Exposition is the voice of speculation

(Hi! Short essay below. If you’re not interested, you can scroll all the way past to an excerpt from an in-progress story.)

Exposition is the voice of speculation

I’ve had exposition on my mind lately. I’ve been thinking about how to write exposition well, but I’ve also been questioning how we talk about exposition, trying to figure out what that reveals about the contemporary craft of speculative fiction.

Exposition is linked to style. In some corners of the SFF world, it’s held as truth that Heinlein exploded all preexisting science fiction stylistics with the sentence “The door dilated.” Ever since, that sentence has been lauded as the epitome of a certain approach. It’s active, short, minimalist. It shows rather than tells, and in this view of exposition, the best kind of showing is implying. It’s economical, not indulgent.

We’ve all read bad exposition. Yawn-inducing descriptions of made-up geopolitics, clunky lists of sci fi technologies that aren’t quite as original as the author thinks they are—been there, skimmed that. Usually when we talk about bad exposition, we really mean boring exposition: detail that’s interesting to the author but not to the reader, because many science fictional and fantastic worlds are more fun to invent than to read about. For good reason, how-to-write books that focus on SFF encourage writers to lighten and simplify their expository material. Ursula Le Guin’s astonishingly slim volume Steering the Craft budgets an entire chapter for coaching new writers on how to break up exposition and “sneak” it into the flow of a narrative. That’s how essential she thought it was.

In this view, exposition is not by nature a part of narrative (or plot, or whatever you want to call it). From this perspective, you have to put in a lot of muscle to integrate exposition into the flow of a story. Underlying this approach is the unspoken assumption that exposition is not already story—that there is a binary distinction between “exposition” and “plot,” and breaking it down is hard work. The trick to smoothly allowing exposition to flow into plot is usually to make exposition invisible, or so brief as to be gone in a heartbeat.

It’s rare that I hear people discuss the joy of really well-written exposition—or maybe it’s just that for a few decades now, truly excellent exposition is granted a different title: narration, perhaps, or description, or even lore, depending on what kind of pleasure the text hopes to elicit.

This trend is deeply linked to another: the demise of the omniscient third person narrator. Okay, fine, demise is way too dramatic—it’s more accurate to say that omniscient third person is unfashionable right now. You can see it most starkly in nonfictional how-to-write texts: recent writer’s manuals decry “head hopping,” the practice of switching rapidly between the inner worlds of multiple characters within the same scene. Sure, I’ve read examples of head hopping that make me want to claw out my eyeballs, but that’s true of pretty much any literary technique. The existence of terrible examples doesn’t preclude the existence of great examples. Jane Austen “head hopped” all the time.

“Head hopping” is done best when navigated by a strong narrator who isn’t one of the major characters. (Mostly. I can think of a few counterexamples.) But opinionated narrators who aren’t protagonists just aren’t very fashionable right now. And opinionated narrators, who tell a story with verve and personality, are in some ways best poised to turn paragraphs of dry exposition into entertaining conversations between novel and reader. On the other hand, if your narrator is an invisible nothingness who robotically lists facts, then of course your exposition must be dispersed into tiny pieces lest it strangle the story.

I’m starting a new novel project right now, and for the first time in a long while I’m attempting a multiple-protagonist long-form story with sweeping scale. There’s a lot of worldbuiling to exposit. I like to think I’m decent at breaking up exposition into invisible, easily swallowed chunks. (Readers’ mileage may vary.) But I’d like to approach the novel differently this time around. I’m curious about the power and possibility of exposition, about exposition as a highlight, something to draw attention to rather than to hurry quickly past. The opening of The Fifth Season is almost all exposition. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. On a totally different note, Terry Pratchett often delivered exposition uncloaked by a protagonist’s thoughts, and his readers don’t seem to mind.

Captivating exposition isn’t limited to third person, though. Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is successful in part because its protagonist exposits at the reader constantly, with verve, humor, anger, and passion. I’m willing to follow the first-person narrator on a tour through whatever worldbuilding details she wants to throw at me, regardless of how interesting the details are in and of themselves, because her voice is irresistible. Common advice for beginning writers is to take the first twenty pages of their manuscript and highlight all the exposition, and if it’s more than [insert arbitrary amount here], delete it. If you tried that on A Deadly Education, you wouldn’t have any novel left. You’d have, like, three lines of dialogue. The thematics of Novik’s novel (a meditation on privilege and injustice in education) rest upon the mechanics of the fantastic world (which is built in an alarmingly literal sense on a bedrock of injustice). The novel is exposition.

As I look for new perspectives on the power and possibility of exposition, I’m drawn to a short essay by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s featured in Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook. KSR argues that exposition is “a huge part of the pleasure of fiction” because it means we’re describing things that require explanation, and things that require explanation are the unfamiliar, the unexpected, the otherworldly. He defines exposition pretty broadly, widening the category to include moments when a side character explains something essential to the protagonist, for example. If you accept this broad definition, then anything speculative must be conveyed via exposition. Exposition becomes the voice of the speculative world. It’s powerful because (Kim Stanley Robinson argues) “after all our narcissisms are exhausted, the world still smacks us in the face like the rocket in the Man in the Moon’s eye. The not-us is the permanent and inescapable Other; and writing about the Other is what we invented literature to do.”

For now I’ll try to approach this novel with that mindset. I’ll try to remember that readers often reach for speculative fiction in order to graze their minds against somewhere and somewhen else. Describing the contours of a speculative world isn’t an inconvenience to be hurried past—it’s the heart and soul of science fiction and fantasy.

A work in progress

Here, have a fragment of a rough draft. This passage will likely be edited out of existence — it has all sorts of problems — but you get to read it anyway.

I’ll probably delete this off the website version of this newsletter in a month or so, but it’ll live in your inbox forever… unless you hit the trash can button, I guess.

Where to find me

My username is “shaonicwhite” everywhere. I’m sporadically on Twitter (occasionally close to professional) and more frequently on Tumblr (strictly nonsense). Technically speaking, I have an Instagram (mostly pictures of plants).

I’m also trying out Mastodon: find me at wandering.shop.

You can find links to all my fiction and poetry on my website, shaonicwhite.com.