Pages

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Exposition Position 03/12/2014

03/12/2014

2061 words today, and barely made it in time before work ended.

Today was all about exposition. It’s a horrendous thing when done improperly, and can destroy the illusion of your characters. If they just say something like “As you know…” and go into a long-winded exposition about their evil plans, you’ve lost everything to the exposition demon. No one believes it. It’s not how people speak, it’s not how characters would speak, and if they already knew it, why did they need to talk about it? It makes no sense.

My book just introduced the plan of the final villain (well, one major part of the plan) by it actually happening before the reader’s eyes. It seems like a simple, stupid statement, but I decided to keep the reader in the dark and have the plan gradually come out. The villain in my book is all about strategy and misdirection, so it works well. He’s still got tricks up his sleeve, including a plan B, but those are for later. The best thing about it is that I drop clues and give hints along the way that build into the later reveals. As always, I might be doing it wrong. It might not be that great, but that’s what editing is for. I’m hoping that the reader gets to the reveal and goes, “Oh! That’s what that was all about before! That makes so much sense!” and my villain comes off as a genius. That’s the hope, anyway.

Bishop

No comments:

Post a Comment