The Exposition Dwarf Says

[mrissa]

While it may be tempting to lay out the main thematic conflict on page 84 in so many words, I find it is not a satisfying reading experience:

"Carla, this isn't about you and Chris. It's barely about you at all. Benito's talking about internal contradictions. Living with what you are, with what your society is. At Hammett McColl, Chris could do that because there was a thin veneer of respectability over it all. At Shorn, there isn't."

Everybody got that? The conflict between characters is really a conflict inside one character, and the other one (the wife, "coincidentally") doesn't matter in itself; it's just there to dramatize the really important stuff. (Marriages, we are all apparently to understand, are not really important.) The Exposition Dwarf* has told you so.

If you have done your job as a writer, the reader will see that the conflict in the main character's marriage is all part and parcel of his larger turmoil without you having to spell it out in all caps. If you haven't, spelling it out in all caps will not be effective anyway. Either way, you lose.

You especially lose when a father's reaction to trouble in his daughter's marriage is, "oh, honey, this isn't about you, it's about sociology and worldbuilding."

I am talking to you, Richard K. Morgan!

I keep coming back to papersky's dragons, how I had an argument with somebody (I forget who) who was claiming that Tooth and Claw wasn't really about dragons, and I kept saying no, really it is. It's also about other things, but if it wasn't really about dragons, it would be a much different, and worse, book. And Morgan is doing that here: he's skimping on one level of the story he's trying to tell. If the story is to work, interpersonal conflicts can't just be illustrations of the point the author is making about society. They also have to matter to the reader as interpersonal conflicts, or the whole thing will fall flat. Which -- so far, as of page 84 -- it is.

*Ever since the beginning of the movie version of "The Two Towers," we have referred to characters who are around to tell you what's going on as The Exposition Dwarf. "Thank you, Exposition Dwarf!" we mutter. The other thing we mutter at points like these is, "Everybody got that?" as in "Spaceballs."

Comments

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, you're reading Market Forces.

Brutal, violent book. I was really disturbed by it.

[redbird]

First, I agree with you. Second, I suspect it could be interesting to have someone play that role, tell Carla that, have her believe it, and then her actions based on that become part of the plot/events. Exposition Dwarves can lie--or simply be mistaken--too.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I don't know... I was just reading a short story by Edith Wharton (Souls Belated) in which the characters did keep explaining to each other what their sources of conflict were. OTOH, the whole point to this story was exactly that they *didn't* exactly understand how societal constrictions were impacting each other, so at least they had an actual story-based need to do that explanation.

Also, it was an early story of hers. I should go read later ones to go see if she still does it.

(Note to self: reading short stories by Edith Wharton and Mark Helprin at more or less the same time can have strange repercussions, like the tendency to remember a story and then have to think, "Wharton wrote *that*??? Oh, wait, no she didn't.")

any way you look at this you loose.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I love you.

This was also one of my problems with Batman Beyond (which I liked, but did not lurve.) I do not need a thematic lecture. Thankyew.

And it's why I have a hard time a lot of Terry Bisson, on another level. Uh huh. I like politics and theme in my peanut butter. I also like the goddamned peanut butter.

GIMME MY PEANUT BUTTER!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is true. Someone could do it that way. I think I'd still prefer it if there was any indication at the time that this person might be talking out his ass. (Instead, it's one of those pointless fictional fights, where the reader can see immediately who is supposed to be right and who is having an idiot plot.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know what? I'm not, so far. I feel like I ought to be, but I don't believe in it enough to be disturbed by it.

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. There will be no keeping me from the peanut butter.

Magpie brain say: do you like real life funky peanut butter? Because we have PB Loco here, and they have apricot peanut butter, which is The Stuff, and also curry and banana and lovely, lovely gourmet flavors, and if you realio trulio want your peanut butter, I could bring you some to try when I see you. (EEEEE!) Later this month. (EEEEE!)

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Ooo. I love me some peanut butter. With the caveat that I do not like peanuts, so when I buy peanut butter I buy the fake stuff that doesn't taste like peanuts... but apricot is probably enough Not Like Peanuts to convince me that it's not, you know, peanuts ground up, but peanut butter.

Um.

If that made any sense.

And I see you soon! Eee!

*dance*

[slithytove.livejournal.com]

Happens in real life, too. During the 1992 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush was having trouble making the media and the electorate believe he was in touch with the average American, and his handlers were advising him that his central message should always be, "I care about you." Bush became increasingly frustrated by his inability to project this idea, and one day at a press conference (http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Y5-1mNF22MEJ:www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/827onvta.asp+message.i.care&hl=en) just blurted out: "Message: I care!" Oops.

It is tough to encapsulate both the personal conflict and the thematic conflict in individual characters, and make the reader see them both. It's something I'm struggling with.

Love the Exposition Dwarf, btw.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

It gets progressively worse as the book goes on. I don't like gratuitous violence, and this book just seemed to have an awful lot of it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't like gratuitous violence, either, but if a book isn't doing a good job of grabbing me otherwise, it slides off me and becomes rather Punch-and-Judy in my head: "Oh, that one character I don't believe in just shot that other character I didn't believe in. Meh."

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We will give it a try when we see you SOON!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Gosh, and I thought "Read my lips" was an awfully lot of being beaten with a message stick!

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

Roasted cashews make a lovely butter, but processing them dramatically shortens the lifespan of one's blender.

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I will file *that* under Recieved Wisdom.

Mmm.

Cashews.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

There's that quote from C.S. Lewis, "No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty--except, of course, books of information". Maybe the converse is true as well - fiction stories worth reading as an adult ought to be worth reading as a child too, in some sense.

No, that doesn't really work, even if I *did* read The Thorn Birds at about ten. Some fiction stories really aren't meant for children (though I never had a desire to reread the Thirn Birds as an adult either, for that matter). But what I mean is, a fiction book whose ideas are worth learning, ought to have a surface-level story that is equally woth reading or those ideas will never get internalized. The surface story is not merely a sugar-coating for the idea, either, but an important part of setting the context and boundaries to which it applies; without a story, what you have left is a sermon or lecture that may or may not apply to your life.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I often tell people that I don't write castor oil. I think in this case it's more like I don't write cherry-flavored cough syrup, either.

But yes, you're right: some stories are not meant for children, and the things that actually are adult themes are not the things that are euphemistically called adult themes.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Yes. I read Gone With the Wind, all thousand-plus pages of it, at about the same age - 10 or 11. On the other hand, I couldn't read Jane Austen even at 18. It had to wait for my twenties. And I had read older things, from Shakespeare to Pilgrim's Progress to Chaucer (with the spelling updated, I think), as well as later stories set in the Regency period, so it certainly wasn't that I couldn't handle the language. I think delicate satire in general is not a kid thing, though broader versions are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And of course it'll depend on the kid: one kid will be fascinated by social themes while another finds them tedious. Mostly the lesson I take from this is that if a kid who's a big reader bounces hard off the beginning of a book, letting that kid put the book down and try it again later if they want to is much better than making them read it on the spot to try to pass one's own enjoyment on right exactly then.

Re: any way you look at this you loose.

[pameladean]

Nice people with industrial blenders will make cashew butter for you. It's usually sold in co-ops and natural food stores. It's not cheap, but neither are cashews.

P.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Ah, Richard K. Morgan. I was bemused-- I think that's the world I'm looking for here-- by Altered Carbon. I mean, it had all these blurbs all over it hailing it as the Next Big Thing, and I'm all, "Meh, Walter Jon Williams did it better in Voice of the Hurricane. And it was ten times less pandering and self-consciously cute."

I mean, it was okay. Readable. Certainly not what I'd call a bold new voice in SF, though.

Re: the Exposition Dwarf, my roommate and I have a related concept which we call the Exposition Wraith. It pops up out of nowhere to bore you and the story's hero with page after page of infodump... at the command of the evil overlord, whose dearest desire is for the reader or the hero to throw up their hands in boredom and disgust and go do something other than suffer through thirty more pages of the Inchoate History of Darkest Khem. (No, we're not bitter people. Why do you ask?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is good that you have that kind of roommate.

Market Forces was my first attempt at Richard Morgan, and it may be my last: not a bold new voice in SF. Reminded me of a friend's ex-boyfriend, actually: "If so-and-so wrote a novel, this is what it'd be like." Bleh.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I was sooooo hoping that Matrix 3 would reveal that Morpheus The Exposition Dwarf from the first two was brainwashed/firmly-misled, and that the REAL way the REAL world works is ....



But no. So I continue to prefer my fanwanking to the canon, as also happens in certain OTHER fandoms (cough*enterprise*cough).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No kidding, cough*enterprise*cough!

I think my problem with the Matrix movies is that we watched the first one and laughed ourselves silly and firmly believed that they knew they were making a comedy. And then the second one made it clear that they thought it was something else. Oops.