Being the fifth part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”
I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
- Engage the reader immediately.
- Do not drown the reader in information.
- Introduce important characters and plots early.
- Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
- Shape early action toward later plot points.
This week, let’s look at the fourth Big Idea: Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
The Bane of Information
Today’s topic may seem to repeat what we said two weeks ago: “Do not drown the reader in information.”
Why do I keep harping on the negative value of information? And how is this week’s diatribe different from that of two weeks ago?
Information is a blessing because readers need to know what’s happening in the story to appreciate and make sense of it. Information is a curse because it can get in the way and prevent readers from appreciating and making sense of the story.
To absorb this paradox, we must consider two concepts. The first is profluence.
Profluence
Profluence, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a copious or smooth flowing.” In geology, it is the inexorable tendency of water to flow downhill—over, under, and around obstacles in its way. Eventually, water will find its way to the sea; but it can be detained for quite a while by something like Hoover Dam.
Profluence in literature means the smooth flow of a story. John Gardner, the late American novelist and professor of writing (not John Gardner the late British novelist) wrote:
“By definition—and of aesthetic necessity—a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events . . . .”
“We cannot read a whole novel in an instant,” Gardner said, “so to be coherent, to work as a unified experience . . . narrative must show some profluence of development. . . . Page 1, even if it is a page of description, raises questions, suspicions, and expectations; the mind casts forward to later pages, wondering what will come about and how. It is this casting forward that draws us from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. At least in conventional fiction, the moment we stop caring where the story will go next, the writer has failed, and we stop reading.” (My italics.)
Profluence is the forward movement of the story, despite obstacles placed—by the author, who else?—in the characters’ way.
Now hold profluence in mind, Dear Reader, while we look at the duality of information.
Duality of Information
Information can be harmful to a story while also being necessary to it, because there are two kinds of information.
External data provides substance, coherence, and setting—a sense of time and place—to the story. Names, dates, physical descriptions, historical events, and all the various acts and milieux that describe and color the plot of the story are external data. Some are essential parts of the story, others have no part in the story and should be omitted. The author must figure out which is which.
Internal facts are the needs, desires, motives, impulses, and emotions of the characters. These things are essential to the story, but the author must know where they fit, how they relate, and how they make the story move forward, and must find a way to make that clear to the reader.
You need both external data and internal facts to tell the story, but it’s easy to include non-essentials that just bottle up the profluence while omitting necessary items.
That’s why I say, “Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.”
Confused yet?
No? Then let me further clarify: Information, in the form of external data, is what is usually meant by “exposition.”
Exposition is looked upon as a necessary evil. Exposition is thought good when slipped in all unbeknownst to the readerbut bad when inserted in a clumsy, fat-fingered way.
Who is to say what is finesse and what is clumsiness? Your New Favorite Writer, that’s who—always ready to rush in where angels fear to tread.
But Gentle Reader, since I don’t really know better than anybody else what is clumsy and fat-fingered, versus what is brilliantly subtle, let me divert you by suggesting three possible ways to HIDE EXPOSITION IN PLAIN SIGHT.
1. Include It in Dialog
Yes, you heard me. Put it in dialog. Only, the dialog must have at least a fig leaf of action.
You can’t just have Character A say to Character B, “That man was fire chief in Little Grove when it burned down 16 years ago.”
You must have a scene. The characters must be doing something reasonable for them to be doing. It’s ideal if it can be a scene that moves the plot forward in clear and obvious ways. But failing that, you can create a brief scene where at least the characters are doing something coherent, and timely in the plot, and in a situation where it’s natural for them to talk about Little Grove’s former fire chief.
The one thing you ought to avoid doing is having characters tell other characters things they already know and that they know they know. “Gee, Cindy Lou, do you remember the time 16 years ago when we went over to Little Grove to watch it burn down, and you remember, that man was the fire chief?” That’s the sort of thing that gives writers a bad name.
And including exposition in dialog is not your only choice.
2. Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse happens when the reader absorbs the thoughts and knowledge of the viewpoint character. It’s like saying:
“Yada-yada-yada,” Sally thought.
Only you omit the quotation marks and the attribution, “Sally thought.” You need to give the reader some clue whose mind you are in, but once you do, you just write the yada-yada-yada in the character’s mind as if it were facts being narrated.
Here is the opening of my historical novel, The Price of Passage, previously referred to in the third installment of this series:
Norway
February 1853
Anders Gunstensen jumped up from his straw pallet, struck a match, and re-lit the oil lamp. What was the time now? How soon could he start for North America?
He teased open the gold case of the watch Grandfather had given him.
At that moment Uncle Torgus burst into the barn with a great bang of the door. “Anders, you oaf—wasting my lamp oil in the middle of the night!” The old man swayed left and right. He smelled of hard spirits.
The cattle, accustomed to Torgus’s rages, neither lowed nor bellowed.
In the first paragraph, sentence one establishes that Anders Gunstensen is the character whose viewpoint we are experiencing. The second and third sentences, wondering about the time and when to start for North America, are free indirect discourse. They are written as if an omniscient third person narrator is asking these questions; but the reader perceives them as questions in Anders’s mind. Even though it doesn’t say “he thought,” or “he wondered.”
That’s the beauty of free indirect discourse. It looks like standard third-person narration, but it feels like being inside the character’s head. And while you’re in there, you can include anything you want the reader to know, as long as it’s something that character (a) would be aware of and (b) might have on his mind at the moment.
Free indirect discourse is so slick it feels like cheating. And, in a way, it is. But you can get away with it. The catch is, you become addicted to using it, and pretty soon your whole story is written inside a character’s mind, with no actual scenes of action and dialog.
Use it with caution—but it’s just too good not to use at all.
Yet, there is another, better way to hide exposition in plain sight. In my opinion it’s
The Best Way
Include it in real action. Make it part of the plot. Here’s a simple example: In writing my first novel, The Price of Passage, I needed to get the protagonist, Anders, from Norway to America. Yet he was a lad without large means. How could I provide him with enough money to make the trip?
As a novice, I was unduly concerned about the credibility of his ocean voyage. I imagined finicky raders skewering me for sending a poor young man on an ocean voyage (despite the historical fact that thousands of similarly poor people found ways to make that voyage!). I invented all sorts of elaborate mechanisms involving loans from Uncle Torgus, wheeling and dealing and trade-offs, which I would naturally have to explain in mind-boggling detail before I would let Anders set foot on board the ship.
All those detailed explanations of how he financed his ocean trip would have been needless exposition shoved into the first chapter. It would have drowned the reader in information, and would have bogged down the profluence of the narrative before it even started flowing.
What else could I do?
Remember the gold watch Anders had received from his grandfather? It’s right there, in the second paragraph of the passage given above, where it helps get the plot rolling. Anders’s great desire to emigrate prompts him to jump up to check the time. To do that he must light the lamp so he can read his gold watch, the one he got from Grandfather. The light burning in the barn at night prompts the oppressive Uncle Torgus to come in and chew Anders out, which is the first bit of conflict in the book (on page one!). My point being that the watch is a plot device, pure and simple.
You might think the gold watch has fulfilled its function, but rest assured, Dear Reader: That valuable old watch will re-appear before long and be sold to pay for a transatlantic ticket! That, too, will be the watch functioning as a plot device. But we thereby avoid the need for any exposition about how a poor boy could afford to travel! So plot has done the job of exposition. The problem—which was only a problem in the mind of one particularly dense aspiring author—is thereby solved.
It’s always best to have something happen, to have a character do something—and in that action, the character will reveal everything the reader really needs to know, and the story will keep on flowing.
Next week: Shape early action toward later plot points.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
