You Need an Editor: Exposition that just needs help

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. Really. It wouldn’t be the same without you here.

This month, this lovely, finally-starting-to-cool-down-below-90-degrees month of September, we’re talking about editing. We’re talking about editing because it’s one of the most important things for writers to discuss, one of the most important things for us to understand, and to do. We need to both edit our own work, and to hire someone to edit our work after we’ve edited it ourselves. Why? Well, that’s what we’re talking about, this month.

You Need an Editor: Exposition that just needs help

Really. Your exposition needs help. I know it does, because I’m both a writer and an editor, so I know writing from both sides. There isn’t a writer in the world who writes perfect exposition—but there are a whole lot of writers out there who think they write some of the most amazing exposition in the world. And sure, they might be right, but they probably also hire an editor, to make sure it stays that way.

See, there are two kinds of miswritten exposition, and editors are great at finding and fixing either one.

Option 1: You’ve written too much exposition

Let’s face it, this happens not infrequently, to a lot of us. We sit down to write a scene, and we get overwhelmed ourselves by the amount of information we want (and need) to include in the scene. So we write all of it, we love all of it, and we think all of it is necessary, even in its chunky, blocky, pages upon pages upon pages format. And that’s not okay.

My general rule of thumb is that if it was overwhelming for you to write, if it was a lot of exposition and seems to you, as the writer, to be a lot of showing without a lot of telling and without a lot of action or dialogue… it probably needs a good edit. And if you can’t figure out how to find or fix those places, well then. You need an editor.

Option 2: You’ve written too little exposition

Logical, right? Those are the only two options. It’s fairly rare to have actually written the proper amount of exposition throughout your entire manuscript. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen, and I’ve edited a lot in my day. Some of you have underwritten your exposition. Maybe you’re not as comfortable writing it, maybe you didn’t know what needed to be said, but you didn’t include enough descriptions, enough actions, enough not-dialogue text in your manuscript. And that needs to change.

How do you spot writing like this? That’s easy. It’s mostly dialogue, without much happening that isn’t directly stated, through dialogue. And it’s actually one of my least favorite things to edit, because it feels like I end up changing a lot more than I would usually do in someone else’s manuscript. But most writers in this camp honestly don’t know how to fix it themselves—and that’s okay. That’s what editors are here for.

We want to help you. We want to teach you how to write better exposition, how to match your exposition to your dialogue. How to get your ratios right, so you don’t have too much or too little of either one.

And I’m willing to bet you can’t do that on your own. ;-)

[love]

{Rani Divine}

P.S. If you have any suggestions or ideas of things you’d like me to talk about in the coming months, let me know in the comments or contact me on Facebook!