Meta, distilled.

[amanuensis1]

Meta-revelation:

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Red Glove by Holly Black, and all through the book I was delighted at how little exposition the book throws at the reader. The book treats the reader like an intelligent creature who can infer from context, as it drops hints at events past and assumes the reader has plenty of imagination to invent the conversations these characters might have had, the details of the lives they've lived before they arrived at these stages in their conflicts. It uses unfamiliar jargon and doesn't stop the action to explain it, since context is plenty. It was one of the first books in a long time that hasn't pinged my annoyance button with tedious blocks of exposition, and I was delighted.

Of course, once I finished it, I discovered it was the second book in a series. *facepalm*

Except, as I lifted my face outta my palm, it made me realize: this is how I like my fiction. How I like to read it and how I like to write it. Where the worldbuilding comes as it comes. Free of dense exposition blocks. Showing the unfamiliar in its context. Assuming the reader can use her brain.

No one style is going to please everyone, but here's my new personal writing maxim: write like it's the second book.

Comments

[cathellisen.livejournal.com]

I'm with you 100% on that, and it's how I like to read and write.

Unfortunately, it's not always up to the writers, esp newbie ones with no publishing clout. I was asked to do a fair amount of expositiony type stuff by my editor, and although I tried to slip it in as seamlessly as possible it *is* still there.

Not saying that what she asked for was bad, just that it was more than I would have chosen to include.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I do know what you mean; I've been there too. I made the deliberate choice that in my latest piece, Muscle Memory, there was going to be very little physical character description that didn't matter to the story itself. Which means I haven't mentioned almost anyone's hair color and I definitely haven't described eye color. I know, though, that an editor for publication would likely ask for those elements added in, even though I'm doing it because this is the way I like to read and assume there are others who think like me.

[painless-j.livejournal.com]

Very lolsome :)

But yeah, I prefer to be trated as an intelligent human being too, as a reader. So yeah, I'm a big exposition hater too.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I hate picking up a series at anything other than the beginning! But I was so pleased with this experience that part of me wants to try it again, with a series in which I'm not so invested. I have the feeling I might have liked The Hunger Games series better if I'd started with Catching Fire.

[mithrigil.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

And your icon is the perfect "writer's block" maxim!

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

No one style is going to please everyone, but here's my new personal writing maxim: write like it's the second book.

I like this. I'm also someone who finds exposition at best annoying and at worst (in my own work) excruciating. I've had a lot of thoughtful conversation with beta readers before in which it became clear, on certain stories, that I had to make a conscious choice to alienate some readers if I wanted to be as subtle or as extra-text-dependent as I wanted to be (with some of those editors taking the position that I can't afford to further alienate people, given the pairings and characters I write). But I take pleasure in figuring things out as I read rather than being instructed by some invisible authority, and at the end of the day, I think I'd like to write for people who feel the same.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

One thing of which I've been conscious: if a story of mine has some kind of revelation at the end, I have always relied on this math:

-I cannot make 100% of the readers say, "Oh! Nifty!".

-I must choose a 85%/15% split.

-The split I chose is that 85% of the readers say, "Oh! Nifty!" and 15% of the readers say, "Wha?", as opposed to 15% of the readers saying, "Yes, we GET it, we GOT it a page-and-a-half ago," and 85% saying, "Oh! Nifty!" I would rather baffle 15% than make 15% roll their eyes.

[belleamant.livejournal.com]

I love your new maxim. I actually read the post to my husband. :)

I will say that White Cat also drops you into the world mid-story with very little exposition. And the audiobook is Jesse Eisenberg, who does a great Cassel.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I feel as if I could trust this author to have carried a similar tersity of exposition in the first book, so, I may give it a try! And there are definitely authors who manage to curb the exposition in their style, no matter what book it is.

[meredyth-13.livejournal.com]

I understand what you're saying - and for the most part agree. As a somewhat clueless person, it's not that I need piles of exposition, but I do get annoyed when information is presented in such a cryptic way that it loses sense for me. Minimal is good, but coherent and minimal is better.

No, I don't have any good examples. It was just a thought I had reading your post.

On another tact, however, I have tried reading several Holly Black books, and although I have appreciated them on some level, I can't say I've enjoyed any of them - as enjoyable experiences. I've yet to read one of her books where I've actually liked any of her characters, and I do like to like at least someone. *sigh*

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I think that it's fair to say that in any given book, if half the readers go, "Oh!" at The Big Reveal and half go "Wait, WHAT?" but then the "Wait, WHAT?" people go back and read the last page again and at least 35% of them join the "Oh!" people at that point, then in my opinion that's the way I like to read/write. I don't mind if I'm in the "Wait, WHAT?" group on the first go-round (in fact, that tells me that the book passes the "subtlety" test, so I like that) but I do want to get it by the time I go back and read the last page again. If that made any sense at ALL.

I don't have to like the character(s) as long as I can match the headspace of someone, preferably the protagonist. And if it's a first-person POV it needs to be the narrator. (That's a post of meta all by itself!)

[midnitemaraud-r.livejournal.com]

This is one reason why I love Dan Simmons' books. (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, Rise of Endymion, and even his more recent Ilium and Olympos.) They're all science fiction, and even on the very first page he introduces things without explaining exactly what they are, and leaves it to the rest of the text to put things in context for the reader to figure out.

That's not to say I always despise exposition, but I really don't like it when it's written in a condescending, let-me-hold-you-by-the-hand way, or when it interrupts the flow of the rest of the story.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I read Hyperion ages and ages ago. I should check it out again!

Exposition isn't always awful, but I can be turned off by the least little things--contrivances that have the narrator describing physical description in a way that's unnatural, for one vague example.

[ella-bane.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Steven Erikson? He writes exactly like that. And yet, his worlds are the richest I've ever read. You put it exactly how I felt while reading his books. He trusted the reader to figure shit out. I remember reading an interview he gave in which he talked about how an American publisher told him his books were 'too smart' for the American audience!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I have sent a preview sample to my Kindle right this minute, on your say-so! I will check him out, thank you!

[pauraque]

I'm with you on this. I always err on the side of subtlety too, and have had to accept that I'll always get a certain number of "it sounded good but I didn't get it" reactions.

As a side note, I love fanfic partially because it frees authors from needing to explain the context. In fanfic you always start in the middle.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Yes! I realized that this is probably one of the reasons I love to read fanfic from good authors even when I don't know the canon. Sometimes especially when I don't know the canon. It's certainly one of the reasons I love to write fanfiction, and I suspect many feel the same even if they aren't conscious of it.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I so, so agree with this! That's what I love about fanfic, actually, that all of that exposition isn't necessary. It's expected that the reader understands the context or can figure it out, and we just get on with it. And then it's fun to see new pieces of that world added on without fanfare or exposition, just put there for us to figure out. I have that same feeling you describe of knowing that the author assumed I was smart enough to figure it out for myself.

I also love this in fiction, but you're right that it's so hard to find.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

The fanfic link is so powerful! (I hoped my flist would bring that up, because it deserved the discussion point. :D ) I think fanfiction teaches us economy of writing; it also teaches us how damn hard it can be to worldbuild, DEFTLY, when we try to move away from it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

This is maybe why I find origfic so hard. It's as if I first have to write my canon / first novel / unpublished endless wodge of exposition, then scrap all of that and go to write the fanon.

[melonaise.livejournal.com]

May I suggest Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear?

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

You can! I'll give it a look!

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

I once explained my "fondue theory of exposition" to a new writer who was...not good...at exposition. Exposition is like dry bread: the only way you can get people to chew and swallow it is to cut it up into small chunks and dip it in melted cheese. But it has to be good cheese and a nice dry white wine.

Physical descriptions of people should be used extremely sparingly if at all IMHO. POV characters should never describe themselves! Except maybe obliquely--"She was taller than I was, but then again most people were," tells you that the POV character is short, which is acceptable if shortness is important to his or her character. Eye color is never important unless the character's father is questioning the character's paternity on the basis of it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

One of the many things I love about Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness is that the reader doesn't find out until about 100 pages or so into the novel that the main first-person protagonist is black. This at once made me reflect on my own prejudices when reading, and made me feel wonderfully liberated that I could now free those prejudices, and it also is powerful in that the protagonist does not think of himself as 'black' but as 'human'.

What a contrast to the ridiculous Life of Pi by Yann Martell which at one point insists that the main protagonist felt like a lonely scared Indian boy. Wut? Never in my life have I felt like a lonely scared German girl. When lonely or scared, I always just feel like a human.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I loved Life of Pi, but I must admit I missed that particular bit! When you point it out it does sound embarrassing.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I liked aspects of it, esp. the lost island, but the bit about the boy's Indian brownness was just too cringe-making.

[pauraque]

Great point.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I love your fondue theory, it sounds brilliant! Good cheese. Very good cheese and good wine, yes.

I see contrivances that get used over and over for POV characters to describe themselves. I've told myself that if I ever have a character look at herself in a mirror on page two in order to describe her features, I'm hittin' myself over the head with a copy of the OED.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, no. Not the mirror! Or the equally bad "He looked at me and I knew he only saw a slender teenager with crystal-clear blue eyes, alabaster skin, and blonde hair reaching my thighs. He didn't see the real me, the angsty, hackneyed victim of the evil du jour."

Please to be hitting me over the head with the same OED if I use either of these.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Actually, Holly does this in the first book of the series as well. She doesn't stop to explain things, she just jumps right in. Drops you right into the action in the very first scene. White Cat is one of the very best YA books I've ever read, and I'm kind of hoarding Red Glove for a bad day. So your original revelation still stands.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I have no problem believing this, as I should be able to expect the style would carry over even into the first book. Yeah, I'll probably get to White Cat one of these days, thanks for the prompt!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yay, I like the maxim! Your post reminded me a lot of my first reading of William Gibson which was Neuromancer. I flailed about in delight for the first 50 pages at least, having no clue but swimming along through the texture and the language and slowly noting it all come together until, wham, another opaque thing was introduced and the process started over again. It was a fantastic reading experience. I was then hooked on W. Gibson and read all the other books he'd published at that time, and found out that even though Neuromancer was the FIRST in a trilogy, he'd written lots of short stories set in the same universe with lots more exposition.

So, yes: the maxim holds!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

W. Gibson does an amazing job with this! I read Pattern Recognition a few years ago and thought, wow, he's still got it, no wonder I love his stuff even when his plots go a little blurry on me.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I find W. Gibson patchy. Pattern Recognition was nice but others I couldn't finish and can't even remember their titles. But then I heard him on Desert Island Discs and he was an absolute darling and I forgave him every crappy novel he's ever written because, basically, he de man.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

You know, I am getting really irritated with second (and further) books that are filled with all the exposition dump to make sure that you understand what happened in the previous book(s) even if you didn't read them. I think I'm finally giving up on the Sookie Stackhouse books because after 6 or 7, they are nothing BUT exposition about what happened in the previous books, and precious little new material!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

One of my guilty pleasure series is Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books; the first was delightful but it seems in every later book the protagonist has to explain her amazing discoveries over and over again for every new audience she encounters, to the point where it's laughable. Man, those books make me groan in disbelief (even as I end up reading them anyway).

[ruthannereid.livejournal.com]

Very interesting! I like the way you think.

I don't know if it would fly with the publishing industry, but you are hardly dependent on them. *grins*

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

True! Unless, you wanna be, y'know, published. ^_^ (Which is not always the goal for everyone!)

[freed-wings.livejournal.com]

That's actually pretty typical of her writing style. She's very subtle, and a lot of her stuff is dark in a classy way. If you haven't read them, I'd highly recommend Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside, a sort of accidental trilogy(you could read either of the first alone, but Ironside connects them). She really won't spell everything out for you. Tithe is maybe the most simplistic, but they grow more complicated. I think they'd be right up your alley. There's even creepy dubcon/noncon slash! Hurrah...

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I did go back and read White Cat and you're right, this seems to be typical of how she writes. I may check out Tithe!