elizabethminkel:

havingbeenbreathedout:

Y’all, not to be that person… but if you are reading books that open with ten pages of exposition, spoon-feed the reader extraneous detail via infodumps, and dwell for paragraphs on irrelevant physical descriptions of characters? Those are bad novels. This is not a fanfic versus original fiction distinction. Those are just characteristics of bad writing. There’s plenty of original fiction (whatever that means given our highly referential culture) that does not do those things, and it kind of makes my heart hurt to think that people believe otherwise. If your experience of non-fanfic fiction is limited to books that do this, I have truly phenomenal news about what awaits you. 

*Caveats: (1) There have certainly been eras of literature when opening with ten pages of exposition was more the norm (I’m looking at you, Thomas Hardy)… but in contemporary lit? This is pretty much Thing #1 that any “shopping your novel” blog post will tell you not to do. I am more weirded out every time that post comes up on my dash. (2) This is in no way meant as a put-down of fanfic, which I read and love. 

****THANK YOU**** for being that person, I am happy to co-chair “being that person” with you on this.

I’m curious how many people who feel this way are thinking of Hardy. Or like, go a century earlier for PEAK expository writing. No, I did not chose Tom Jones from the dozen titles we were given for English comps in college lol. Maybe people have bad memories of studying 18th and 19th century Western literature in school? I love this stuff but I also spent my academic career studying it—and specifically studying the cultural context in which it was written. 

Take my commentary with a grain of salt, because I read a lot of contemporary capital-L literature, but I don’t have a real sense of what’s standard in, say, SF/F. I do see some basic expository writing in YA—not endless pages of it, but often more to go on than in other books I read. But with most non-YA I read, it’s far more common that I’m tossed in blind and have to find my bearings. (You might be frustrated for a bit, until you find your bearings and you feel like a champion.)