Welcome To My Head; I Made You A Guidebook

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Appreciate a Dragon Day
National Nothing Day
Religious Freedom Day
Haru-No-Yabuiri (Japan)
National Day of Peace (El Salvador)

 

Almost done with the introductory Doctors … in … SPACE! story. Gods be damned, I hate endings, so I’m procrastinating by reading back through it and trying to balance out the action with the endless exposition.

Exposition is troublesome in science fiction.  Crazy conworld and conlang guru Mark Rosenfelder wrote a pretty good parody of the style of writing employed, but it’s kind of hard to avoid it in science fiction.  The problem is that science fiction is supposed to portray Another World, a world Different From Ours. This means that the reader can’t take things like how to get from Point A to Point B for granted, because maybe the usual method of intercity travel is to ride on the back of flying whales that follow specific sonar patterns emitted from evenly spaced whale towers between the two cities.* The people on that world would take it for granted, but we’d need to have it explained.

It’s not limited to science fiction, though.  You can get that with historical fiction—I always thought the American Girl stories actually took an interesting approach, where any unfamiliar object, like a hornbook or a turn-of-the-century swimsuit or a water gourd, was taken in stride in the story, but also shown in a very nice little spot illustration for the reader. All of those damn doctor shows on TV necessitate a lot of expository dialogue that no doctor would ever really use.** And a fascinating article by Steven Goldstein covers how different world translations of Harry Potter books may have to include footnoted explanations for things like afternoon tea or how one eats cornflakes.***

 

If you have to explain something like that, then imagine how much harder it is for somebody writing about a tidelocked planet (where the sun never moves in the sky), or about a flying species or one that sees in infrared or doesn’t see at all but smells everything.  These would all have serious impact on evolution, and then further on the radiation of different cultures, and so the author has to start from the ground up.

 

Of course, that’s part of the fun of science fiction: exploring the milieu, or what gamers call sandbox play. Make your world interesting enough, and you don’t even need a plot. Do you remember Dinotopia, back before all the silly knockoff novels? Nothing particularly significant happens in that—it’s just a guy wandering around remarking on things like the setup of a hatchery or how dinosaurs read scrolls instead of books. (Okay, and it had pretty paintings.)  I don’t need to so much limit the exposition as I need to make it interesting enough that people will want to read it as well as the story.

 

The trick is to do it well.  You have to make it interesting, and also you have to trust your readers.  I read enough science fiction to know that you don’t need to be totally explicit about everything that happens—readers can pick up a lot of details from a simple concept.  My science fiction seminar teacher’s favorite example was of The Space Merchants, where one of the first details is that the main character decides to splurge and wash his face from the freshwater tap in his sink instead of the saltwater one.  You can extrapolate a lot from that unelaborated detail, and a lot more from other contextual clues. Good exposition and description is a guide to help readers build the rest.

 

That’s what I’m working on right now—striking the balance, making it interesting, and trusting the reader.  It’s a tough job, but it should pay off.

 

 

*But probably not.

 

**A lot of doctors will respond to someone else’s comments about a case with something like, “Metastasis? But that means that the cancer has spread through her body!”  And of course, there’s the ever popular preface “Well, as you know, doctor …” which writers NEVER OVERUSE.

 

***Hell, they had to translate the American version of Harry Potter, because they figured American kids would get some weird ideas if Mrs. Weasley kept sending all the boys jumpers for Christmas.

Comments

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

I think dialogue exposition is horrid! Except perhaps in cases where the person being talked at actually has no clue as to what's going on... as you know, Bob.

Dinotopia is so very pretty... I think I still have both books.

[nixve.livejournal.com]

*nodnod* the "As you know, Bob" stuff really grates on me. Especially in movie adaptations where they're doing a shoddy job of getting a book into a movie.

I loved Dinotopia, the paintings were wonderful. :)

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Yeah! It breaks up the flow of a story pretty badly.

I love dinosaurs, and Dinotopia solidified that love. ;) I think it also instilled in me a deep appreciation of art, because of course dinosaurs + art = awesome. (and that is a mathematical law!)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Therefore, Amelia inserts a coupla clueless Terran humans for just such a purpose. "Gee willikers, Ms. Alien, I didn't know that! Tell me more! Perhaps I will even make an oblique analogy familiar to a reader in a Western Earth nation!"*

Also helps that my protagonist thinks like an encyclopedia. I'd say that was a clever narrative choice on my part, but the truth is that he was like that before he ever became a protagonist. (So was his tendency to be a psychic voyeur, which turned out really useful for conveying other scenes or points of view not normally accessible from a first-person narrative. I wish that would happen more often.)

*Fry: 'DOOP'? What's that?
Farnsworth: It's similar to the United Nations from your time, Fry.
Fry: Uhh ...
Hermes: Or like the Federation from your Star Trek program.
Fry: Ohhh!

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. I'm not sure I'd find that quite believeable in a story, but of course it depends on how it is handled. Cute analogies, though! :D

A psychic voyeur! Sounds quite handy narrative-wise-- and possibly in his career?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*gets out notebook in case she needs to make improvements* What's not believable? The humans? And why?

Hmm ... I may have to just post the story so it gets clarified. But it may take me a while to tweak it enough that I want to share it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Whoops, sorry, compy got mad and posted twice.