A bizarre thing happened to a client of mine one day.
This author is one of my best clients. She’s been writing all her life. She has a fabulous imagination and sees her characters moving and acting and speaking with wonderful vividness. She’s written lots of screenplays, so her dialog is especially sharp—dialog, in fact, is her style. (Not as blatantly as Amistead Maupin or Ivy Compton-Burnett, naturally. . .but still her style.)
She knows the premise of every novel she writes, so she knows where she’s headed all along as she delves deep into creating the plots and scenes that illuminate her stories.
She’s humble and dedicated and willing to write and rewrite and think and rethink everything she needs to in order to make her novels just right. She’s completely, utterly committed learning to this craft.
And I teach her—as I teach all my clients—to minimize the use of exposition.
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Exposition is telling
Yes, this is shorthand, but it’s still pretty much the gist of it.
We can get into the finer definitions of exposition and telling (and we will further down), but, really, fiction in general can be broken into showing and telling—scenes as showing, and exposition as telling.
As it happens, I know a whole lot about exposition.
It’s a fascinating technique that can slip information unobtrusively into story, throw in a little backstory without taking time for flashback, carry rhythm, and—mostly wonderfully—in the hands of a master create strong voice, even plumb the depths of profundity.
Some of my favorite authors (Elizabeth Bowen, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Isak Denisen, Graham Greene, Henry James, et cetera, et cetera) were whizzes with exposition, so I’ve studied and practiced exposition for many, many years.
However, exposition is really hard to do so well a story simply can’t exist without it.
And stories are best-written when they’re written only in the words they absolutely need and no others.
The truth is that good scenes are within the reach of pretty much anyone with three or more senses and the ability to type (or write longhand). Flannery O’Connor was a great one for advocating the use of your senses and your writing hand to skip over all that fal-de-rol about deep thought and just write great stories about what you perceive.
I think we can safely say O’Connor knew what she was talking about. What she described is showing, and if you study O’Connor you’ll see she stuck strictly to scenes.
And so did the vast majority of the other canonical writers still making money for publishers.
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Pink Is not necessarily the new red
However, I know you’re seeing articles floating around recently turning “show, don’t tell” inside-out into, “tell, don’t show!” This is partly because exposition can play a role in fiction if you know what it’s for and have practiced learning to do it well.
It’s also—largely—because those of us who blog about craft have said most of what we have to say over the past few years of the explosion of the blogosphere and are now looking for ways to say something new and unexpected.
“The anti-rules are the new rules! Pink is the new red! Telling is the new showing!”
It gives us something to talk about.
Yes, we can get into complex high-level academic discussion about whether or not details included in exposition make that exposition ineligible for the term telling. And we can contemplate together the ways in which a line or two of exposition dropped adroitly into scenes can illuminate subtext and the meaning story has for its characters, thus complicating the term showing.
Both these techniques blur the distinctions and give those of us who like that kind of discussion all kinds of good material to chat about.
We like chatting about this stuff.
But most of the aspiring writers who come to me aren’t looking for complex high-level academic discussion. They’re just looking for useful, straight-forward guidelines that they can remember as they focus—and rightly so—upon writing their stories.
Fiction lives and breathes through scenes.
So, as the greats have been saying along with Henry James for a very long time: “Show, don’t tell.”
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Dialog is showing NOT telling
Of course, it wasn’t an unbelievable surprise when my client got a rejection on that day long ago.
Although she was querying a lovely novel with good, strong writing, aspiring writers always get rejections. In fact, lots and lots of aspiring writers are getting rejections lately. It was bad ten years ago. Now that we have the current publishing industry, it’s an epidemic.
What was depressing about this one was the agent saying they’d rejected the novel—even though they thought it was “well-written” and “were crazy about” the premise—because it didn’t have enough of that good stuff about the characters’ feelings in it.
The agent didn’t know what to name that stuff, but they did know that they wanted to be more constantly told what to feel rather than mostly shown the characters and events of the novel and allowed to react with their own feelings, in their own way.
It was, in a word, too subtle.
This agent thought that telling the reader how to feel would be ‘more commercial.’
And while the agent didn’t know the word for it (although their resume lists working as an editor at a major publishing house), what this agent meant was exposition.
They meant the novel needed more telling, less showing.
There are, of course, reasons for why this agent thought exposition would be more commercial, which I intend to delve right into next week. (And just this morning my husband sent me a link to a letter by C.S.Lewis explaining quite simply why telling the reader what to feel is a bad idea.)
But for now let’s just politely say. . .this agent should probably have been better trained at that publishing house where they were employed as an editor.
Because then they became bizarro.
The agent informed my client that the real problem with her manuscript was the dialog, “which is telling, not showing.”
And this is when I started to bang my head on my desk.
Dialog is not telling. Good heavens! Dialog is the characters’ voices.
“Telling” is the narrator’s voice telling the reader what to think and how to feel. That’s exposition—exactly what this agent wanted more of.
Dialog is part of showing.
“Showing” is where the author shows the characters as they act and speak and move in their described environment—and keeps their own big trap shut.
This is my head on my desk: bang, bang, bang.
O, ye innocent aspiring writers querying in today’s industry: beware.
Not everyone associated with publishing knows what they’re talking about. A great number of them are quite young and therefore understandably low on professional experience. Some of them have picked up terrible advice and, without the guidance of experienced editors or in-depth study of literature to correct them, they pass it on to aspiring writers, secure in the assumption that the unpublished will take anything publishing professionals say as gospel.
If you want to be involved in this industry, you must simply be prepared for such nonsense.
Truly, folks—it’s a very bizarre era.
NEXT WEEK: We’ll get into the reasons behind why heavy exposition might be considered more commercial in today’s publishing industry.