Batblog

Breaking The Golden Rule

The "Golden Rule" is, of course, "show, don't tell." It's something I've been trying my absolute hardest to follow, to the point that I'm almost worried that I might end up making my writing too vague. But that's not what I want to talk about.

Now, in general, I'm trying to consciously avoid using exposition dumps in my writing except under two very strict circumstances:

-In dialog, where the speaker is explaining something relevant to matter at hand to a character who logically wouldn't know that thing.

-In the narration, to reflect the fact that the POV character is currently thinking about the thing that's being explained.

It's a set of rules that requires no small amount of discipline to follow, and also quite a bit of faith in the patience of the reader. But they're also rules that are absolutely worth the trouble to follow. Except when you're doing something completely bonkers that the rules simply don't apply to, that is, which brings us to the matter at hand; against my better judgement, I've started writing Free Fox.

Free Fox is something I mentioned quite a few blog posts back, in my entry about the projects I have planned for the future. Essentially, it's a sprawling sci-fi action-adventure story set in an alternate version of Earth, and starring an eccentric super-assassin named Zero. The crux of the concept is that it would be written as if it were the in-universe autobiography of the protagonist, and therein lies part of the problem; an autobiography is basically all exposition.

Now, here's an excerpt to show some of what I've tried to do to make the format work:

A lot can be gleaned from my appearance, of course; my brown skin, black hair, and hazel eyes all mark me as being of the desert-dwelling Kerashi stock. Unfortunately, Kerash was the human nation that sat closest to the Shiah territories during the time of the infamous Honeywater War. So, when Sahl Fith made the decision to start taking hostages to keep the human military from bombing his city into a fine, bat-dusted powder, most of the prisoners ended up being Kerashi children.

I was one of those.

As you can imagine, a bunch of little kids take up quite a bit of space, and thrifty Fith wasn’t about to let his meat shields just sit around growing fat on stringy venison. Instead, he put us to work. A lot of us, myself included, were sent to the mines beneath the city. So that’s where the story starts; in a dank, dirty hole. It’s not nearly as sexy as it sounds.

First and foremost; the jokes. After all, if you're going to be reading a lot of exposition, it might as well be entertaining (being written by a borderline-insane character who refuses to take anything seriously helps in that regard). Secondly; it's written for an in-universe perspective. Zero is writing with the expectation that the reader will already know all the things that are common knowledge in that universe, so, just the same as any other story I'll write, there will be times where an element of the setting is merely mentioned in passing and the reader will have to figure out what it is from contextual clues.

In a strange way, Free Fox will be following that first of my exposition rules. It's just that the entire story will be like one giant dialog, with Zero explaining his life to the rest of his world. Whether it'll actually be a readable dialog in the end is another thing entirely.