The cold has struck. It’s not as bad as I feared, but a deep cough and enough mucus to grease a runway? Check. Body aches and pains? Check. All this while I am undergoing that particular female biological process all girls of reproductive age are visited with about every twenty-eight to thirty-six days?

CHECK, dammit. Check.

Yeah, I know, too much information, Lili-san. Sorry. It is a blog, you know.

Reader Elaine asked after yesterday’s post on infodump, “For something that is on all the lists of story-telling errors, why is it so prevalent?”

Ah, a simple answer, Grasshopper. Because it’s easy.

Compare this:

Vanth was an assassin for the Jackal King. The Jackal King owned the streets in the city Vanth lived in, called Vois. Vanth was a real badass and hated the Jackal King.

To this:

It was time for another job. He stretched, making sure nothing would creak or jingle while he moved, took a few experimental steps, touched the garrote’s handles. A job that called for a neck cord was likely to end badly; you were just as much at risk of losing a finger as the mark was of losing its life.

Vanth preferred a good clean knifing from behind, if you prepared the ground well the mark could not easily struggle and cause problems. But perfumed, whispering, greasy Sivarus wanted this one strangled, it was a condition of the prize, and one did not disagree with the Jackal King’s expressed preferences. Not unless you wanted to lose the prize and quite possibly one’s own license to weed the world of annoyances.

That was how Vanth phrased it to himself, when he thought of it at all. He was in the business of removing annoyances, for those who had the money. The rich could pay for an annoyance-free life. Other sad saps, like Vanth himself, had to work for every annoyance-free moment they could snatch.

He took a final look around his small rented room, closed one eye, and stared at his unmade cot while he counted to fifteen. Then he blew out the candle, opened his now dark-adapted eye, and ghosted for the window.

It never did to leave from the front door too often…

That isn’t the best illustration in the world, but it works. Exposition seems easier because we place a premium on verbal information-giving. However, what works well verbally may not ever work well on the page. An indirect directness works best on the page; you must avoid definitive statements from the third person about your protaganist (Vanth is a badass, Vanth hates Sivarus) but you can state definitively what the character is doing or thinking about (perfumed, greasy, whispering Silvarus; Vanth has to work for annoyance-free moments.) Those things, if chosen carefully, can hold two or three different pieces of information about the character at once. And they MUST.

Dialogue is not just what a character says. Dialogue must also serve the purpose of telling us something about the character and MOVING the story along. If it doesn’t, kill it swiftly before it breeds. Definitive statements from the character’s point of view are the same way. If they only say one thing, they’re exposition. If you can weave them to say two or three things about the character at once by showing what the character does and says, it’s actual writing.

A touch–a mere pinch–of exposition may be okay, if there is no other way to get the effect you want. One must, however, think carefully about what to put in and what task, exactly, the expo is supposed to perform. It must be a conscious choice.*

When I see a lot of infodump I see an apprentice writer’s mistake. When I start seeing less infodump and more showing, there are no longer apprentice mistakes–there are journeyman mistakes, which only about ten percent of people who think they’re writers make because they’ve made and learned from all the other mistakes. I don’t read stuff that makes apprentice mistakes. I put it back into the slush pile and I move on. Infodump is a mistake that will land you in the slush pile ninety-nine times out of a hundred.**

Exposition is a piece of information you give the reader that s/he just has to take on faith because you SAY so. (Vanth is a badass.) Real writing is where you show Vanth getting hit in the gut and a finger hacked off, and dealing with it well enough to kick the shit out of Sivarus’s goons and escape–and then bandage himself up while shaking and realizing how close to death he came THIS time. (Which touches on combat psychology and combat scenes, a different ball of wax. Stay focused, Lili.) Additionally, exposition is passive. There is no movement in infodump. The character stands there like a wax figurine to be painted. During SHOWING, not telling, the character moves and breathes in such a way that the reader can read between the lines and decipher numerous things about Vanth, his background, his personality, his job, his outlook on life, and his likely reasons for doing what he’s doing.

This is one of the reasons why writers must read constantly and omnivorously. After a while, infodump gets to be like pr0nography–you may not be able to define it but you knows it when you sees it.

It’s not easy. It’s a heck of a trick pony ride. But when done well, it’s what writing is all about, and it’s well worth thinking about. Pretty much every jackass who can tell a good joke at a family reunion thinks s/he can be a writer. “How hard can it be when it’s just telling stories?” But telling stories on the page requires a completely different skillset than telling stories at the family reunion. Each sentence has to perform multiple functions and balance against every other sentence. Then there’s plot and characterization, verisimilitude, pacing, and all sorts of other things to consider.

Hey, if this was easy, anyone could do it. And I’m sorry, but “just anyone” can’t do it. Writers work hard and think about these sorts of things.

Thank God.

* Breaking the rules consciously is NOT the same as breaking them because one doesn’t know any better.
** I can hear some of you now thinking about wildly popular books are are pure exposition–Dan Brown, for example, or Tom Clancy. Such books are not writing. They are technical manuals with a thin veneer of hero worship. Don’t bother with those.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Real Life, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.