5. How Not to Tell a Story
by Steve Rosse
If you’re at all interested in writing, you probably already know that narrative, that is a story with a beginning, middle and end, engages different parts of the brain than does a list of bullet points or unconnected sentences. Most language is processed in two areas of the brain known as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. These are the language centers, where words are processed into meaning.
But a narrative engages not only the language centers, but also any other part of the brain that might be stimulated if the listener was actually experiencing what’s described in the story.
So when we read about Proust eating his famous madeleine the part of our brain related to taste wakes up. When we read one of Louie Lamour’s exciting horse chases we actually “feel” our rumps bumping up and down on the hard leather saddle. Putting information into narrative form excites the listener, it makes us pay better attention to the information and commit it more easily to memory.
And that’s why we hate to read exposition. It is always necessary in a story to inform the reader of things that he simply has to know, but which do not lend themselves to drama. Simply putting this information into blocks of words inserted into the flow of the story stops momentum and dulls interest.
In the past readers had far more tolerance of exposition than they do today, when they are more used to information being presented visually in film and TV, where dialogue, character, plot and setting can all be delivered in one carefully crafted moment. Herman Melville devoted whole chapters to exposition in “Moby Dick,” but these days the author who devotes as little as a single paragraph to exposition takes the risk of losing his reader.
There are some common tricks to get around this problem. You can, like Dan Brown did in his “DaVinci Code,” make your protagonist a university professor. Whenever you need to deliver great whacks of exposition you simply write a flashback in which the professor is at his lectern delivering a lecture to his students.
Other authors deliver exposition in the form of letters or memos or transcripts embedded in the text. In “Catch 22” Joseph Heller makes excellent use of military dispatches, which not only deliver dry information in a highly condensed form but add a wonderful touch of military atmosphere as well.
Sometimes an author can deliver his necessary but dull information in the form of a character’s inner monologue: “Jess thought about the time when he and Sally had found the dead body under the bridge. It was October…”
But it’s lonely in a man’s head, and unless your character is God there will inevitably be something he doesn’t know and can’t relate.
Sometimes an author can do the job in a bit of dialogue, a gimmick called the “As You Know, Bob”:
“Hey, Jess,” said Sally, “Remember that time we found the dead body under the bridge?”
“Yeah,” answered Jess, “It was in October, right?”
But a reader gets tired of hearing two characters tell each other things they already know.
There are a lot of tricks that an author can use to deliver exposition, but my favorite is no trick at all: Write the exposition so well that the reader has no idea he’s being force fed dull facts. Take, for example, the first paragraph from Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery:”
“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock. In some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.”
The first para of a story is almost always used to set the scene, and Ms Jackson does exactly that here. But at the same time that she’s describing the weather and the grass, the geography of the town square, the time of day and the number of people in the scene, she’s also telling her readers this:
“In a few minutes there is going to be a lottery. This lottery takes place every year in every town and village. The lottery is important enough that every single person in town takes part.”
Sneaky, yes? And beautiful, yes?
Eastlit Note:
Previous articles in the series are:
Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok. His books are available on Amazon.com
