I promise that not only will read your paragraph about the local teamsters union, I will wish you had said more about them and their internal political struggles.

And I also promise to think that William Goldman's wasn't half as good as yours.

You could replace "Teamsters" with "Trebuchet and Bubble Wrap" if you wanted to. :-)

/unhelpful, but hopefully cheering, advice

I find myself thinking this all the time. However, since I haven't managed to actually sell a story yet (although I've gotten close a few times), I figure the answer is that I have sit down and write the text that leads the reader through step by step even if I can feel myself falling asleep as I do it. (I guess the trick is to do the exposition such that I don't fall asleep writing it. I'll work on that...)

OTOH, you, Bear, could write volumes about fresh, wet paint drying, how it eventually cracks and peels, lashed by decades of wind and rain, how it flakes fall off and the wood underneath weathers to a dull, fragile gray, and I will be so enthralled in rapt ecstasy that I can not eat, drink or sleep until I have absorbed every word.

Ah. The step you're missing is that YOU know all this stuff because you made it up yonks ago, and it bores you to tears in the same way that Uncle Moe's story about how he got his start in show business that you've heard three quadrillion times bores you. WE, on the other hand, know it not, and are not only fascinated by the remarkable coincidence of Uncle Moe's happening to be busking for rent money at the corner of 42nd and 6th just when the casting director for Guys and Dolls was looking for his Nathan Detroit, but really, really need to know it, because it explains, as nothing else does, exactly why he's always so damn sure something will turn up and save his bacon at the last moment.

In short: exposition is good. Try and learn to love it.

Now, I'll go and try to take my own advice.

I think readers should have to excessive some initiative!

Though if the existence of a local hauler is important, how about "The mule team brought the new stove up the drive, and the carter heaved it off the wagon for me"?

I'm with you Bear.

I hate hand-holding as a reader, but I'm apparently in the minority there?

The way you put it, it all sounds so logical.

I have no idea; I might well not be surprised if you mentioned a cartage industry much later, because I'd just assumed of course there was one. Kinda has to be, doesn't there? To have much of any economy, even at the medieval level? (No idea what kind of society the book you're talking about is; not assuming it's generic fantasy pseudo-medieval, promise!)

It implies there are carts, but that's about as far as my mind would be likely to take me.

Some will and some won't read it. Besides you can always cut it out later if you don't like it. It's always kind of sad but sometimes it just has to be done.

(Is it bad that most of what I took from this is the intense desire to read a William Goldman teamsters book?)

Ahh!

Spare, tight, immediate, every word does work: these are the things I admire most in your fiction.

The word exposition brings me visions of skip-over paragraphs.

I tell myself not to worry. She will find a way. In a quick landscape detail or a bit of dialogue, she will place one ever-so-small-yet-functional stepping stone to satisfy us all.

(I don't want a livejournal account, but I created one to say this...)

I suspect Steve Brust could also do justice to the teamster's union. But you make a good point.

Necessary Evil. The exposition is there for people like me, who think they're pretty intelligent, but still miss important details that more intelligent people than me intuit automatically.

For this, I apologise, and thank you for your suffering.

Lee.

Honestly, the one thing I would have wished for in some of your books was a little more exposition. I know I should be able to fill it in for myself, but sometimes I'm just a little too dim.

No, here's what you do. Right after your socioeconomic spiel, have the second mule turn to the first and say "By the by, did I tell you about that terribly interesting, and utterly absorbing series of events I found myself involved in, yesterday?"

And then the first mule looks at the second and exclaims "Oh my God, it's a talking mule!"

Then continue with your exposition at length.

not only is nobody actually going to read all this incredibly boring exposition I'm currently writing, but in fact, they're never going to finish the book because


I wonder if writers should compile a wiki of our various in process/progress thoughts ranging from Yes I knew it was all crap! to Wow I just wrote the most amazing scene! and everything in between, and then instead of having to keep coming up with new angst we can just go checkmark the one that is closest to where we are today.

otoh, there really is no end to the writing angst. Strange how it flows so easily!

Meanwhile, my sympathies. *g*

I have faith in your ability to make a paragraph about the local teamster's union not only interesting but thought-provoking.

One of the things I most miss when I fall off the on-line cliff and sink into isolated oblivion are thoughts like these.

I find them very encouraging, and not because I enjoy your frustration. Honest.

I got caught up in your books when I found out Richard Feynman was a character in the Jenny books; he's always been one of my heroes. But I haven't read nearly as widely as you and reading your other books sometimes makes me feel...stupid. Like being in 4th grade and being away for a couple of weeks and you -know- you're missing things and you can see the shape of them but you don't know what they are or how to find out. When I make (most of) the implications, etc., in your work, I emotionally connect to the story and characters. When I don't get them, such as in Carnival, I feel frustrated and emotionally distant. I knew that it was because I wasn't seeing references and synchronicities and noticing minutae of glances and implications of relationships. I could see the shape of the gaps, but that only made me feel worse because I couldn't see the thing itself. So sometimes elucidation of what to you is slap-in-the-face obvious can be nice, for those of us who grew up allowed to read only limited approved materials considered age appropriate.

I love your writing, don't get me wrong. When I do connect emotionally it's gut-wrenching and uplifting and fabulous.

I'm actually totally with you no this one. I love it when the writer assumes I can make all of the intuitive and logical leaps. It draws me into the book far more than anything else. What I don't like is when the writer has clearly forgotten that these things need to exist ("What's a cartage industry?" *facepalm*), but that's still far more forgivable in my mind than over-exposition (see also: Two Towers, whole middle section; do we really need to know about all those veins on the leaves??? I mean, it's nice that he did all of the back-work on the world, but please "leaf" out the excessive literary fiber?).

My solution for you: Throw in a few side-references to it (the cartage industry, in this case) here and there — enough to get the reader to touch on the subject with their mind, but not enough to clog up the story's colon. (:

Is it really too much to ask that readers fill in the obvious logical steps and suppositions for themselves rather than having to be hand-held through everything?

Jane Austen agrees with you on the answer to this one. :)

It's not just William Goldman. I'm pretty sure that Terry Pratchett could write an interesting paragraph about the local Teamster's union. ...In fact, I think I've read that book of his.

But I'm nitpicking.

But it doesn't actually help the conviction that not only is nobody actually going to read all this incredibly boring exposition I'm currently writing

Ooh, ooh, I will! *bounces up and down* I like exposition! I like knowing that a driver with a mule team was hired to move the stove, rather than, y'know, they magicked it over or a dragon carried it or they planted a seed and it just grew there or something. It's the flavor and the texture of the world. If I could make all this stuff up on my own, I wouldn't need to read books. :-)

I mean, if you can get a stove from a nearby town to a farmhouse, and you know there are mules, doesn't that imply there's a cartage industry?

That sort of depends on whether these "mules" are hybrid equines, toasty-warm slippers, narcotics couriers or telepathic mutants bent on destroying the Foundation.

So find something fun or interesting to say about the cartage industry, ya big whiner :-)

Come up with a good mule joke. Have someone tell an interesting anecdote about "this one time, in the caravan." This is why Stephen King's books are 650 pages long...

Don't think of it as a *burden*. Think of it as an *opportunity*.

Hey, I was just thinking "If I were at a workshop, and I described this problem, what would Bear tell me to do?"