Exposition? Nothing wrong with it.

Okay.

I know, I know. It’s been over a month since I last posted. Entirely my fault.

I’ve been busy with a lot of things at home - painting the living room, repairing holes in the wall, working with my daughter’s robotics group (I’m the coach and the competition is in less than two weeks). It’s not like I haven’t had a few minutes here and there to write, but my story insists on coming first and spending time posting to this blog leaves me feeling guilty (and a little dirty). You may look at this post and ask yourself, “How long could it have taken to write this?” Unfortunately, I’m a notoriously slow writer, and even a post as short and simple as this one will take over a half hour. Lord knows how other bloggers can manage to write multi-page posts and still have time to work, or eat, or sleep.

Anyway, I ran across this blog post about “exposition” today and it caught my attention enough for me to stop and share it with you. In the post, the author rails against the notion that exposition is “always” worse than story. I completely agree. In my opinion, exposition, written well, and in an entertaining manner, is just as much fun to read as dialogue.

As a newbie, unpublished, wannabe writer, I suppose my opinion doesn’t count for much, but many of my favorite books contain exposition – Harry Potter, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, SciFi by Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asimov, etc. I’m not saying all exposition is good. I’ve been turned off by badly written exposition, but I’ve also been turned off by poorly written dialogue, so what’s the difference?

Feel free to comment.