Black Gate

As it happens, this line isn’t needed where it appears. We’re watching a movie and we can see for ourselves how tall Luke Skywalker is.

But imagine that we’re reading the screenplay or a novel. That one line tells us quite a bit. That troopers are usually tall. That Luke isn’t.

For a really brilliant example of how this works in a novel, consider Tom Holt’s Expecting Someone Taller. Without even opening the book, readers immediately know something about the main character’s appearance: he’s shorter than anyone expects.

I thought I was finished with exposition in my last post – or as finished as a writer ever is when talking about the elements of writing. But then I realized that, in a way, description is a particular form of exposition, just as necessary, and just as likely – yes, I’ll say it – to be skipped, or at least skimmed, by readers if it’s too long.

And description, like other forms of exposition, carries its own peculiar difficulties. What I’d like to talk about this week is how characters, especially main characters, are described. You know, what they look like, not their personalities.

[Aside: Is a fictional character an object? In giving them human characteristics, are we indulging in personification?]

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Not a lot of exposition in that type of ending, was there? Didn’t tell us much of what happened “after” – which actually turned out to be quite handy, when you consider the number of writers who have gone on to tell that “after” tale. Take Jim Hines and his Princess Novels, for example, where we learn the true, ever-after fates of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty.

We no longer see much of that type of ending, perhaps because when that phrase was used more often than it is now, there was an understanding of what “after” meant, and what “happiness” was, that removed the need for any further details.

What I’m really talking about here, of course, is that old story structure chart we were taught in school, the action that rises to the climax, followed by the denouement. Where “climax” is defined by “the point at which you know how the story ends” and “denouement” is defined by “what happens after that point” – or, as we might call it, the final exposition.

We’ve all had the experience, when discussing a movie or a book with our friends, of finding that some of us want the “final” explanation, the wrap up after the climax, and some of us are satisfied that we know what happens “after,” without having it spelled out for us.

The fact is that often where you as the writer want to stop isn’t where readers want you to stop – or so my editor tells me. In my own case, with my first novel, The Mirror Prince, I had what I thought was the perfect spot to end the story. Both my agent and my editor told me that I had to tell a little bit more, that the readers would want to know what happened after.

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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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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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The idea of genre in literature is relatively recent, if you take as your time span the history of the written word. Why, I remember a time when there were only two genres, Poetry and Prose. Or, as we call them nowadays, Fiction and Non-fiction. Things have gotten more complicated since Sir Philip Sydney wrote “A Defense of Poetry,” however, as I’m sure a glance over any of our own bookshelves would tell us.

Last week, in discussing my serial-killer fantasy, Path of the Sun, I started talking about cross-genre writing. I was writing a high fantasy crime novel, but most examples of the crime/fantasy cross are urban fantasies, set in an alternate reality.

The first of these to cross my path was Robert Heinlein’s “Magic Inc” (1940). Technically, it’s an amateur sleuth mystery – the main character isn’t a professional detective of any kind – Archie Fraser lives in a world where magic is a routine service you rent or purchase, like the expertise of a plumber or a musician. When he’s threatened by the equivalent of the mob, asking him to pay “insurance” for his business and threatening him with magical reprisals, he finds an unusual ally in the shape of a very powerful, and very old, witch.

In 1987/88, Glen Cook published the three novels that make up the Garrett Files: Sweet Silver Blues, Bitter Gold Hearts, and Cold Copper Tears. (Fans of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books will recognize MacDonald’s method of keeping his books straight by using a different colour in each title.)

Cook’s Garrett is a human private investigator with supernatural allies, but he sets the stage for the more recent Dresden Files, now in, I think, its fourteenth or fifteen volume. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden is himself a magician, part Sam Spade and part Merlin, living in an alternate version of Chicago.

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So, I decided to write a serial-killer book. All my friends were.

Perhaps I should explain. A lot of my friends are crime and mystery writers, and with them, after a few glasses of wine, the talk always seems to turn to serial-killer books. Who’s writing one. Who wants to. Who’s never gonna, no matter what. How publishers always push for one. It’s like serial killers are the new black.

Inevitably someone turns to me and says “Well, you don’t have to worry, Violette. It’s not like you could write a serial-killer fantasy novel.” Well, as you can imagine, I regarded those as fighting words – and now you know the origin of my novel, Path of the Sun.

Of course, that friend was echoing the John W. Campbell opinion on science-fiction mysteries that I mentioned a few weeks ago. According to Campbell, it couldn’t be done. Here in the community, experience has shown us that Campbell was wrong. But the attitude among non-fantasy or SF readers is still pretty much the same as his.

The trick, as most of you know, is to solve the crime – sometimes after figuring out how to commit the crime – within the parameters of our created worlds. Sometimes, we can even create crimes our pure-mystery-loving friends have never even thought of. Any common thief can steal money, the Fantasy or SF thief can steal your soul. Or a few hours of time out of your life. Or, perhaps, the best time of your life.

But let me get back to my serial killer.

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