shaonicwhite

Exposition is the voice of speculation

I’ve had exposition on my mind lately. I’ve been thinking about how to write exposition well, but I’ve also been questioning how we talk about exposition, trying to figure out what that reveals about the contemporary craft of speculative fiction.

Exposition is linked to style. In some corners of the SFF world, it’s held as truth that Heinlein exploded all preexisting science fiction stylistics with the sentence “The door dilated.” Ever since, that sentence has been lauded as the epitome of a certain approach. It’s active, short, minimalist. It shows rather than tells, and in this view of exposition, the best kind of showing is implying. It’s economical, not indulgent.

We’ve all read bad exposition. Yawn-inducing descriptions of made-up geopolitics, clunky lists of sci fi technologies that aren’t quite as original as the author thinks they are—been there, skimmed that. Usually when we talk about bad exposition, we really mean boring exposition: detail that’s interesting to the author but not to the reader, because many science fictional and fantastic worlds are more fun to invent than to read about. For good reason, how-to-write books that focus on SFF encourage writers to lighten and simplify their expository material. Ursula Le Guin’s astonishingly slim volume Steering the Craft budgets an entire chapter for coaching new writers on how to break up exposition and “sneak” it into the flow of a narrative. That’s how essential she thought it was.

In this view, exposition is not by nature a part of narrative (or plot, or whatever you want to call it). From this perspective, you have to put in a lot of muscle to integrate exposition into the flow of a story. Underlying this approach is the unspoken assumption that exposition is not already story—that there is a binary distinction between “exposition” and “plot,” and breaking it down is hard work. The trick to smoothly allowing exposition to flow into plot is usually to make exposition invisible, or so brief as to be gone in a heartbeat.

It’s rare that I hear people discuss the joy of really well-written exposition—or maybe it’s just that for a few decades now, truly excellent exposition is granted a different title: narration, perhaps, or description, or even lore, depending on what kind of pleasure the text hopes to elicit.

This trend is deeply linked to another: the demise of the omniscient third person narrator. Okay, fine, demise is way too dramatic—it’s more accurate to say that omniscient third person is unfashionable right now. You can see it most starkly in nonfictional how-to-write texts: recent writer’s manuals decry “head hopping,” the practice of switching rapidly between the inner worlds of multiple characters within the same scene. Sure, I’ve read examples of head hopping that make me want to claw out my eyeballs, but that’s true of pretty much any literary technique. The existence of terrible examples doesn’t preclude the existence of great examples. Jane Austen “head hopped” all the time.

“Head hopping” is done best when navigated by a strong narrator who isn’t one of the major characters. (Mostly. I can think of a few counterexamples.) But opinionated narrators who aren’t protagonists just aren’t very fashionable right now. And opinionated narrators, who tell a story with verve and personality, are in some ways best poised to turn paragraphs of dry exposition into entertaining conversations between novel and reader. On the other hand, if your narrator is an invisible nothingness who robotically lists facts, then of course your exposition must be dispersed into tiny pieces lest it strangle the story.

I’m starting a new novel project right now, and for the first time in a long while I’m attempting a multiple-protagonist long-form story with sweeping scale. There’s a lot of worldbuiling to exposit. I like to think I’m decent at breaking up exposition into invisible, easily swallowed chunks. (Readers’ mileage may vary.) But I’d like to approach the novel differently this time around. I’m curious about the power and possibility of exposition, about exposition as a highlight, something to draw attention to rather than to hurry quickly past. The opening of The Fifth Season is almost all exposition. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. On a totally different note, Terry Pratchett often delivered exposition uncloaked by a protagonist’s thoughts, and his readers don’t seem to mind.

Captivating exposition isn’t limited to third person, though. Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is successful in part because its protagonist exposits at the reader constantly, with verve, humor, anger, and passion. I’m willing to follow the first-person narrator on a tour through whatever worldbuilding details she wants to throw at me, regardless of how interesting the details are in and of themselves, because her voice is irresistible. Common advice for beginning writers is to take the first twenty pages of their manuscript and highlight all the exposition, and if it’s more than [insert arbitrary amount here], delete it. If you tried that on A Deadly Education, you wouldn’t have any novel left. You’d have, like, three lines of dialogue. The thematics of Novik’s novel (a meditation on privilege and injustice in education) rest upon the mechanics of the fantastic world (which is built in an alarmingly literal sense on a bedrock of injustice). The novel is exposition.

As I look for new perspectives on the power and possibility of exposition, I’m drawn to a short essay by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s featured in Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook. KSR argues that exposition is “a huge part of the pleasure of fiction” because it means we’re describing things that require explanation, and things that require explanation are the unfamiliar, the unexpected, the otherworldly. He defines exposition pretty broadly, widening the category to include moments when a side character explains something essential to the protagonist, for example. If you accept this broad definition, then anything speculative must be conveyed via exposition. Exposition becomes the voice of the speculative world. It’s powerful because (Kim Stanley Robinson argues) “after all our narcissisms are exhausted, the world still smacks us in the face like the rocket in the Man in the Moon’s eye. The not-us is the permanent and inescapable Other; and writing about the Other is what we invented literature to do.”

For now I’ll try to approach this novel with that mindset. I’ll try to remember that readers often reach for speculative fiction in order to graze their minds against somewhere and somewhen else. Describing the contours of a speculative world isn’t an inconvenience to be hurried past—it’s the heart and soul of science fiction and fantasy.

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The idea of a forest

Generic ecologies in SFF

(Hi! I hope your June has been chill! No new stories out this month, just nonfiction—an essay on specificity and the environment in speculative fiction. Still working through these thoughts, so bear with me.)

There are woods aplenty in fantasy and science fiction. Above them all, Tolkien’s old growth European forests loom. Echoes of his trees repeat endlessly in the genre. The collective landscape of fantasy is littered with mist-wreathed mountains and golden-boughed woods. It’s not just plants. European foxes, stags, and wolves forever flit through our fantastical ecosystems, darting among a laundry list of flowers that could be drawn from any English gardening manual: roses, daffodils, peonies.

Occasionally you’ll see a different kind of forest, of course. SFF as a genre owes a debt to the adventure novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and as a consequence, white authors are forever stocking their invented worlds with thick jungles teeming with stinging insects and dangerous fauna. Tigers, jaguars, and snakes, oh my! The exoticized jungle is an ever-popular vacation destination for adventuring heroes, especially if a one-dimensional caricature of a tribal community can be tossed into the mix to provide extra danger or dispense canned wisdom. Every now and then the jungle will shed its skin and take on the guise of the swamp instead, adopting a minutely different aesthetic but keeping the same thematic core.

These fictionalized depictions rarely ring true for anyone who has ever lived in or near a jungle or a swamp. The experiential reality of moving through a real mangrove forest, for example, is rarely reflected in Western fantasy or science fiction. Instead, these narratives draw upon the abstracted idea of the jungle, a flimsy one-dimensional thing filtered through travelogues and action movies.

To state the obvious: you can write a jungle without it being terrible. Plenty of people have. My point here is not so much that white authors continue to be white, which we already knew, but that speculative biomes draw upon other speculative biomes more often than they draw upon the real world.

This isn’t an inherent evil; genres are by definition ongoing conversations in which texts reference and layer upon each other, building a collective megatext. It’s natural for fictional environments to be reflections of other fictional environments. But the ceaseless re-inscription of the same landscapes into the genre’s fabric has led to a curious flattening effect. The unruly physicality of the real world is smushed into a handful of tired images, their enchantment dulled from overuse. A towering oak, a blooming rose—there is power and wonder to be found in these images, but it grows harder and harder to find with each appearance, like a song stuck on repeat until its catchiness drains away. Melody becomes noise.

When I open recent fantasy novels and find the protagonist wandering through yet another version of Tolkien’s forests, I can’t help but wonder: has the author actually been to a place like the one they’re depicting? Not that they need to produce a stamped passport before being Allowed to write, but—why return to that particular imagined landscape and not a more personal and familiar one? I live in Southern California; why do many of my fellow Californian writers make their fictional mountains echoes of the Alps rather than the Sierra Nevadas? Where is the coastal grassland, the chaparral with the heady scent of sage in the air? Where are the eucalyptus groves, the manzanitas with their blood-red limbs? Why are the poppies so often implicitly the deep crimson flowers of Flanders, and not the cup-of-gold that blooms the color of sunlight along the western coast of Mexico and the United States?

This phenomenon is at least partly due to… is habit the right word? To successfully write within a genre, you have to internalize it. You have to live within its patterns—its tropes, its arcs, its conversations. At a certain point trends become simply the way things are. Forests in SFF are like that because they’re always like that. In a story that isn’t really about ecology or landscape, I can see why a writer might not feel the need to reinvent the wheel.

But so much SFF is about the landscape. Many speculative texts that aren’t “ecofiction” per se are still invested in the vibrancy of the natural world. How many times have we read stories in which a special herb must be harvested for its plot-relevant properties, or in which something strange and magical can only be found in the heart of the woods? In these narratives, wonder and enchantment is attached to the general concept of capital-N Nature, but lowercase nature is often set aside in favor of a diluted, abstract idea that has trickled down from other texts.

I keep returning to Tolkien here, and I don’t mean to imply that he was the only guy to ever leave an imprint on the genre or to ever talk about trees, but I can’t help but see his legacy lurking underneath so many of contemporary fantasy’s environments, lingering in the soil. And I can’t help but suspect that this state of affairs, this particular form his legacy has taken, is due to a collective incomprehension of why, exactly, the forests of The Lord of the Rings are so magical.

Sometimes it feels as if we all decided that the reason Lothlórien remains so vibrant in fantasy’s collective consciousness was the mallorn trees themselves and not the way Tolkien wrote about them. Sometimes it’s like we’re all pretending that what gives “The Song of Beren and Lúthien” its sense of wonder is the linden leaves or the hemlock-umbels, and not the delicate, sensitive attention that the narrative grants them. It’s narratorial sleight of hand: a reader is tricked into believing that wonder comes from what is being looked at, rather than from the act of looking itself. And the strength of Tolkien’s narratorial gaze lies in his attentiveness to real-world forests, real-world beauty. And so I can’t help but feel keenly when a story that hopes to invoke a sense of wonder and fascination with the natural world lacks any meaningful touchstone with real-world environments.

Perhaps this aching absence is rooted in the fact that many people feel disconnected from their environment. Many people feel that they need to travel to some far-off location in order to Experience Nature, which is somehow believed to be distant, removed, foreign. Perhaps in the same way, many writers feel that they need to reach for landscapes that other authors have already made magical, rather than seeking out the root of wonder itself.

We are desensitized to our local flora and fauna. The raccoons rooting through our garbage are pests, not clever neighbors with their own fascinating social structures. The agave in our sidewalk planters is the “before” photo of a syrup sold in Trader Joe’s, not a profoundly weird succulent that gets more science fictional the closer you look. (Google “agave in bloom,” if you’ve never seen it—that thing looks like an alien!) It’s true: there’s no substitute for standing in the shade of Yosemite’s sequoias or hiking through Finland’s national parks. Ecoregions are simply not interchangeable; no place is a substitute for another. But every neighborhood, no matter how urban, is home to thousands of species with their own potential to fascinate.

I often think about how much richer fantasy and science fiction could be if more writers drew deliberately upon their own engagement with their local landscape, rather than reaching toward landscapes that other people have already imagined and re-imagined for them. But I don’t want to phrase this as a call for “authenticity,” whatever that means, or as a didactic command to “write what you know.” Those concepts have always been on shaky ground in conversations about the speculative. So here’s another way to put it: I wish that speculative writers considered their options more seriously. I wish that speculative landscapes didn’t keep defaulting to factory settings.

Even now I’m not sure that my focus on wonder and enchantment is the right way to go about this conversation. I worry that by positioning enchantment as an ideal, I obscure the heart of the matter, which has more to do with the materiality of the lived environment being flattened into an idea. Wonder is not the only useful way to approach the landscape, real or fictionalized, and in some respects it may even be woefully inadequate. But I’m still articulating these thoughts, so for now I’ll leave it there.

Other news

Nearly a decade after everyone already read Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’m giving it a shot. (I was familiar with him via his editing work and nonfiction rather than his fiction, which I get the impression is the opposite of most people’s journey through his work.) My ongoing threads of craft notes + literary analysis + general thoughts:

Notes on Annihilation
Notes on Authority
Notes on Acceptance to come later

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The mystery of the mystery plot

The old adage goes like this:“In a good mystery, the reader should have all the clues they need to solve the mystery. They shouldn’t actually solve it before the story is over, but the reader should theoretically have been able to connect the dots and guess the culprit. This is an absolute must-have in good mystery writing.”

I’ve heard that idea stated like fact so many times that for a long while, I took it as gospel. I’m no longer sure it’s true.

To be fair, there are great reasons why this advice is so persistent:

When a mystery (or a science fiction or fantasy story with mystery elements) builds up a grand puzzle in which pieces of evidence are presented one by one, the reader expects the answer to arise naturally from the evidence. This is because the story is making an implicit promise to the reader: hey, I’m showing you this mysterious letter tucked into the victim’s desk. Hey, I’m showing you that there was dirt on the windowsill on the fourth floor. I’m showing you these things because they’re important. Pay attention. I promise it’ll be worth it. If those bits and pieces aren’t actually part of the solution later on, the narrative has essentially stood up the reader and failed to apologize for it. Following the rule of “the reader could solve it right now” is a good way to avoid that.
A common source of excitement and engagement in genre fiction is the feeling that you, the reader, are experiencing challenges alongside the protagonist. It’s tremendously fun to be invested enough in a story that you feel the characters’ defeats and victories alongside them. Making a reader feel like they’re solving a puzzle alongside the main character is a great way to foster engagement and identification with the protagonist.
If a crucial piece of evidence is hidden from the reader, and it’s handled poorly, it often feels arbitrary, even lazy. I’ve heard a fellow reader complain “oh, the author totally just made up a reason we couldn’t know about that earlier,” which is a really fascinating statement when you consider that by definition everything in fiction is made up by the author. Weird, isn’t it, how certain authorial decisions feel only natural, as if the author’s hand was forced by the internal logic of the narrative, whereas others are often dismissed as too intentional? Weird and cool.

I began to question this old standby of mystery plot writing advice because I am, regrettably, in possession of a Tumblr account, and for inexplicable reasons two mystery TV shows have recently had a small resurgence on Tumblr: Columbo (1971) and House (2004). I say “inexplicable” because Tumblr’s core demographic wasn’t born yet when Columbo aired and, if I recall correctly, Tumblr users as a whole absolutely, passionately despised House back when it was on the air. But for whatever reason, these two shows kept showing up on my dash, so eventually I caved and watched several episodes of each.

Both of those TV shows do very, very weird things to the traditional formula for maintaining reader (er, viewer) engagement.

Columbo’s subversion is pretty straightforward: the show’s big conceit is that each episode shows you the crime itself in full detail, culprit and everything, and then the next hour is about watching how the titular Columbo deduces all the things you already know. Regardless of whether you personally like the show, you have to admit it was quite successful—it aired all the way into the 21st century—so clearly someone found it narratively satisfying. That says something interesting about how we derive enjoyment from mysteries. It suggests that the central joy of a mystery narrative isn’t necessarily our own attempt to solve a puzzle—that a mystery story won’t lose its special magic if there’s no secret to guess.

That’s a bit of a relief, to me. I’ve always enjoyed mysteries, but the closest I’ve gotten to writing one is a “but who really assassinated so-and-so?!!” plotline in a SFF story. Straight-up no-speculative-elements examples of the mystery genre often feel like strange and miraculous artifacts to me, complex little puzzles that require the author to somehow perfectly understand their entire audience’s ability to guess a made-up answer to a made-up question. It’s exciting to see a successful piece of media whose entire premise is that it’s cool if the audience knows what’s going on.

House’s subversion is a little weirder, because you can watch it and go “yep, that’s a standard mystery plotline with a hospital setting plopped on top.”But when you look closer, you realize that the maxim of “the audience should have been able to put the clues together” doesn’t apply. Because the audience isn’t made up of doctors. In one episode of House, it turns out the patient is suffering from selenium poisoning because he ate too many brazil nuts—which I guess you might be able to guess if you just so happen to be familiar with the effects of selenium poisoning? Which you definitely aren’t, unless you listen to a very weird set of podcasts. But even if you say “okay, okay, but the idea is that the audience still could have figured it out, if they had the right training,” you confront the issue that basically every clue in this show could mean at least three different things. The characters acknowledge it within the text: they say things like “but a fever could be anything” and have at least one argument per episode about how a particular combination of symptoms could signify at least four wildly different ailments.

If you look too closely, if you think about it too hard, House becomes curiously hollow. The central mystery of each episode becomes nothing but a word game, empty actions and empty numbers without even a passing relationship with reality. Medical terms that are vaguely familiar to a lay audience emerge upon a froth of petty interpersonal drama, ultimately meaning nothing more than remember, this is about medicine, remember, this is serious. There’s no time in the story for an in-depth explanation of the root causes of the unusual medical problems the characters discuss, so the showrunners toss the audience a halfhearted metaphor every now and then, maybe a CGI shot of the inside of a lung that probably looked very impressive in 2009. If you actually think about any of the metaphors or graphics for longer than three seconds, you realize that none of it makes sense.

But it doesn’t matter. The made-up facts that lead to a made-up solution to a made-up puzzle aren’t actually important. Maybe the fictional evidence matters more in other pieces of media, but in this one, at least, the “evidence” isn’t really evidence at all—it’s a signifier that points to the idea of there being evidence. And that’s all the show needs. It still works.

The showrunners are betting that the reason people watch mysteries isn’t for the experience of saying in amazement, “Oh, but that’s so obvious! How did I miss that?” The reason people watch is… well, a bunch of things, but one reason people watch mystery TV is because the rhythm of evidence revealed and hypotheses tested is satisfying in and of itself, even if you can’t follow along at home. It’s just fun to watch a fictional person tug at a fictional problem until it’s solved. These shows reminds us that the real magic in a mystery isn’t the mystery itself. In the end it all comes down to character, rhythm, dialogue, setting. It’s not about invented facts, not really. It’s about the same things all good stories are made of: little made-up weirdos saying weird things to other made-up weirdos in a weird place at all the best and weirdest times.

I don’t know. There’s more to say here, I think, but I can’t quite put it in words.

New stories

“The Wren In the Hold” and “Without Any Sound But the Sea”: two new narrative poems in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction!

“The Wren In the Hold” is set in the same universe as “Seven Needles Glinting,” the short story that you get when you subscribe to the Unreality Effect emails.
“Without Any Sound But the Sea” is about queerness and respectability and history and the sea. It’s a little bit eldritch.
Get the physical version of the magazine here.
If you prefer ePub, go here. (I think it might be available on Amazon too?)

“Every Bone a Bell”: a very short and (hopefully) very disturbing science fantasy story in Lightspeed about the absolute worst form of faster-than-light travel I could think of. Read it here.

“Where the Heather Grows,” originally published in Nightmare, has been translated into Spanish by the wonderful people at Voces de lo insólito! It’s the first time anyone has translated my work and I’m absolutely delighted.

They also conducted a brand-new interview with me (at the previous link) that’s been translated into Spanish as well. Voces de lo insólito is a new and really exciting project, and they do good work — even if you’re not interested in my stuff, you’ll probably love everything else they’re doing. Check it out.

Other news

My story “The Kaleidoscopic Visitor” will be on the Notable Stories list for 2023’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy volume! (In other words, it was longlisted, but won’t appear in the anthology itself.)

You can read the story in Uncanny.

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