Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by L Rust Hills

Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by L Rust Hills

Author:L Rust Hills [Hills, L Rust]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4719878083
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2000-09-06T00:00:00+00:00


Such dialogue does provide an "initiation" into the situation, but it may seem to the reader more like an ordeal-by-fire. It's an exaggeration, of course. But even artfully done, dialogue thus concocted to carry exposition seldom rings true. "Planted" information almost always somehow breaks the normal rhythms and flow of conversation. Characters always seem to be telling one another what they both already know, just for the reader's benefit. If information is to be imparted from one character to another, there has to be some reason for it, some request or demand on one character's part for an explanation from another—and this situation cannot really exist at the beginning of a story. Such a situation certainly can exist toward the end or in the middle of a story, where not only some third character in the story but the reader as well may be interested in how two people from such different backgrounds as Martin and Miranda ever came to meet in the first place, and presumably such information could be conveyed there more convincingly. But by and large, beginning writers cannot be told too often: Forget "making dialogue work for you"; keep exposition out of dialogue; it's hard enough to make dialogue work for itself.

As was the cause with scenes, much of this bad advice about "handling exposition" in opening dialogue derives from "rules" for playwriting that fail to take into consideration the many alternative techniques available to the fiction writer. Playwrights (or at any rate, the people who theorize about playwriting) always apparently assumed (and perhaps in this particular case they were right) that your average theatergoer couldn't be counted on to read his program notes:



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