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When you’re writing a novel in first person, how do you write exposition without it sounding weird and unnatural?

Vicky posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do you write exposition from the first person without it sounding daft – unlikely the character would be thinking about how things work, she’d just know. I’m writing a fantasy, so some explainations are necessary – or aren’t they? Many thanks for your help.

Randy sez: Writing exposition in a novel always feels a little unnatural, because it breaks the reader out of the story. When you’re writing in third person, it may feel a little more normal. But it’s not that hard to do it well in first person.

There are a few principles that should keep you from the dangers of daftness.

1) Minimize the amount of exposition. When you think you need to explain something, ask yourself if the reader absolutely must have this explanation in order to understand the story. If so, then what’s the least you can get away with explaining?

Authors often worry about this much more than readers do. The reader usually doesn’t care, unless the story just plain stops making sense. Then a little exposition will go a long way.

2) Put the exposition in dialogue, if you can do that in a natural way. You can do this if one character knows something and another character doesn’t. If they both know it, then it doesn’t work.

Whenever you see the phrase, “As you know…”, consider that a red flag.

Your readers are going to mock you if you write something like this:  ”Rapunzel, as you know, the two of us are twins and inherited a billion dollars from Great Aunt Daphne, who died last year at the age of 92, leaving us as the heirs and cutting Cousin Wilhelmina completely out of the will, which is the reason she’s been chasing us across Europe with a machine gun and a Dachshund, which is massively interfering with you completing your Ph.D. in philosophy and is keeping me from marrying my fiancee of seven years, Gretchen, who lives in Topeka.”

Dialogue should generally have conflict. If you’re going to use exposition in dialogue, consider making one character unwilling to give up the information, and make the other character have to work hard to get the info she needs.

3) If you really need to use exposition, then just do it. Suzanne Collins broke into a few paragraphs of exposition several times in The Hunger Games. Her character Katniss gave a two-paragraph first-person explanation of how the tracker jacker wasps were created by the Capitol. This came right at the point where Katniss discovered a nest of them and found a way to use them as a weapon. Here’s what she wrote:

Fear shoots through me, but I have enough sense to keep still. After all, I don’t know what kind of wasp lives there. It could be the ordinary leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone type. But these are the Hunger Games, and ordinary isn’t the norm. More likely they will be one of the Capitol’s muttations, tracker jackers. Like the jabberjays, these killer wasps were spawned in a lab and strategically placed, like land mines, around the districts during the war. Larger than regular wasps, they have a distinctive solid gold body and a sting that raises a lump the size of a plum on contact. Most people can’t tolerate more than a few stings. Some die at once. If you live, the hallucinations brought on by the venom have actually driven people to madness. And there’s another thing, these wasps will hunt down anyone who disturbs their nest and attempt to kill them. That’s where the tracker part of the name comes from.

After the war, the Capitol destroyed all the nests surrounding their city, but the ones near the districts were left untouched. Another reminder of our weakness, I suppose, just like the Hunger Games. Another reason to keep inside the fence of District 12. When Gale and I come across a tracker jacker nest, we immediately head in the opposite direction.

Collins needed to explain just how lethal tracker jackers could be. So she did. It worked. The above segment comes right near the beginning of chapter 14. It’s very smooth and clean — just enough info. Notice that it’s not done as if it were interior monologue. Katniss is stepping out of the story to explain it to you, personally, in a conversational voice. Then she steps back into the story and it resumes.

4) When you’re writing your first draft, just write the exposition and don’t worry too much about whether it works smoothly. Best to just get it down on paper. Later when you come back to edit, ask yourself how much of it you can throw away without confusing the reader. Get it right in the second draft, not the first.

More Resources for Writing First Person

Should Your Novel Be In First Person? What are your options and how do you choose between them?

Some Special Problems in Writing First Person How do you show what’s going on inside the other characters’ heads?

Perfecting That Pesky Point of View What if you want to write your novel partly in first person and partly in third person?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

So you’ve been writing a novel for a while and you suddenly realize that you hate everything you write. Is that normal? Is that bad? Are you going to die? Or are you a Great Suffering Artiste facing the customary doubts of all great Artistes?

Autumn posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy.

I’ve been following your blog for just under a year now and your advice has really benefited me and helped me grow a lot as a writer in that time. So thank you very much for that!

My question is: what happens if you reach a point when you just hate everything you write? I’ve been working on my novel for a long time and I can’t get even five chapter in. Not for a lack of ideas or writers block. I can sit down and write for an hour or more and walk away feeling darn proud of myself. Then I come back to it later and I just hate it! It’s a complete 180. And recently I’ve been doing that with everything I write, not just stuff for my novel. Short stories that I write just for fun I’ve felt like crumpling them up and tossing them.

Is this a phase that all writers go through? I can’t give up writing, it’s in my blood and I have to do it. But I just don’t know how to handle this…

Thank you very much for your time.

Randy sez: This is an excellent question, Autumn. It’s one most writers ask at some point in their career.

I’ve met only a few narcissistic writers who never questioned the dazzling brilliance of their work. About half of them were extraordinary geniuses and the other half were irretrievably awful.

So are you really good or are you really awful?

There are several possible answers:

• You might be a terrific writer suffering from the usual “my writing sucks” doldrums that many terrific writers wallow in all their lives. (This is the price of writing that some very good novelists must pay and they never, ever get over it. They think they’re awful but they’re massively wrong.)
• Your editing skills may have outpaced your creative skills for the moment. This is not unusual and it passes with time, if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you might always be a better editor than creator. That’s one of the hazards you face in writing. It might just mean you’re a perfectionist.
• Your writing might actually be awful. Again, this is one of the hazards of writing. If you’ve got some talent as a writer, the solution to this is to get some training and some good critiques from people you trust and just keep developing your craft. In a year or five or a hundred, you’ll reach the level of craft you need to make yourself happy. Let’s remember that not everybody has talent, so there are no guarantees here, but hard work does tend to pay off.

Now which of the above is the real answer for you, Autumn?

There’s absolutely no way for me to know, because I don’t have a sample of your writing in front of me. Because of the extraordinary demands in other areas of my life, I only do critiques at writing conferences and in my local critique group. So I’m not the guy to tell you if your writing is any good or not.

But there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of good freelance editors out there who can tell you. And there are thousands of published novelists who could also tell you. (It usually only takes a page or two to know if a writer is really good. It only takes a paragraph or two to know if they’re awful.)

So Autumn, your homework assignment is to find somebody who can give you a good objective opinion of your work. If you’ve got a community college in your area that teaches creative writing, the teacher could probably do this. Most writing conferences have many faculty and staff members who can do a great evaluation. There are any number of freelance editors available online (a very few are listed in my blogroll).

If the only question you have is, “Is my writing any good?” then just about any of these folks could give you an answer pretty quickly.

If your question also includes, “How can I make my writing better?” then you would need to pick your evaluator with a little more caution, because not all critiquers are equally adept at all categories, so you’d want to look for somebody who “gets” your kind of fiction. (For example, I’m not all that good at critiquing romance or women’s fiction, but I know the suspense category cold and I can almost always pinpoint exactly how to fix a thriller.)

So get an expert opinion, Autumn, and keep writing. Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

So you want to write a novel, but you don’t have a story yet. Everything you think of has been done before. What do you do?

Gavin posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy

I’m halfway through reading your ‘writing fiction for dummies’ book and I felt the urge to contact you for advice on what I hope is a common issue for many aspiring writers.

I say ‘hope’ because I hope you have the answer

Essentially I want to write a novel, but I have no storyline. Anytime I concoct a storyline in my head it feels stereotypical / not unique. On my computer I have Snoflake Pro open and an MS word document open. Both empty but for a blinking cursor.

I suspect i am suffering from having not discovered my creative paradigm as you describe. I purchased your Snowflake Pro with the belief it underpinned the logical approach I take to nearly everything I do. I seem to be drawing a blank though.

It may be an impossible question to answer, but do you have any tips or methods to share in terms of how does one decide on what story they want to tell.

Not unreasonably, your book and software probably assumes the reader has a storyline, so the more I progress through the book the more I feel I am not ready to progress. Sometimes I feel there are concepts in the book where it would be infinitaley easier had I nailed my storyline already.

I guess the one-liner here is “you know you want to write, but you don’t know what to write about”. Is there a method to even narrow it down?

The genres that interest me are Spy, Thriller, Military, Private Eye stuff. I feel this where I belong based on my own interests and fairly average military background.

The story-world time period also seems to present a challenge. Modern day stuff feels so saturated and unless you are Tom Clancy probably difficult to research. World War II era would be easier to research and I already have alot of foundation knowledge in that area, but I am bit skeptical on the market demand for WWII Fiction. My childhood fantasy world consisted of a private eye scenario with a dingy office and a hot assistant, and whilst I get a surge of creativity down this line, it feels so overdone. In some ways it is all a bit intimidating. Perhaps it is just a state of mind I need to get into whereby it doesn’t matter?

I don’t know, is the answer that ‘overdone’ is OK? There is always a market for the overdone as long as you can do it well? If I went down this path is it recommended to at least identify and implement a differentiator or variation?

In any event, I hope these questions are not inappropriately soliciting free consulting but I have grown to view your book as my early mentor and as a result felt comfortable enough to pose the question. Ironically, writing this email has helped me somewhat but I would truly value your insight.

Thanks and Best Regards.

Randy sez: Wow, that’s a long question, Gavin. Actually, at least two questions, if I’m not mistaken. Fortunately, both of them have short answers.

The first question has to do with originality. What if the story you want to write has been done before? The answer to that is, welcome to reality. Every story idea has been done before at some level. Your problem is to find a way to do a story that’s been done before in a way that hasn’t been done before. That’s the problem every author has every time they sit down to write a new novel.

I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Even if it’s been done before, take it and run with it and see what you come up with. An old story can seem very different if it’s got a fresh new character or a different storyworld or some new spark that makes it unique. Sometimes, that new spark only comes as you write. This is especially true for seat-of-the-pants writers, but I think it’s true for all of us. Most of my ideas come to me while I’m actually writing the first draft. Yes, even when I’ve got the high-level plan for the book mapped out. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.

The second question is this one, which I quote: “you know you want to write, but you don’t know what to write about”. Gavin, I think the solution to this is to read more. You know in general the sort of story you want to write, but you don’t know exactly what yet. You have no story burning a hole in your brain begging to get out.

So go read a bunch more books. Nothing inspires me like reading a new author or a new genre. If writing fiction is in your blood, then at some point you’ll find a book or an author and you’ll say, “Man, I’d like to write a story kind of like that, only way different.” And then you’ve got something you can run with.

But what if that never happens? What if you never get obsessed with an idea for a story? In that case, my guess is that writing fiction is not in your blood, and it might be best to try something else. There are many other ways to be happy in life than by writing fiction.

At some point while I was in graduate school working on my Ph.D. in physics, I realized that I’d never be really happy unless I gave myself the chance to write one particular story. It’s a long story that has so far spanned several novels and still isn’t complete, but it will be someday.

If that never happens to you, Gavin, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. But it might mean that you aren’t cut out to be a fiction writer. If that’s the case, then there’s some other thing you can do with your life that you’ll love far more than writing fiction.

If you’re a novelist, the one thing you can’t do without is passion for your story. Without passion, nothing you write will be good. With it, you won’t be able to keep yourself from writing.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.