Hi and welcome:
Last night, I had dinner with one of the new teachers at my Studio, a terrific lady who is also a terrific writer, who talked about a professional editor she’s working with.
“She cut every bit of my exposition,” she had said. “All of it.”
Then she made a gesture with her fist to show zero to me, to my assistant Cloie, and to another woman at the table, a photographer and writer in her own right.
We all gasped. NO exposition allowed. Zero. ⛔️
Of course, we writers know this. I know it. You know it. And yet we cannot help sneaking in tons of exposition. It’s normal. It’s expected. And it’s a hard habit to break.
Expository writing, as the term implies, exposes the author’s thoughts or experiences for the reader; it summarizes, generally with little or no sensory detail. Expository writing compresses time: For five years I lived in Alaska. It presents a compact summation of experience with no effort to recreate the experience for the person reading.
~ Brenda Miller and Suzanna Paola, Tell it Slant
In my opening paragraph above, I did this very thing (to be expected in a teaching, but still). Thinking about our scene recipe card (SRV), let me try again:
Location: a restaurant in an old Arts and Crafts style house called Forage.
Overhead: a box beam ceiling of old timbers and a disco style lighting fixture of crystal orbs shining so brightly I wanted to pull on a set of sunglasses.
Underfoot: a hard wood floor of narrow tongue and groove planks.
To the right: A loud gathering of women clothed in bright colored silks who were clearly out on the town and living it up with plates of steaks before them, and full glasses of red wine that did not stay full for long.
To the left: the terrific lady who is a terrific writer and who wore a silky cream blouse and olive colored pants, her blond shoulder length hair styled in soft waves around her narrow, high cheeked face.
This is what I’ve been asking you to do over the last week. And I hope this example makes it more clear.
Enough about exposition for now because it’s time to continue with scene. By now you have had a week to incorporate description from the SCR into a current project or something new. Good work. I hope you’ll get some of those into the comment box so I can take a look.
Now, let’s debrief the first chapter of Crazy for the Storm:
You listened to me read the story with your SRC handy and underlined when Ollestad incorporated one of the elements.
You noted the number of scenes in this chapter. Not flashback or representative scenes, but the scenes that move the story forward in linear time.
And you may have stopped noting the elements of scene in this chapter, if and when this happened, for whatever reason, you made a large X on your copy.
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