Filling the Silence
By Donald Maass | February 3, 2016 |
In conversation, is there anything worse than an awkward silence? Actually, there is. Its silence filled by the tedious ramblings of a bore. The first situation makes you want to kill yourself. The second makes you want to kill someone else.
What is it that makes the drivel spoken by a bore so boring? It lacks all interest, for you anyway and maybe even for the bore. After all, the bore is talking not to say anything but to hear the sound of his or her own voice. But never mind that. What does it mean to lack interest? What makes anything we hear “interesting” anyway?
Let’s be boring. “It’s an unusually fine day.” Okay, that’s tedious but not full on boring. “Yes, the grass is green today.” “Later we may get rain.” “Shall we play golf while we can?” Golf! Now that’s boring. (Oh, you like golf? Sorry, it’s boring.) But seriously, the humdrum exchange we’re developing has nothing unexpected in it.
Now let’s turn that into a conversation on the surface of Mars:
“It’s an unusually fine day.”
“Yes, the grass is green today.”
“Later we may get rain.”
“Shall we play golf while we can?”
The humdrum gets a tad more interesting because on the surface of Mars we do not expect anyone to be discussing fine weather, green grass, rain and golf. There are even implications and undertones to ponder. The grass is green “today”? What does it mean to “get” rain on Mars? Is it manufactured? If so, why isn’t the schedule known? There’s intrigue here. It’s mildly sinister. (Take it from here, Phillip K. Dick.)
Now imagine this conversation in a prison yard, or in Hell. What is humdrum in one context in another context is new, unexpected and raises questions we have not previously considered.
Let’s shift focus from dialogue to the fiction element we sometimes call exposition. Exposition, as the term is used nowadays, is the thoughts and feelings of a point of view character, the stuff that takes us inside a character’s head. Exposition can be some of the most boring stuff on the page. I know that. You know that. We know it because all too often we skim it.
Skimming is sometimes a result of reader impatience, or perhaps a writer being inconsiderate. So anxious are we to know what happens next that we race ahead; conversely, so in love is the writer with unimportant stuff that he or she fails to cut it. (Let’s not forget the carelessness of the editor, either.) If we skim for reasons like that it’s a pacing issue.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what makes exposition actually boring. Inside a character’s head is not always an interesting place to be. It’s tedious when the cognitive/emotional transcript we’re reading offers nothing unexpected, holds no intrigue, states the obvious, raises questions we’ve already asked on our own, or presents feelings we’ve already felt. It’s like reheating leftovers for the fourth time. (Except for lasagna which I, anyway, am always excited to take out of the microwave.)
No one wants to be boring so let’s take a look at why exposition feels fascinating to authors when they write it down but later proves uninteresting to readers.
Exposition often is a mini aftermath. It’s a reaction to something that has just been witnessed or said. That would seem important to record but remember that your readers are ahead of you. Readers think. They feel. They react to everything and do so instantaneously. And, unfortunately, their instant reaction may well be what you’re writing down.
When that happens you’re duplicating. Stating the obvious. You’re being boring.
The antidote is to use exposition to challenge the reader. That requires thinking of stuff the reader hasn’t thought of. It means elaborating feelings that are not immediately obvious. It means exploring implications of a given situation that aren’t easy to see. The idea is to give your reader new cognitive and emotional work to do.
Try these approaches:
Find anything that is seen or heard in your manuscript, maybe on the page you’re drafting right now. Who is your POV character? Now consider…
- The event just experienced has a personal impact on your POV character that is non-obvious or the opposite of what most of us would think or feel. Explain.
- What did your POV character notice just now that no one else did? Why did this in particular strike your POV character?
- Who at this moment is trying to conceal or suppress a feeling? Why? Let your POV character be the one to perceive this.
- Whatever has just happened raises a potential threat, however minor, down the road. To whom and how? Let your POV character grasp this.
- If the event just witnessed seems like a setback, how does your POV character realize that it is actually helpful? (Or reverse that.)
- There’s a big meaning in the little thing that just happened. How does your POV character explain that? (Or explain the small significance buried in a giant event.)
Exposition isn’t always reactive. Sometimes it’s an interior essay, a meditation of sorts. Find a spot where we might stop for a time in your protagonist’s head. Now consider…
- What’s something your protagonist hasn’t told us about himself or herself? Make it something your protagonist hasn’t previously acknowledged. How has your protagonist avoided this until now? Why is that no longer possible? What can be said or done now that couldn’t before? Why is this self-realization fearful—yet also a relief?
- What’s something your protagonist has avoided seeing about someone or something in the story? Why has your protagonist avoided this truth? What will change now that this truth is recognized?
- Pick a random page in your manuscript: What’s the last thing we would expect your protagonist to focus on right now? Focus on it.
- Pick anything your protagonist feels anywhere in the manuscript. Reverse it. Then justify that new feeling.
- Pick any event in the story. Give your protagonist a way to look at this event that is ironic, sacrilegious, cutting, crazy, brutally honest, unnecessarily generous, paranoid or perverse. Elaborate. Add.
- Stop somewhere in your story. What’s the mountaintop view of what’s happening? How will it look ten years from now? How would a being divine look at what’s happening in a way that we mortals cannot? Allow your protagonist to see that perspective—then reject it.
The point of approaching exposition in such ways is to challenge your readers, to force them to react to something that is not exactly what they expect to read. Provoke them to disagree. Require them to make up their own minds. Cause them to evaluate their own feelings. Readers don’t automatically fall in sync with your characters’ inner processing. The better approach is cause readers to do their own.
An empty page is a form of silence. You can fill that silence with boring stuff, or you can fill it with song. Make that song surprising and we won’t be bored. We’ll dance.
Are you writing a passage of exposition today? How are you using it to challenge your readers?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Helpful and timely as always, Don. I’ll use these tips in a crucial scene that I’m revising today. You always provide new ways to look at things. Never boring!!
Well that’s a relief!
It’s a tricky thing to see and know for sure when we’re telling too much or too little. Giving the reader just enough credit is the sweet spot, and it’s hard to find at first.
In many manuscripts I find authors erring on the side of telling too much, spoon feeding the obvious, giving the reader too little credit and trusting too little in the reader’s engagement.
You can give the reader space to think and feel in the assurance that they will. Better still is to give them something new to think and feel *about*.
Exposition doesn’t need to be filler, a rehash, it can be a lively next step in the unspoken dialogue with the reader.
Mr. Maass, you remind me of my college calculus professor. I hated her. Until I realized that she made me look deeper than the memorized formulas of our textbooks.
I am, in fact, just beginning a new YA novel. In it, my protagonist is a typical angry young man, injured in his prime and his future bleak. Yeah, typically boring. So I have to make different, somehow, than all the other injured and angry young men that line the bookshelves of my library’s youth section.
Having read this post, I think, perhaps, he’ll be secretly happy to have lost his chance at a scholarship and pro career. No, it can’t be because he’d rather play the flute. Readers will see that one coming from a mile away. I’ll think of something, though. Since it is sci-fi and involves some mind-bending (to the author, anyway) Interstellar-like aspects, I’m sure I can come up with something to make it unique.
Thanks again for a great post. I always look forward to them.
Yep. Ron, it’s a great principle of storytelling: Leap ahead of the reader’s expectations. Violate them. When readers have to ponder and measure a character’s experience against their own you’ve got them right where you want them. Imaginations engaged.
Marvelous provocation sir! I’ve found that in epic fantasy, the dangers of going “inside” are twofold- 1) the emotions tend to be broad-brush, not hard to guess but still in need of declaration (and the purpler the better). The stakes are usually high, and the situation itself far from usual, so that helps. Then again 2) the real need is for metric tons of world-building, probably the one thing even more dangerous to the reader’s patience than exposition. Tip-toe, and run have been my rules. Which I ignore of course…sigh…
World building can be tedious on the page but it needn’t be. A topic for another post! Thanks for the idea.
That was some bonafide, in depth, fifth-level writing advice. I don’t remember the last time I read anything this sophisticated. Space permitting, it would have been helpful to read concrete examples of writers who handle exposition particularly well. I ask this because left to my own devices, I would automatically default to Robert Penn Warren, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, and I know that most readers don’t have the time or the patience for that kind of narrative anymore.
It’s a new age. With new narratives. And new, visual-and-social-media influenced ways of telling a story.
I loved this article.
There are examples all over the shelves, including yours at home. Hey, why not suggest some?
Don, I love that last line – the one that challenges us to challenge our readers. Challenge accepted!
I suppose I’d better stand before the class and start with a confession. Hello, my name is Vaughn and I’m a recovering over-explainer/rehasher. During this rewrite I’m finally beginning to recognize such sections. I’ve been try to pull the necessary exposition from it (if there is any at all) and from there try to figure a way to show it rather than tell it. It’s interesting how often the effort creates something unexpected between characters (often even for me).
You reminded me of a link someone posted to Quora on the WU Facebook Group page in which people listed the three plot devices they’d like to see less of. I had a sinking feeling, but had to look anyway. Sure enough, a fantasy reader mentioned the trope of a protagonist finding out they’re somehow special… “or worse, fated by some prophecy.” I couldn’t help but bristle for a moment, till I remembered why I have my protagonist become the so-called subject of a so-called prophecy. I purposefully left the prophecy’s existence in an absence of all but the most circumstantial evidence because I wanted to explore his reactions to it—how he at first is fully aware that it’s superstitious nonsense, but then gleans how it may serve him. But if he knowingly uses the advantage, is he a fraud? Deeper still can he be taken by having him occasionally wondering if there’s any truth to it. And if he actually drinks his own flavor of Kool-Aid they keep serving him, how does he then behave? If he begins to believe he’s actually destined by the gods, how does he react when stuff goes wrong? Is he then divinely ill-fated? Is there anyone else he can blame? And so on.
The exploration of what could be a tired trope can be great fodder for interior conflict. Fingers crossed, anyway. Thanks for the reminder to keep it surprising! It’s like you’re sponsoring my recovery, or something. Much appreciated!
I like your thinking, Vaughn. If you’ve got a weary trope, turn it on its head. Twist it, reverse it, use it to play with readers’ heads.
“The better approach is cause readers to do their own”(processing). They may make a different story from the one you created, but a book is a bound world, and they will come back to yours.
Reminds me of an article that posits 5-year olds can learn calculus if we go about it differently–show them the “patterns and structures” rather then the “little manipulation of numbers”.
So also will a great writer reveal the patterns and structures, and leave the rest to the reader.
I hit a wall with calculus. Do you know of any alternate teaching I could find?
It can be any teaching, any subject.
The point is not the subject but the method–“look, even 5-year olds can learn the basics of calculus, one of the more advanced math topics, if you show them the underlying patterns.”
You have done that in your article already by exhorting the writers to pay attention to the scaffolding and structure they have created –the POV’s thinking, the top-of-the-mountain viewpoint, and build on it, in expected or unexpected ways, or reverse it.
I’m currently rewriting my book in first person, so this is a perfect time to make sure my protagonist isn’t thinking about the obvious. It would be a great way to show she’s a creative thinker and it would toss a few more red herrings along the path to temporarily lead readers astray.
Most excellent advice. Thank you!
Welcome.
I love writing your lessons out by hand. Today, every single prompt evoked a scene in my novel that could be pumped up, maybe even to lasagna-worthy status. Thank you for talking about context, and about the idea of getting ahead of the reader. Not an easy thing to do (for me, anyway). A question, though. You say, “Who at this moment is trying to conceal or suppress a feeling?..Let your Pov character be the one to perceive this.” But what if, on occasion, the reader gets it before the protagonist does, putting him/her (the reader) in the ‘dread seat’?
Just have to say that sitting here with a cup of coffee and being able to participate in this conversation is really a wonderful thing. Thanks!
You can never be ahead of all your readers all of the time, but you can be ahead of many of them much of the time.
This post is like a course on character development. I don’t know whether to cheer or groan! Cheer because of the insightful suggestions for enlivening exposition; groan because of the hard work ahead of me.
I’m printing this off and using it as a guide to analyze what isn’t working in my first manuscript. It just might help me avoid the same mistakes in my next one. Thank you!
Rita, it’s easy to fill blank space with what’s obvious, harder with what is less obvious. The reward, though, is a better read, faster acceptance, bigger contracts and better sales.
I like this way of thinking of it. I’ve always had the mantra “trust your reader” in my head (on several different levels), but I don’t know that I’ve ever applied it quite so directly to exposition duplicating reactions. It’s scary sometimes to really trust that a reader will feel what we want them to, though. I guess trusting our reader also involves trusting ourselves. Great post, Don!
I think you hit it: It’s not so much trusting your readers as trusting yourself as a storyteller. Do your work well and your story will put folks under its spell. They will then start to do some of your work for you–in their imaginations.
Really interesting stuff here. It’s definitely going to help me with the rewrite of my WIP. Going back to what Vaughn said above about that list of plots that people want to see less of I think lists like that miss the point. It’s not so much what’s happening, it’s how it happens. PKD whom you mentioned in your post, was a master at that. Take Blade Runner… plot is a cop who kills bad guys for a living. The twist is the bad guys are renegade androids, and the cop is beginning to suspect these bad guys have feelings just like humans… I think I knew this deep down in an unaware way that I never put into words, but once again you hit the nail on the head for me, Don. Thanks for shining the light.
We should do a study of Phil Dick and other pulp masters, don’t you think? They were highly efficient storytellers. They wrote lean and yet had impact on readers. Hmm, an idea for more posts. Thanks!
Yes! That would be an awesome and enlightening read. I’m biased because PKD is one of my favorite storytellers, that man could set up more story in one sentence than most writers do in a paragraph. But even those of us who haven’t read him, could take away a lot from your exploration. It would be an exciting post, hell a series of posts, from you, on this subject. No pressure, heh! Please do it. :)
I tried to read The Man in the High Castle recently, found the beginning insufferably boring, and gave up.
Thanks for the post Don.
Could you recommend a book where the exposition is focused on a vitality struggle (Life vs. Stagnation)?
Stephen King is pretty good at using exposition to take us to new cognitive/emotional places. Dean Koontz is good that way too. Danielle Steele, John Grisham…commercial storytellers who make it big aren’t boring us with their exposition.
Hey, Don:
This is a nice continuation and elaboration on your previous post(s) about third-level feeling. It echoes that age-old maxim: Resist the obvious.
I believe the type of scene you’re referring to, which comes at the end of a particularly dramatic scene or sequence of scenes, is referred to as a sequel. In it the POV character does three things:
1. Register the emotional impact of what has just happened.
2. Explore the meaning of what just happened (i.e., why it happened and something more expected didn’t).
3. Make a plan for going on from here.
Your strategy for making sure the emotional exploration doesn’t merely belabor the obvious is incredibly useful, especially with your usual focus on emotion not merely as a statement of inner feeling but a statement about self.
I think this focus on self also arises in the attempt to understand the meaning of what happened. Adding this element of self-definition deepens both these examinations in a critical way, raising the stakes implicitly because they force the question: Who am I?
But both of these explorations, toward emotion and meaning, and the examination of self they accentuate, also serve a need to make a decision: what next?
Shakespeare’s monologue (which are similar to the exposition you describe), almost always end in a resolution to act or a change of heart.
I think one way to make sure these inner moments don’t become tedious belaboring of the obvious is not only to explore the contrary, hidden, or deeper-level emotions at work in the scene, but to remember that this isn’t mere navel-gazing but an attempt to make a decision: What should I do now?
Combine those two elements — resist the obvious and move toward a decision — are the key elements of making sure exposition doesn’t become boring.
Wonderful, thought-provoking post as always. Hope all is well.
David-
All’s well. To be clear, what I’m discussing here are not aftermath scenes, in which I do not believe. They are an outdated technique. What I’m referring to is exposition within a scene. This kind of thing…
“I’m sorry to tell you, Susan, your mother passed away last night.”
Mother was dead? Oh no! It was so unexpected. Why had no one told her until now? Why hadn’t she been at her mother’s side? This was terrible news. What was she supposed to do? What was she supposed to say?
ZZZZZZZZZZZ
You get the idea.
Very helpful post, Don. I learned a long time ago the importance of surprising the reader and not giving them the expected. When I was writing a weekly humor column for the newspaper, I took some classes with Erma Bombeck who stressed the importance of leading the reader in one direction, then, wham, give them the surprise. I think that works for all writing, not just humor.
I have heard that Bombeck was able to teach humor, nice to hear that from one who learned from her. And yes, same principle.
Thanks for another informative and well-timed post.
As I mentioned in a comment last month, after weeks of struggling only to see my WIP get progressively worse, I decided to take a one month break. Even though I began with a detailed outline, once I started writing it blew up–barely through the first quarter of the outline the word count was what I had expected for the entire story.
On top of that, a few weeks before deciding on this little hiatus, I let my nine-year old grandson read it (I’m writing stories for my grandchildren, each featuring one of them as the mc), and while he was enthusiastic about a couple parts, overall he didn’t like it. Trying to explain what he didn’t like, he finally shrugged and said, “I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound like the stories you tell us.” Needless to say, I haven’t been able to get those words out of my head. Although it occurred to me that my grandson might have been using the word ‘sound’ literally, as I frequently create sound effects or distinctive silly/scary voices for different characters (not sure how to put that into writing), I spent January studying aspects of craft, especially voice and pacing.
February 1, I re-read my WIP and was ready to send it to the trash bin. While I could see a few specific problems, overall I couldn’t figure out why the story isn’t working. I think you just gave me the answer: too much explaining of everything.
When I’m telling a story, unless one of the kids asks a question, I never explain anything. In this story, I have two and a half pages describing a long-abandoned Victorian house (maybe I’ll offer them to Architectural Digest), where, if I was telling them the story, I would have said something like, “It was a big, scary house, with boarded-up windows, crumbling chimneys, and holes in the porch steps”, and left it at that.
Today, I realized that because I’m writing for children, I’m trying to anticipate things they might be curious about, in addition to things they might not understand, even when those things have nothing to do with the story. (There’s no reason for an elaborate description of a bay window unless there’s something exciting to see through that window.) And, I’ve also realized that much of what I write is for my own entertainment. (Nothing wrong with that, just need to keep it separate.)
So, another writing lesson learned. And this time it took only 15,000 words.
A helpful critique partner you have there!
Excellent post, and it made me feel better about what I just recently wrote.
Also, mmmmm, lasagna. Lasagna has layers, and layers are never boring. Probably why it continues to excite you. :)
The fourth reheat of lasagna is like reading a Neville Shute novel again, pleasure revisited.
The question of why writers think exposition is fascinating while readers are bored to tears is a great one. I think your ample answers can be summed up like this: contemplative exposition scenes close the story instead of opening it up.
Readers don’t read passively. They’re constantly imagining what could happen in the future, what might have happened in the past, what they would do if they were in this character’s situation, etc. In a great page-turner, every paragraph feeds the reader’s imagination and opens up exciting new possibilities. Even answers to old questions should immediately pose new ones.
Boring exposition doesn’t open up new questions or possibilities. It either reiterates the same questions in different wording, or it hands readers the answers too soon (i.e., closes the story). The first is pointless, the second disappointing. It’s like the writer placed an empty crossword puzzle in front of the audience, then stood there and filled out the boxes for them instead of giving them clues.
Providing new information, new insights, and the other suggestions in your bullet points are good ways to open up the story instead. Though if a passage of exposition needs dressing up to be mildly interesting, perhaps it doesn’t belong there at all, and the writer should consider conveying any important information in a different way.
I’m so glad I found this post – I recently got a rejection from an agent I really wanted. She said there was a lot to love about my manuscript but the exposition was “too heavy”. This, after some earlier responses were that it needed to be more… I guess it’s subjective, but in any case, I’ll go back and take another crack at it with these tips in mind. Thanks Don, I always love your posts.