Maybe I'm weird....

[conuly]

but I actually like a good bit of exposition in my books.

I mean, the author does have to know how to write compelling monologuing, and ideally it flows in some sort of natural way - but if all the action stops for three pages while our narrator tells me about fainting goats, or why the pinky is more important than the point finger, or about the detailed geopolitical implications of Prince Whoever's abdication from the throne of East Fantasyland? Listen, I'll eat it up with a spoon.

That could just be me.

************

Tomoko Sato's Sculpted Foods

Machu Picchu Reopens for a Single Stranded Tourist

Teens Did Surprisingly Well in Quarantine

Meerkat triplets: no school holidays for the baby meerkats (Video with a bit of printed exposition)

Moldy Fruit Sculptures Formed From Precious Gemstones Challenge Perceptions of Decoration and Decay

The Most Dangerous Pole Dance

The company that has a monopoly on ice cream truck music

The Holocaust-Surviving Violins That Were Quarantined Beneath a California Stage

Birds are crashing into NYC buildings. Record numbers are being rescued.

How maverick rewilders are trying to turn back the tide of extinction

The So-Called ‘Kidnapping Club’ Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers Into Slavery

‘We were students negotiating with armed guerrillas for my father’s life’

AP Road Trip: Racial tensions in America's 'sundown towns'

Stop-and-Frisk Never Really Ended. Now It’s Gone Digital.

Watching the Outrage Over Cuties as a Survivor of Pedophilia

Wildfire smoke in US exposes millions to hazardous pollution

He’d Waited Decades to Argue His Innocence.

A 'second wave' of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say

Europe, US reel as virus infections surge at record pace

Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis

Comments

[elayna]

I think every time I read advice on 'how to write,' there's something where I think...But I like reading things that are the opposite of this advice!

[conuly]

There is nothing wrong with a nice, satisfying infodump.

[used_songs]

I fell in love with Moby Dick during the all-about-whales chapter.

[baranduin]

I love exposition.

[thawrecka]

There's a lot of people who like that. Infodump is, as far as I can, the entire selling point of hard science fiction, for example, and a lot of the hard rules fantasy.

[calimac]

I've seen exposition done well, and I've seen it done badly. But the worst kind is the kind where the author has been told that outright exposition is a no-no, and packs it in to awkward conversations or the middle of action scenes.

My favorite all-exposition fantasy story is "Flight" by Peter Dickinson, which is written in the form of a history essay about an imaginary country.

[mount_oregano]

"Expository writing" in non-fiction is considered, when done at its best, an art form. It includes essays, magazine and newspaper articles, and even textbooks. So why should one art form exclude another kind of art form if the medium is the same? I wrote this story in the form of a non-fiction magazine article: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/burke_11_17/

[oursin]

The very worst expository lump I ever encountered was in a woowooey historical fantasy set in the Crusades, about a Templar who is (details fade a lot) I think initiated into Goddessy paganism? Anyway, there is a long passage on the signs and symptoms on leprosy, apparently cribbed straight out of a modern medical textbook, when we come to Baldwin The Leper King of Jerusalem.

Further cringe from medical historian that, it is extremely contentious to suppose that what ye medeevle folx termed leprosy was anyway what would now be diagnosed as Hansen's Disease...

[pensnest]

I like exposition, especially in the form of 'asides', when characters' thoughts meander and thereby tell us a lot. I also have a great fondness for footnotes, and Terry Pratchett's footnotes were things of joy.

[dorchadas]

Worldbuilding is one of the main reasons I read fiction.

[conuly]

Bet you learned a lot about whales too.

[conuly]

Mmhm.

[conuly]

His footnotes were more useful than most people's actual feet.

[conuly]

Oh dear.