlein was a master. You don't even notice him doing it, he is so good. When you notice, that is bad -- just like when you notice the dancers working hard or the politicians sweating on stage or the smoke coming from the restaurant kitchen. When it's really expert, you will never see it.

[Hillary]

Expo-wise, I prefer scrambled or over easy. I generally appreciate it when a writer gives the reader some credit for figuring things out in context

One recent peev, however, is when significant details that are perfectly obvious/accepted to the characters are only "revealed" to the reader well into the middle -- or even at the climax -- of the story. In some cases, an author will deliberately obscure these well-known-to-everyone-but-the-reader facts. (A perhaps-not-entirely-fair example that springs to mind: if a character is referred to as others as being "lessened," I know that's not gonna be a good thing, but I'm pretty annoyed if it takes me 30 more pages to find out that "lessened" meant "his clone was killed" and everyone who took part in the conversation knew that perfectly well.) I don't know whether this is a particular pitfall of "scrambled" style or whether it's a more general issue of plot structure. In general, if a revelation or insight is important to the climax of a story, I want it to be a revelation to the characters as well (preferable, to me *and* the characters), not something that's only new to me that the characters have known all along. Otherwise, it's kind of the opposite of dramatic irony.

[Christy]

G33z3r wrote: "In defense of David Weber (since I first cited him as a datadumpy author), what he is trying to do is provide the feel of a Horatio Hornblower or Jack Aubrey early 19th-century naval warfare, and o..."

I also like Weber's stories. The parts I generally skip over are all the technology bits where he tells us every little detail about a missile, for about 3 pages. It reminds me a bit of Tom Clancy's ever-increasing tomes (his editor should rein him in a bit!), where it does become lecture mode. However, with Weber it is simple to just scan ahead till he gets back to the story, and the space battles are what his stories are mostly about. If you don't like that focus, you won't like his books. I happen to like them a lot.

[Jim]

Hillary wrote: "One recent peev, however, is when significant details that are perfectly obvious/accepted to the characters are only "revealed" to the reader well into the middle -..."

Your comment is timely. I just quit a book because there is too much that should be known, but isn't. Makes the heroine out to be an idiot. I just can't get into it.

[Mary]

the fun part is that what is laying it on with a trowel for some readers is going to be too subtle for others.

[Jim]

Fun? Frustrating for the author, I would think. It certainly is for readers. Authors need to keep to a standard to satisfy their readers. I quit reading Stephen King due to his insistence on spending pages describing common place objects, but love Zelazny who rarely explains anything & leaves many readers bewildered. It's a matter of taste. Friends of mine love King's books, the descriptions & long-winded, circuitous paths of his stories which bore me. They hate the uncertainty of so many of Zelazny's tales, which is what intrigues me.

[E.D.]

If you're soaking in the tub and a couple of bubbles appear between your knees..., you should be able to ascertain where they came from without knowing the molecular structure of methane. :}

[[deleted user]]

I think I prefer the egg & ice cream metaphors. :)

[Clare]

I've just had fun writing a section in which the conversation is just sufficient to explain events and context - would be sufficient if it was film dialogue - but my protagonist has also thought about some background information.

I figure SF readers are sharp, and may not need the background, but it feels more natural to have someone think the extra few lines than to force my characters to recap what they both already know.

[Matthew Reads Junk]

That's why I stopped reading Webber after about the third book. I didnt need an explination again of how the ships turn to their broadside to fire, or whatever. Let alone another reminder of treecats digging their claws in and comunicating feelings.

I like the made up dialogue and the challenge it gives my mind to fill in the blanks or guess what the slang is.
It sorts of depends of you want to be a passive vs active reader.

[[deleted user]]

Some authors have a gift for making the exposition entertaining in itself. Either they present a somewhat confusing scenario and leave us dying to figure out what happened, or they use a lot of humor in their exposition.

I wonder if that gives a edge to first person narration? That lets the author inject the personality of the main character into the exposition. (I can think of several stories where a first-person narrator explains things, even things that might be common knowledge to a contemporary, as if writing a diary specifically for non-contemporaries; and there's something about the folksy first-person approach that seems to make that work, even though it wouldn't sound right at all if inserted as dialog.)

[Mary]

G33z3r wrote: "I wonder if that gives a edge to first person narration?"

First person does have a definite edge because it's much easier to do an engaging voice. Omniscient with a chatty narrator also works.

Humor, however, is not necessary. All the voice has to be is interesting enough that you want to listen for more of this voice.

[[deleted user]]

Brenda wrote: "These days it is a question, how much front material to pile into a book. Consider when you go to Amazon to buy a book. The Look Inside feature lets you look at the first page or two. Do you want this first glimpse to be a family tree? ..."

I thought of this comment again this morning when I started reading the new Kate Daniels book (Magic Breaks). It starts with an introduction and acknowledgments and list of people the author thanks. Then there's a huge recap section (the first time the series has done that, I'm pretty sure.) Capsule descriptions of all the characters, and a summary of the previous six books in the form of a journal. (Oh, and there's a map! Definitely the first time for that. Of course, I'm collecting maps at the moment. :)

So I decided to "Look Inside" on Amazon, and sure enough, there's only room for one sentence of the first chapter before the sample ends!


It's kind of funny, no?

[Brenda]

Oh dear! That is too bad.

[[deleted user]]

I decided today that I like my Glossary in the front of the book. :)

[Ben]

A few surprises for me in this thread:-

1) I only just noticed it, I am usually pretty sharp at noticing and reading threads here

2) no-one has either talked about "Show dont tell" as the rule writers to follow or mentioned Kim Stanley Robinsons critique of this as a "zombie idea"

I dont mind what approach the author takes as long as it is either reasonably accessible or it has me hooked sufficiently to give it the time, effort, rereading if neccisary to work out what is going on.

Info dumps can be more engaging and well written than some plots (take Red Mars - I really enjoyed all the stuff about the challenges of terraforming Mars but cannot remember anything much about the smaller scale story/narrative of the book.

[[deleted user]]

Glossary in the front of the book....is it just me, or does anyone else hate books with to dang many people in em? When I come across a book with a who's who in the front of it, I quickly put it down

[Michael]

I tend to start skimming when info dumps become too long (cough Weber cough) so I guess I like it spread out a bit. This also allows for character exposition without making it seem like they are giving a class on the subject.

[[deleted user]]

Brenda wrote: Oh sure, you can have a map in the front. Also a character list, like in Victorian novels. But will your reader read these things?

In ancient times (i.e. when I was young), movie makers used to put all the credits at the start of the movie. Eventually, after the Great Popcorn Riot of 1962, they realised that it was better to put them at the end. It's the same with books.

The main thing I demand from a book is that it should not send me to sleep. (At my age, very few books pass this test.) I therefore greatly prefer the over easy method to the other two: my ideal is that the author should draw me in with an intriguing first sentence, and thereafter keep me amused/horrified/excited without me realising I'm also being educated. The book I'm currently reading, Tom Holt's The Walled Orchard, does this superbly.

If a book starts with infodump, you need patience to get through it and trust that it will be worth it in the end. (It obviously helps if you've read the author before and have found that they generally deliver.) The worst infodump beginning I've come across is A Shadow on the Glass. Here the author has made the mistake of thinking that the infodump would be made more interesting if he had one character telling it to a lot of other characters. Wrong: it just slows it down.

As for the scrambled method, it requires dogged determination from the reader to plough through the unfamiliar terminology in the hope that it will all become clear. Again, you need to trust the author that it will all be worth it in the end. Being a jaded reader, I find it hard these days to trust anyone that much.

Over easy for me, please, every time.

[Jim]

Spooky1947 wrote: "...does anyone else hate books with to dang many people in em? When I come across a book with a who's who in the front of it, I quickly put it down"

I won't put a book down because of a list of characters in the front, but they are a cause for worry. I don't care for casts of thousands. They're too hard to remember & generally a needless complexity.

I HATE it when the names are similar & unpronounceable. I can't remember how many novels have been ruined for me over the years because of that. I need to be able to pronounce a name to make it stick & I'm not very good at it. When I can't, I rely on part of the name to differentiate them & if they're too similar... well, obviously the story suffers greatly.

[Michael]

I'm not while about "cast of thousands" books either. I can think of a couple of books or series I gave up on simply because the narrative became too diffused. What I mean is the story tried to follow too many characters at once. It became hard to remember what was happening to who, and I was unable to muster any empathy for any of the characters, simply because I never spend enough time with any of them.

[Brenda]

That tends to be a flaw in the writing. The work is not structured right, if there are so many protagonists.

[[deleted user]]

Probably also the author is padding out the book with extra incidents because readers want more pages for their buck.

[K.F.]

Someone mentioned Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson - and I would have to lend my opinion that he did a great job in leading the reader through his world. Yes, he did go the easy route of having someone not familiar with it all as the main character, but the explanations (both written and implied) were very well done. I didn't feel in the least as if I were being lectured.

As for lists of characters and maps:

They don't necessarily turn me off from a book - but they better be there as more of a bells and whistles feature than references I need to look back to. I'll rarely go through them, anyway.

What I AM turned off to, however, are too many main characters. Dawnthief by James Barclay is an example I can readily think of.

The story itself was interesting, and fun. But there were so many dang characters...and I had no idea who the "main" one was. Especially when they kept dying. His theory was probably to keep the reader in suspense of the "anyone could die" frame of mind, but I just distanced myself from them all and didn't really care when one was offed. Oh, and another thing that ticked me off - they were supposed to be this band of great warriors, yet they died pretty darn quick...didn't make a lot of sense to me.

But back to the original question: I would love to see a "scrambled" way done correctly - otherwise, I prefer over easy. Give me the information I need right now, and don't bog me down with unnecessary information. If the chapel is gorgeous, and you want to describe how the stained glass looks - fine. But unless it's REALLY important right then and there to the story, please don't go on to explain how the glass was made from the finest of sands either with your characters or as narration...I just don't care.

The sunny side up approach really turns me off. Reminds me of prologues - and I HATE prologues. I'll rarely read them, as the reason I got the book was for the current story, not what came before. Same thing with laying out all or most of the information at the very start. I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are) but I'm interested in the STORY. Not how their particular warp drive works.

[Nikolay]

For me the main criterion is that the characters act naturally. This means: they are to know only what they can, and explain things only if the explanations are necessary from their point of view in a given moment.

I presume there are ways to make "sunny side" readable. For instance in The Left Hand of Darkness there is a whole chapter "narrated" by a woman scientist who is completely unrelated to the rest of the characters, and giving an exhaustive information about geten. The thing is: this is chapter 7. I remember being overly confused: "Are they all homosexual?", then skimming to ch 7 from ch 3, "Oh! Androgynous! Crap!", and then starting the book once again.

In Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, the protagonist writes a diary addressed for the extraterrestrial species, so presumably it should have been "sunny up" to "over easy". Yet, despite the fact that the book was written as early as in 1925, the author purposely omits long lecturing. He goes like: "Explaining to you, my alien readers, what the green wall is and what is it for would be the same as explaining the purpose of jackets to a savage." For the same reason, he omits the description of the principles spacetravel.

So, IMO, it really depends on the amount of "strangeness" of the world the reader is thrown in. Urban fantazy - all right, the inner workings of local magic may be taught by example, with theoretical basics presented when the protagonist fails to employ them. Being thrown in a world of spacefaring octopi is something completely different, and I'll possibly even appreciate a bit of "sunny side".

[[deleted user]]

Fantasy Faction has an interesting article on exposition, An Exiguous Exploration of Exposition in Expansive Epics

[[deleted user]]

will someone please tell me what The Great Popcorn Riot of 1962 was? I googled it and can't find it and the person above who mentioned it has deleted their account.

:(

[[deleted user]]

Spooky1947 wrote: "will someone please tell me what The Great Popcorn Riot of 1962 was? I googled it and can't find it and the person above who mentioned it has deleted their account."

I believe this was a fictitious event invented by the author humorous purposes in his analogy. You know, audience gets tired of 15 minutes of whooshing credits before Superman, wants story to begin.... Lost something in the explaining.

[K.]

Not sure if I prefer the sunnyside up analogy or the scrambled. I know I find it fun to read, and discover new things about the world/environment the characters are in. One of my favorite authors to return to is Elizabeth Moon. Either her anthology "The Deed of Pakcsenarrion" or her "Suiza" series.

In both of these, you start with a character that knows their world, but is constantly learning more. There is a little bit of catch up - sometimes a sly info dump to get things started, sometimes you just have to flat figure out what is going on - but once you reach the point where the character is, you get bits and pieces as the characters learn about them.

I know with my own writing, I do my best not to have huge lumps of info dumps. I try to either make them relevant to the current scene, or to give enough hints that the reader can figure out what is going on.

About the only thing I do not provide information on are the odd names I used for places. I have a growing list on my blog with these defined and detailed, but that is for the truly dedicated fan (when/if one shows up, I hope) who wants to know more. So far, my beta readers haven't said anything either way about the terms, so I'm hoping I haven't gotten too far afield with the concepts.