Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Exposition

The first goal has been reached! I'd like to feel accomplished, but that's only 1/5 of my word count and the majority of it is in glorified outline form. Three very important transitional scenes are simply a couple lines of very rough description of what ought to occur. This is especially problematic because I'm in first person because I think it's fun to be that deep in a character's head. Problem is, I need to be deep in her head without losing the action.

This is why novel writing is so hard and why it's so fun.

Each scene will be a prompt. I am going to write about all the description of the scenery. How she feels. Maybe I'll write how someone else feels and then translate that to my POV character seeing it. From there I will take the paragraph and scatter it through out the scene either directly or indirectly.

I think that exposition gets a bad rap from authors mis-using it. The classic info dump, while exposition by definition, is not exposition by good utilization. Exposition when sprinkled throughout a scene in tiny chunks can add to voice, setting, and scenery in ways that direct dialog cannot.

4 tidbits:

Spy Scribbler said...

I'm struggling with the "telling" nature of first person myself. I do prefer it, though.

Bernita said...

So true.
But I like first.
Thank you for stopping by my blog.

totalement café le plaisir se partage said...

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totalement café le plaisir se partage said...

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