Let's Talk About Those Telling Paragraphs
Write Better Now
So, as you can tell, (cough, see what I did there?), I’ve been on a show vs tell kick for the last month or longer. This is because I truly feel that understanding this (and character development and story structure) is one of the best things you can do for your writing.
Yesterday on the podcast, we talked about telling on the sentence level. Today, it’s about the telling paragraphs.
A lot of people call this exposition, which I’ve talked about before.
But basically, there are two main types of telling paragraphs:
Info dumps - world building moments in a bigger block
Backstory - person’s prior history moments in a bigger block
What are these things? They are places where your story slows down. They are places that take us away from the forward motion of the plot to tell us things that happened in the past (backstory) or explain the world (info dumps).
When we take our readers out of the main thrust of the narrative to give backstory or info dumps, we take the risk of losing our readers. Stakes lower. Brains hitch.
It can be done. It can be done well. But it is a risk.
Here’s the biggest key. In these paragraphs, we do not feel anything for the character. We don’t live in their experience.
Here’s an example:
Bud Godzilla walked into the middle of the street and say Hammy the Hamster there. He loved Hammy so much and hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the Hamster-pocalypse twenty two days ago, a day he’d never forget because the day sucked but also because he’d had that delicious pineapple and radio antennae pizza from the little place on the street that didn’t exist any longer because the hamsters blew it up on Sunday, demanding more cheese noodles. But there Hammy was, all cute and stuff, lurching right down the middle of School Street. They’d always been best friends. Bud knew that he had to get a hug from his beloved friend, but Hammy attacked him.
So, this should be a vaguely big moment for Bud and Hammy. We should feel things.
We don’t.
That’s because there is so much filtering and told language in multiple consecutive sentences and also back story.
This sort of backstory/exposition event tends to:
Take us out of the immediate exciting interaction (a reunion, a zombie hamster attack)
Use a lot of filtering language
Try to be too clever and gets in the way of the story.
Bud Godzilla walked to the middle of School Street, naked feet stomping on the bits of old pizza cartons, flyers warning of the hamsterpocalypse.
Something snarled.
Where?
Just thirty feet away, Hammy lurched along the pot hole, fur mangled.
“Hammy?” Bud whispered, crouching down to see, arms opening for a hug. “Buddy, is that you?”
Different, right? Still not amazing, but you can feel the hope in Bud and you know things are not good, and I didn’t even get to the bite.
So, how do you find these moments?
You look for places where there isn’t details.
You look for places where paragraphs tend to be longer than the rest of the story.
You look for a lot of distancing words and language grouped together (seemed, felt, looked, thought, when, then)