Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Huh?

Duh!

Well, the Memorial Day Weekend is behind us now. I remember how before I retired how I looked forward to being able to escape from my job for a couple of days. It is great not having to step back into the grinder. Then again I’m growing old and aches and pains remind me of times of full health when I took my vitality for granted.

I have a truck over at a consignment place off the interstate and I went there yesterday in my Studebaker pickup to see how it was doing. The owner told me I needed to put it all in primer. There is a “Thresheree” coming up which features old farm equipment and vendors. They will be trying to sell it there. While we were talking I noticed an old Yard Statue made of cement. I bought it and will try restoring it using some to the modeling techniques I use.

One of the things I asked my students to do in the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) was to template their favorite authors. What emerged from this exercise is a validation of the obvious. This is that good writing uses many devices and components but the King and Queen are exposition and dialog. DUH! In a novel exposition tends to tell and exposition tends to show… DUH! Thus it is reasonable to expect that in a favorite novel most of what a reader should expect is exposition and dialog. However… most aspiring writers tend to provide the reader with one or that other but not both.

I find myself telling them over and over that the best writing has a blend of both. A novel is not a stage or screen play. In either of these the audience or reader gets to see the characters actually moving about on the stage or screen. The big difference between the two seems to be that in a stage play the language is more important while in a screen play the imagery is more important.

In a novel however, there is no stage or screen, only the reader’s imagination that that must be illuminated by both exposition and dialogue. “Telling” has become a bad word to many and I suppose the reason for that is because novels that depend too much on telling can be ponderous. There is however… exposition that both shows and tells. For example exposition can show what is happening in the world of the story just as it can show what has happened in the past. Both are necessary but backstory provided in blocks gets boring and most successful writers intersperse it with current action and dialogue. This is the art (Duh!) of good writing….

Some writers do it better than others, but the science is that some careful thought needs to go into the structure of how the words are going to be presented, to optimize the utility of the form. Good novels don’t just happen by accident as writers merrily write down the first things that pop into their minds. That’s what I’m trying to get across in the EWW and there is a systematic approach that has been planned to get students to realize the importance of both spontaneous writing and getting that spontaneity to accept the form of time tested techniques in writing.