Don't tell me what I already know...

As promised, today I have a craft post. But first...

Disclaimer: I am not an expert; I make no such claim. You are free to disagree with me now, as always. Your disagreement invalidates neither of our opinions. The following is my opinion about a writing technique that doesn’t work for me.

I am a writer. I’ve been doing this professionally for several years now. My first novel (Stray)sold in 2006 and came out in 2007. In the years between, it’s become very difficult for me to take off my “writer’s hat” and read books for pleasure, because I now see the technique behind the story. I see plot devices, contrived events, character archetypes (and often stereotypes), faulty grammar, and sometimes just plain awkward phrasing.

Have I done some of that myself?

I’ve done ALL of that myself, at one point or another. I'm probably still doing some of it--it's much easier to catch these things in other people's writing than in your own. My flaws have been pointed out to me. A lot. Which is probably why I see them so easily now in other things I read. And, like most writers, I have pet peeves. Does that mean I hate authors/books that utilize my pet peeves? Of course not. Sometimes I realize I've used my own writing pet peeves, and that gets on my nerves far worse than when someone else does it.

Today I’m going to talk about one of my worst writing pet peeves. There’s probably a technical name for it, but if so, I’m unaware of it.

[Confession: I’m not a trained writer. I have a BA in English and I taught high school English for a short while after college, but I took no writing courses in high school or college, beyond the required freshman level composition classes. I didn’t even take technical writing. (I was afraid I’d die of boredom or come to hate writing.) The VAST majority of both my major courses and my electives were lit classes. Well, that, and philosophy and women’s studies classes. Yes, I was one of THOSE students. ;) But the point is that what I know about writing, I’ve learned from the generous help of an awesome mentor when I was first starting out, and from experience. Trial and error. The patience of my editor, who probably used an entire package of red pens on the ROGUE manuscript, teaching me to tighten my prose. THANK YOU, MARY-THERESA!]


That said, today’s writing pet peeve is: The character who explains stuff to a character who already knows this stuff, just so the writer can get information across to the readers. (This happens in movies all the time too, and in fact, this post was prompted by a movie I saw this weekend.) Sometimes it goes something like this...

“Bob, as you know, Immortal Remains is the world’s premier slain-vampire-dust
collection company in the world. We were established in the year 1286, in a
small Hungarian village that was first overrun by vampires, then by vampire
hunters, until it was nearly buried by the dust of the dead, prompting the
Lightbright brothers to offer their disposal services to the world in an
historic attempt to combine selfless good deeds with the concept of a free
market economy. As you well know.”

Sometimes, it’s a little more subtle than that. But the point is that there is almost never a good reason for one character to tell another something s/he already knows. This is just plain lazy writing. (I know, I’ve done it too.)

So, how can a writer get background information across to the reader? There are many ways, but one of the most common (and the most effective, when done well, IMO) shows these scenes through the eyes of a character unfamiliar with the world. That way, as this character learns about the world around him or her, so will the reader. And it doesn’t have to (and in fact, shouldn’t) come all in one long speech/lecture, like the made-up illustration above. No matter how it’s delivered, backstory (and world building) should be spread throughout the story, not throw in like one great blood clot of information, guaranteed to halt the flow of the plot.


Also, especially in stories told in first person, the narrator can just come out and state things in the narration. Not large blocks of information, but short, straightforward bits are fine. Like this.

“Make sure you clean your nozzle, rookie,” Mina said, then flounced off with her
skirts raised an inch off the sooty ground, leaving me standing in a pile of
recently-dead vampire. Mina Harker was the most experienced vamp dust vaccumer in the industry, and I’d hated her for as long as I’d known her.

See? We know Mina’s position in the industry, and that the narrator hates her. And no one had to tell anyone something s/he already knew.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m off to practice what I preach. ;)