Let's Set the Scene: How much exposition is necessary, anyway?

Hi everybody! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. All month long, we’ve been talking about editing. We’re talking about those dreaded first drafts, that horrible first round of editing, and all the things we have to train our eyes to find when it comes to those edits. We’ve talked about everything from plot holes to grammar and sentence structure, and this week, we’re going over the things that I think can take the longest to learn. If you haven’t checked out Tuesday’s post yet, be sure to do so!

For today, let’s talk about…

Gratuitous Exposition

As you know, Tuesday we talked about the opposite: dialogue. Those are the two types of writing you’ll have in your manuscript. You’ll have dialogue, and you’ll have all that other stuff. And, like we discussed on Tuesday, dialogue tends to be what draws a reader’s eye—because of that, we need to make sure we’re not overusing our exposition.

Where dialogue needs to be pointed and necessary, where dialogue draws the eye and allows readers to get to know characters a little bit better through their word use and actions during speech, exposition is the filler. It’s where readers find the real story, where readers discover through sight, smell, taste, touch, and feel. It’s where we writers get to introduce emotion and feeling, where we get to explore every little thing and show every tiny detail we’ve discovered about this world we created inside our writer brains.

And that’s also why we need to watch ourselves, and make sure we don’t overdo it.

I’ve been known to overdo it. I’ve been known to have to go through and cut down on my exposition, because I’ve described the same tree five times in two pages, and I know my readers just won’t care that much about this one specific tree. I’ve also been known to spend too much time in a single character’s head, to focus in on them and allow them to go down the rabbit hole of thought that so many people go down a million times throughout the day—and I know for a fact that nobody really wants to read that.

Just like with dialogue, exposition needs to have a reason. The only difference in how much exposition you’ll need to cut and keep lies in your genre, if I’m being honest. If you write thrillers, then you’ll probably want to limit your exposition. You won’t need to describe as many things as much as you’ll need to precisely use your exposition to maintain the tension of the story. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you write sci-fi or fantasy, then you get creative license to describe things a little bit more. If you’re making a whole new world out of nothing, your reader will want to be able to see it, to touch it, to make sense of it. So you’ll get to take that extra time to reproduce the vision you see in your head.

It all comes down to genre, yes, but the point will always stand: if you have too much exposition, your reader (especially if you market to the US) will get bored, and may put the book down. We don’t want that. We want readers to love our stories as much as we do.

That’s why we edit them so much, before they hit the shelf.

[love]

{Rani Divine}