A Post About Fiction
Since we prefer that to reading the stuff
I’ve been thinking about what I might actually do with this whole Substack thing. Right now, it smacks of shitposting. And that’s fun, I guess, but hardly sustainable. I’m not a 13-year-old boy. Not anymore.
Did you know I have a degree in writing? Stupid, I know, but that’s what I did; I got a degree in writing. I went to writing classes and read other people’s writing and wrote crap and read it out loud, and I did that for two years to get a bachelor’s in English with a focus in writing.
Worthless.
But I guess if I’m qualified to talk about anything, it should be that.
Let’s talk about exposition.
Sage wisdom says, “show, don’t tell.” But I hate sage wisdom. And there’s so much that can happen in the telling. The telling is your voice. Without it, your story is dry and boring.
Let’s shit on Cormac McCarthy. It’s cool to shit on him, he’s rich and successful. (Checks Wikipedia) Was rich and successful.
Here’s a snippet from some book he wrote:
He got the key and walked down to the room and went in and shut the door and set the bags on the bed. He closed the curtains and stood looking out through them at the squalid little court. Dead quiet. He fastened the chain on the door and sat on the bed. He unzipped the duffel bag and took out the machinepistol and laid it on the bedspread and lay down beside it.
When he woke it was late afternoon. He lay there looking at the stained asbestos ceiling. He sat up and pulled off his boots and socks and examined the bandages on his heels. He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror and he took off his shirt and examined the back of his arm. It was discolored from shoulder to elbow. He walked back into the room and sat down on the bed again.
Hot damn. That’s a lot of showing. And it goes on like that for 300 pages. Sure, there’s dialogue and there’s the bits where Tommy Lee Jones has some inner monologue, but mostly it’s going in and out of hotels and driving around and looking at stuff and refusing to use punctuation and worshipping the run-on sentence like it’s some kind of demigod.
Hey. Listen. He wrote a decent book. It was alright. I liked the bit where Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin have a shootout. It makes all the hotel shenanigans seem worth it. But I have to admit that I probably missed a lot when my eyes started glazing over at all the showing going on.
Chigurh checked into a motel on the eastbound interstate and walked out across a windy field in the dark and watched across the highway through a pair of binoculars. The big overland trucks loomed up in the glasses and drew away. He squatted on his heels with his elbows on his knees, watching. Then he went back to the motel.
Mr. McCarthy, were you aware that there are, in fact, only so many motels one can check into in the course of a novel?
He pulled into a motel outside of Hondo and got a room at the end of the building and walked in and set his bag on the bed.
Apparently not!
Of course, the world isn’t black and white despite it mostly seeming that way online, and if I had readers, one or two might say, “So what, Ty? Are you implying that we should exposition our way through every story?” And I’d say, “Well, isn’t that just sort of blog?”
I kid. Sort of. Not really. Anyway.
Clearly, a story built on exposition only would be a hard sell. Let’s look at one that’s clearly a bit of amateur trash:
Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king.
Haha, just kidding, I fucking love this story. I won’t give away the ending, because it hits. It hits hard.
But okay, so clearly, point being, that showing and telling actually work. They can both work super well. See how I took nearly 800 words to say “both can work?”
That’s writing.
Damn, have I already written 800 words? That’s not gonna go over well with the short-attention-span-blogosphere. Oh well. Let’s keep going.
The cold, hard truth of the matter is that writing is about nuance. Phrases like “show, don’t tell,” “murder your darlings,” and “write drunk, edit sober” are what the smug kids at the writer’s table tell you as they sip their lattes and eye your latest manuscript with a red pen at the ready.
What I think (and remember, I’m a Doctor of Writing if doctors are what you become when you get a bachelor’s which I’m pretty sure is the case), is that you can really write whatever you want, however you want, as long as it serves the narrative.
Let’s think about a scene. A guy is about to open the door. He’s scared of what’s on the other side. You could just say:
Lary was about to open the door. He was scared of what was on the other side.
That’s completely and utterly serviceable. And if the rest of your book has that kind of short-sentence, matter-of-fact writing, then that’s cool. It’s sexy! Cool is sexy and sexy is cool. Crazy, Sexy, Cool.
I’m rambling.
Another way you could write it is to omit the telling entirely:
Larry stood on one side of the door, eyeing the handle. Beads of sweat formed on his brow, and his fingers trembled as they rose to touch the handle.
Look at that. All showing! No telling! Though one thing that can become… obnoxious after a while is that there are only so many ways to show that someone’s scared. Sweating and trembling do a lot of the heavy lifting. If you stick with this style in a horror novel, you’re gonna have buckets of sweat and it’s gonna seem like everyone’s developed Parkinson’s.
Let’s keep going. This is fun:
Larry stood upon the precipice of demise. He felt it in his bones. Some ancient terror lay just beyond the fragile oak door before him. What once felt as if it could hold back tornados now seemed paper thin with the horror that awaited on the other side.
This is the kind of sentence where everyone in a writing group would say, “Wow, that’s so good, so crunchy, I could really feel his fear!” but anyone picking it up on the shelf would go, “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.” Like they do with the classics:
I stood for a moment, adjusting my cufflinks which were given to me by the great Duke Archibald of Gosenberg on my twenty-fifth birthday, and I must say, despite my excellent upbringing, I found the links slipping through my fingers—they trembled so! But a man must have courage, and so I summoned up my own and made my way through the french double doors (designed by none other than a good friend of my father’s: an architect of some renoun throughout Gosenberg and beyond). With my head held high, I marched into the parlour to come face to face with that which had until that moment frightened me so—Madamme Lorena Dorenson—my mother-in-law!
But I started this whole post talking about exposition. That’s more like an info dump, and that stuff is irredemable, right?
Larry had never walked through that door before. If you asked him why, he couldn’t have told you. Traces of childhood memories, playing jacks in the hall. The door loomed much higher back then when he was three feet tall, but even then he never noticed it. The wood was painted red. Faded. Larry couldn’t have told you that either. Passing by it as he memorized facts for term papers and talked to his girlfriend on the phone—not once did he stop to wonder what might lie beyond the red door.
The funny thing is that I have no idea which of the above you, the reader, actually liked. Which was your favorite? Which did you hate? I can’t be sure! But one thing I’ll bet is true is that the answer is different for everyone. And maybe there’s the stupid point I’m trying to make.
If you want to write exposition. Write exposition. Just do it well.
But that’s just kind of general advice for all writing, isn’t it? Terrible advice, really. Like saying “git gud.” AND I took 1500 words to say it!
Well, shit. Maybe I’m not a Doctor of Writing after all.
Back to shitposting.
Thanks, Dr Ty!