The ‘Rules’ of Writing

I’m beginning to doubt more and more of the ‘rules’ of creating writing.  Maybe this is a good thing.

Take, for example, the shock and horror that goes around writers’ workshops when someone dares to ‘tell’ some piece of back story instead of ‘showing’ it.  It has become more and more apparent to me in the last two years that commercially successful fiction has a very different view of the ‘told exposition’. You can find sections of it in just about any book in just about any genre (even literary fiction, though it’s clearly more prevalent in fantasy and crime-thriller genres), and whilst I agree that it is usually very sparingly used in the very beginning (i.e. Chapter One), it is often the main feature of Chapter Two or Three. (Just read ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ for the most extreme example).

I have a lingering worry that one of the effects created by workshops that hear 2,000 words of a novel every week is that they end up telling the author to take out everything that they can’t immediately see as necessary, which is all well and good but their view of what’s necessary is limited to the horizon at the end of the 2,000 words. ‘Exposition’ which affects the layering of the story in the long term, and sets the foundation stones for much of what it to come, thus seems to get lumped in with the rest of the ‘unneeded’ material.

Sometimes I sit listening in a workshop and, when someone’s reading chapter three or four (and even when I’m reading chapter three or four of my own work), I think, ‘OK, we’ve watched this guy/girl wander round and do things for 25 pages but I still have no idea who they are or why they are doing it and – although I’m enjoying today’s 1500-word chunk – I’d be well past the point of caring if you’d asked me to read from the beginning.’  Consequently, I’ve come to believe that we ought to be campaigning for a revival of good old-fashion ‘told exposition’, as long as it’s snappy and in the appropriate place so as not to slow an important action sequence.

It’s like this: my daughter comes home from school and tells me that salt is bad for me. My wife agrees. I point to the scientific proof that the human body cannot function without salt, because – among other things- the entire structure of our cells would collapse.  This does not go down well in our house as my wife imagines us all dying of a stroke from high blood pressure. But the real point here is that the Western diet is already so full of salt that any attempt to willingly consume extra salt can be deemed bad and no one’s going to argue unless they happen to be a pedant like me.

‘Told Exposition’ is like salt.  So are adverbs and adjectives.  We need adjectives and adverbs, but we use too many of them, therefore, in editing, it is safe to assume all adjectives and adverbs are bad and only leave them in there if we can really think of no alternative.  Similarly, the author needs to tell the reader some back story, because otherwise I’m watching strangers dance and a proper shown introduction is going to waste several chapters that aren’t going to move the plot forward.