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Dear Writing Teachers of America
Dear Writing Teachers of America:
Stop telling authors that they need to start with a huge blort of exposition physically describing all the characters. Seriously. STOP! IT! Nobody gives a damn. It does not allow the reader to connect with the character because we don't know a freakin' thing about the character's personality or situation.
We might be freaking out because the character is already being inappropriate, though. Like the eight-year-old-boy who says his friend and his friend's mother have "cute noses" or the supposedly heterosexual woman describing her best friend as "meat made for the sack." (How I wish that I was making those examples up.) That's telling the reader something all right. It's telling us to put the book down and back away slowly, and I don't think that's the message you want to be passing on to your pupils, hmmmm? And describing the hot clothing of the time is just as bad, really. Your window for readers going "Oh! Jimmy Choos, how cool!" and "Jimmy Choos! What freak would be seen in public in those old things?" can be counted in nanoseconds, and often is shorter than the time between submission and publication.
It's one thing if it's actually part of the plot to bring in that sort of detail - if the kid wants to go into rhinoplasty when he grows up, or the woman's about to come out of the closet, or wants to design shoes, or whatever - but if not? Come on, in the whole damn history of literature, no reader has ever snapped, "Oh! This book is about a babyfaced blonde in Jordache jeans, and I ONLY read books about gamine brunettes who wear Calvins!"
And speaking of the history of literature, I would like to point out that the two unchallenged Greatest Romance Books Of All Time (whose readers are supposed to be particularly breathless for all this trivia) leave all physical description to dialog instead of pre-emptive epository blort, *and* all we know about Elizabeth Bennet is she has "fine eyes" and a tan, and all we know about Jane Eyre is that she's shortish and brownish. Please note that this is all we've needed to know about either woman since the early 1800s.... whereas your students, if they're very, very lucky, will stay in print for about 18 months. Get down off your checklist of "what readers want" and learn from the authors who've given the readers what they've really wanted for a couple of centuries.
Stop telling authors that they need to start with a huge blort of exposition physically describing all the characters. Seriously. STOP! IT! Nobody gives a damn. It does not allow the reader to connect with the character because we don't know a freakin' thing about the character's personality or situation.
We might be freaking out because the character is already being inappropriate, though. Like the eight-year-old-boy who says his friend and his friend's mother have "cute noses" or the supposedly heterosexual woman describing her best friend as "meat made for the sack." (How I wish that I was making those examples up.) That's telling the reader something all right. It's telling us to put the book down and back away slowly, and I don't think that's the message you want to be passing on to your pupils, hmmmm? And describing the hot clothing of the time is just as bad, really. Your window for readers going "Oh! Jimmy Choos, how cool!" and "Jimmy Choos! What freak would be seen in public in those old things?" can be counted in nanoseconds, and often is shorter than the time between submission and publication.
It's one thing if it's actually part of the plot to bring in that sort of detail - if the kid wants to go into rhinoplasty when he grows up, or the woman's about to come out of the closet, or wants to design shoes, or whatever - but if not? Come on, in the whole damn history of literature, no reader has ever snapped, "Oh! This book is about a babyfaced blonde in Jordache jeans, and I ONLY read books about gamine brunettes who wear Calvins!"
And speaking of the history of literature, I would like to point out that the two unchallenged Greatest Romance Books Of All Time (whose readers are supposed to be particularly breathless for all this trivia) leave all physical description to dialog instead of pre-emptive epository blort, *and* all we know about Elizabeth Bennet is she has "fine eyes" and a tan, and all we know about Jane Eyre is that she's shortish and brownish. Please note that this is all we've needed to know about either woman since the early 1800s.... whereas your students, if they're very, very lucky, will stay in print for about 18 months. Get down off your checklist of "what readers want" and learn from the authors who've given the readers what they've really wanted for a couple of centuries.