Fiction Book Reviews

(In an effort to get myself to write in here more regularly even when I don’t have time for a book review, I figured I’d start a weekly feature where I talk about matters of craft and style in writing, mostly because that’s one thing I can almost always ramble about easily.)

I had a professor who liked to talk about economy of language. Whether he was as much a good example of this as one might imagine from how much he emphasized it, I’ll leave to your imaginations, but it’s an important thing to remember for any kind of writing…and it’s not exactly something I’m good at. (You might notice just how long some of these entries are.) I go on and on forever in my blogs or any other casual-writing environment; I often find myself butting up against the maximum word limit in my papers (and then there are the times when I deliberately use more words to say what I need to because I need to hit the minimum word count).

I’m probably the worst at this in my fiction, though. I can write short things; much of my fanfic, especially early one-shot fics, is pretty short, but these short pieces tend to be plotless vignettes exploring a single character’s point of view or thoughts on a specific event. It helps that with any fanfic, with the possible exception of crossovers (I’ve written two, and they were both…pretty epic), the writer can automatically assume that the audience is familiar with the characters, world, conventions, and previous events of the fandom in question.

When it comes to stories with plots, original fiction with worldbuilding, stories where things have to be explained…I tend to go a bit overboard in my exposition to make sure everything is understood. I write long. My worlds and backstories tend to be kind of complicated, and in short stories (er, for certain values of “short”), there isn’t much room to cram in all that exposition. I’m a little better with novels, since I know I’ve got much more space to seed in everything the readers need to know, but it’s still a difficult balance to strike: don’t bore readers by going into textbook mode, don’t confuse them by not letting them know what’s going on.

So after all that rambling about exposition (I told you I write long! …but you knew that), the main point of this entry was to highlight a couple of stories that impressed me with the skillful way they handled their exposition. And…neither are books. Whatever.

I saw Up this weekend, after hearing everyone raving about it (still need to see Star Trek, the other movie everyone seems to love), and excepted to be a little disappointed since such things rarely quite live up to the hype. Not this time. It’s just as touching, heartfelt, hilarious, and well-done as everyone’s saying. The part I really admired on a storytelling level was the opening sequence depicting Carl and Ellie’s life together, though. It’s maybe five minutes long, tops, and it has basically no dialogue, if any at all–and yet it manages to convey an enormous amount of information quickly, elegantly, and very effectively. I realized watching it that it leaves a lot of details out: what exactly was Ellie sick with? How did Carl break his leg? Did they really work at the zoo their whole lives? Did they travel anywhere else? Why couldn’t they have kids?

And the answers to those questions didn’t matter. Those are the sorts of things I obsess over in my writing, making sure every little thing is explained. But it didn’t matter. We were given exactly the information we actually needed for the story–that they loved each other deeply, that they kept having to break into their funds for all the curveballs life threw their way, that they wanted kids and couldn’t have any, that Ellie was the light of Carl’s life, that she got sick and died. That’s all we need to know–no more. The writers at Pixar were smart enough not to clutter it up with unnecessary exposition. (This was somewhat true throughout, actually–with Russell saying “Phyllis isn’t my mother!”, for instance, and while I never could figure out exactly what was going on there, that really didn’t matter either: the important thing was that his dad wasn’t around, and that was conveyed just as effectively.) I’ve been trying to put this lesson to work in the werewolf story I’m currently writing; it has to be short anyway because it’s a school thing with limits on length (10-13 double-spaced pages), and it’s in my interest to write quickly and leave out any excess because it’s, um, already sort of late, but it’s a good exercise for me anyway, keeping myself aware of things that don’t need to be detailed. This also means, of course, picking the really pertinent details and focusing on them.

The other was the beginning of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which I just watched over the past few days (now that I have no more Farscape to watch, I gave in to all the friends who love BSG, despite my probably-unfounded misgivings). If you know anything about BSG, you probably know that it begins with the Cylons–you know, robots created by man who became more powerful than their creators and nearly killed everyone–nuking the planets on which humanity lives, some 40 years after the first Cylon War ended, and thereby kicking off a great big war of sorts in which people basically…try to fight off the Cylons and survive and stuff.

Well, the miniseries begins aboard the Battlestar Galactica, a military ship…with a tour guide explaining to what are essentially a bunch of museum-goers the ship’s role in the war, why it’s now being officially decomissioned, why it’s so old and low-tech, that kind of thing. Not only does it give viewers some key information very quickly (the ship’s age and lack of more modern technology are exactly why it survives to be pretty much the only military capital ship to fight back against the Cylons) and explain things that would otherwise be difficult to get across, it does so in a totally natural way–and just as important, the way in which that information is presented tells viewers just as much. The warship’s a museum with civillian visitors, rather like the battleship USS Missouri or something: a relic from another era, a symbol of a great victory, and not much more relevant to modern people than any other old curiosity. The simple fact that tours are being given in just this way shows just how much everyone believes the threat to be gone, irrelevant, forgettable. That sets the stage for the attack and the response to it, of course, as well as establishing some nasty dramatic irony–and it was all accomplished in about a minute.

And after all that–as well as having got nothing done on abovementioned late werewolf story–I should probably follow my own advice, if belatedly, and ramble no more. Until next time, anyway. I’ve got more vampire books to review, with the intent of making a series about vampire books better than Twilight–or, as my friend and I can’t resist calling it, “vampire books that don’t suck.”

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