Exposition is often seen as the worst thing a writer can do. If you have to directly tell the reader things, such as what a character looks like, their history, or explaining a situation, then you’ve failed as a writer, right?
Wrong! All authors use exposition to some extent. The only difference is that they use it for good instead of evil.
So let’s go over what make good exposition vs. bad exposition.
There are two problems that many writers, myself included, make way too often:
(1) Being so excited about our stories that the plots become fast and boring, and (2) being too scared to have fun with descriptions.
Well now it’s time to end that by showing how to add fun to your writing!
You’ve enjoyed the power of stopping time your entire life.
You have as much free time as you want to work on projects, relax, and even catch up on sleep.
But then, one day, when you try to start time again… it doesn’t work.
WikiHow is one of the craziest places on the Internet, and that’s saying something. It has articles on literally everything, from How to Keep Your Glasses From Fogging Up to How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs. All with completely serious instructions and professional step-by-step illustrations.
So then what happens when we write a story about a random WikiHow article?
3rd person past tense? “He said/she ran?” Yawn. Been there, done that, it’s been written a billion times.
1st person present tense? “I say/I run?” Enh. Every young adult book does this nowadays.
2nd person future tense? “You will say/you will run?” …now you’re writing with fire, baby!
A good simile is like chocolate syrup on a bowl of ice cream, the perfect addition to a story that makes it all the more delicious and vivid.
But a bad simile is like a bottle of ketchup squirted on top of your sundae, wrecking an otherwise potentially-tasty story.
The question then is, what’s the difference between them and how do you write GOOD similes?
As a writer, you’ll often be given word-count restrictions. Maybe 2,000 words, or 500 words…
…or sometimes, even 30 words. Could you write a story with only 30 words?
We tried, and here’s the results!
Getting writer’s block sucks, but the first step in un-clogging yourself is to figure out which kind of writer’s block you have.
There are three main types of writer’s block:
1) No ideas. You don’t know what to write in the FIRST PLACE.
2) No start. You have an idea but don’t know how to START.
3) No momentum. You’ve written part of it but don’t know how to CONTINUE.
Once you’ve identified your type of writer’s block, it’s time for the next step: fixing it.
For the last stream’s exercise, we did an exercise about overcoming writer’s block.
There are many different types of writer’s block, though most people use it to mean “not knowing where to take the story next.”
It turns out the best way to beat writer’s block is to, well, write! It doesn’t matter if it’s good or if it makes sense, quite often just getting something down on the page will get the juices flowing.
To show that off, we induced writer’s block on ourselves. Chat came up with an opening sentence, then we wrote half a story, and stopped (that’s when we got “writer’s block”). To unclog the block, we got a random sentence that had to be the next sentence in our story, then we had to finish it to the end.
Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream’s exercise, we went over something that’s a pretty divisive topic: when/how to write a prologue.
I’m not a fan of prologues. In the Ten Writing Commandments we came up with, the second commandment outright says: “Thou shalt not start thine story with a dream, flashback, or prologue. At best, thine readers will be disappointed when they start your “main story,” at worst, they will be bored, confused, and stop reading.”
I would steer all beginner writers away from writing prologues, because it’s too easy to use them as a crutch. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place sometimes.
So for the last stream, chat voted for a randomly-generated plotline, and then we wrote a prologue for that story. Here’s what we got: “A cowboy and a maverick heavily conspire to prepare an irritating pixie.”
It was a fun exercise, trying to think of what kind of information would be justifiable in a prologue for that story. Here’s what we came up with:
