We talked last week about an alarmingly bizarre piece of writing advice one of my clients got from an agent in response to her requested full manuscript.
We also talked about exposition & telling and why they’re pretty much exactly the same thing, even though I know we out here in the bathosphere of professional fiction sometimes like to sit around chewing the fat over the fine points of complex technicalities.
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Exposition is authorial commentary
I advocate minimizing the use of exposition.
This is because it’s a great deal of what we usually write when we’re still mulling over our stories in early drafts—lots of stuff like, “This was interesting, because she really hadn’t ever thought much about rabbits, and suspenders reminded her of her uncles,” and, “If only he had known about the sad, heartbreaking history behind the woodshed he’d have thought twice before buying an ax,” and “Again, they wondered why the operator kept buzzing through.”
That’s all useful to us as writers, but it can safely be edited out once we figure out how to “Dramatize!” as Henry James said. “Dramatize!”
Drama is the good stuff that moves the story out of the writer’s head and into the reader’s.
We also call that stuff “scenes.”
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Run-of-the-mill authorial commentary is supposed to be edited out of final drafts
Sadly, though, exposition is often used these days in published fiction to skim right over scenes without delving into the vivid details that bring characters alive. The overwhelming telling doesn’t get edited out. So exposition winds up being used as a crutch rather than a technique.
Why does this happen?
Because the publishing industry has morphed in recent decades from being about storytelling that lasts—which has always been financed, it’s true, by a great deal of mediocre mass market shove-a-matic fiction—to being mostly about slipping those ole wallets out of readers’ pockets.
Successful genre authors are pressured to churn out books faster and faster. Authors who don’t arrive on the publishers’ doorsteps with massive followings are often summarily booted out high windows if their first novels don’t bring in big bucks.
And the worst part of it: many publishers have stopped editing manuscripts altogether, so whatever early drafts their authors (particularly big names) churn out can go straight to the presses without editorial interference (ask me about a book going straight to the presses without editing)—still full of their authorial commentary, which is the exposition we writers accidentally write as we explore our novels.
Publishers’ editing is becoming a dying craft.
It’s a self-consuming cycle of failing literature.
Now those early-draft unedited novels full of exposition are seen by newbies to the industry as the models upon which all fiction must be formed, although they’re the lowest-common-denominator of our day.
A whole generation of publishing professionals is growing up without even knowing about the existence of editing techniques, as though no publisher’s editor had ever sweated long hours in the office over polishing good writing into beautiful prose, or spent weeks and months (yes, even years) working over and over scenes and storylines and character development with their authors, guiding the translation of narrative summary into narrative—as though professional editing itself were meaningless to fiction.
A reader’s nightmare.
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Lack of editing is killing the craft of fiction
Remember John Gardner and his wonderful, immortal discussion of fiction as a “vivid continuous dream”?
Remember Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press working meticulously with Jack Kerouac on his scroll manuscript–plus pages and pages of additional scenes–to create On the Road?
Remember Pat Covici, also of Viking Press, corresponding with John Steinbeck for years about the development of The Grapes of Wrath?
Remember Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, famous for lying on the floor with his authors going over their manuscripts for hours and even bringing in other editors to back him up in arguments over details as granular as punctuation?
Remember Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons, who ‘discovered’ and edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe? He famously told James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, “You explain too much, you use too much exposition. Put it into action and dialog!”
Exposition is not more commercial than scenes, as some of the inexperienced sometimes claim.
It is simply common in today’s early-draft unedited fiction.
Actually, dependence upon heavy exposition isn’t even a new literary crime. It’s always been a problem in throw-away fiction, the cheap stuff nobody remembers. Vintage fiction, of which I am a minor aficionado, can occasionally be full of it. (In the 1920s, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a whole lot of treacly, emotional exposition. Wow, he could be a terrible writer.)
And the less fiction is taught and mentored and edited by editors through whose hands pass the literature of an era, the worse that fiction turns out to be.
Take note, folks: this is what it’s like to watch your era’s literature die right there on the vine.
Jane Austen is now and always has been an enormously commercial author. That’s because she filled her novels with vivid scenes and mostly left the reader to decide how they felt about them. So did Arthur Conan Doyle. And Emily and Charlotte Bronte. And Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Colette, Gordimer, Cather, Conrad, Bowen, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bowles, Updike, Salinger, Bellow, Carver, LeGuin, Chandler, Nemirovsky, Tolkien, Peake, and “I Am a Camera” Isherwood.
Every one of these authors is still making money for publishing houses.
Because stories that rely on scenes to show the reader things about which they might have feelings—rather than on exposition to tell that reader how to feel—is the stuff of fiction. . .in fact, the stuff of great literature.
And it’s commercial.