Sometimes I find myself scrolling through amateur literary forums. Among mountains of fan-fiction, there are occasional gems to be found. I don’t usually expect to find those, but what I do hope to find on those sites are the best of the worst, dialogue that is so bad it enters the realm of sublimely brilliant. I hope to witness the next Troll 2 or The Room. If you have to grade or edit such missives, and can’t walk away from it when you have had a chuckle, you have my sympathies, but you’ll also better understand the motifs I’m writing about here. I notice certain patterns in these spaces, and I’m not here to merely criticize bad writing (everyone writes badly until they write well), but to consider what it tells about the way some people organize and categorize the world around them to the point that it becomes maladaptive.
In the opening scenes, there’s usually a mirror. In front of the mirror stands our protagonist. For some reason, the character is thinking of their height down to the very inch or centimetre, because somehow mirrors work differently depending on how tall one is. Next is their build, then features and coloration. Usually this involves adjectives such as “chiseled” or “perky”, or using food or drink to describe the character’s skin-tone. The character’s salary and size of house are established soon after. Then we hear a description of the world in which they live- not by showing a representative experience within that world, but as an external summary- year, location, political factions. Over the course of the story, most of these details are never relevant again. Unlike the gun in the first act of a Chekhov play, the chiseled jaw and perky breasts never shoot anybody by the conclusion. Yes, these expositions are often staple in erotica, but they’re not even very effective there. How many successful relationships start with two people reading each others’ body measurements, or any of the various descriptions with which people define themselves in a top-down manner? So what compels so many bad writers to begin this way?
What we see here are writers using markers of identity as a substitute for exploring the character’s experiences. It is the literary equivalent to asking to “talk to the Manager.” Not only is this bad for writing, but emphasizing these things makes for a less meaningful life. If you’ve ever worked with disoriented people, and certainly if you’ve experienced disorientation, there are different ways to deal with the experience that can correspond to different approaches to writing. If you can’t remember where you and are unable to articulate your name, but your basic approach to establishing meaning is experiential and relational, then you can better recognize in the moment if someone is trying to help you and work with them. Anchoring one’s reality on first establishing status and definitions leads to bitterness as life happens and these things change. Some people will continue to demand “Do you know who I am?’ as a means to establish the hierarchy they need while they have literally forgotten who they are. Joy has to be found in having an experience without having, or rather pretending to have, a complete summary of what is happening..
You are probably thinking of successful exceptions to this rule. Some amazing fiction uses what I am describing as top-down exposition, but let’s look a little closer at why that fiction works. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien establishes and shares significant details beyond the ken of the main character’s direct experiences. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams intersperses details from the titular reference work throughout the experiences of his characters. So, how is this not comparable to the details that Bad Exposition establishes? The difference is that good writers acknowledge that even the Official Story is imperfect. The lore that Gandalf explores is often contradictory and depends on translations and interpretations of each in a long series of scribes. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is remarkably incomplete and not at all concerned with the details that would matter to a human. (The complete entry for all of planet Earth is “mostly harmless.”) The perspectives that glue the narratives together are not the top-down ones, but rather those of Hobbits, who do what they can with what little they know of each situation, or of Arthur Dent, who happens to be the last survivor of planet Earth, not because of any special overarching knowledge.
The need for a set of predefined roles and cosmology before being able to move forward in a literary setting, points to the same rigidity in life: How do you expect me to accept new evidence when the first chapter of my life featured a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis? I bet you can’t even define what a Wookiee is! People in this mindset have to define their status relative to other people before they can interact. Moving beyond this is important for develop writing skills, but also personal skills. Lynda Barry, the author and cartoonist, often wrote from the perspective of kids and non-humans, finding meaning in situations where they held no authority, and where they weren’t privy to “official” details. She encouraged writers at her workshops and at book readings, like the one where I heard her speak, to start writing with no idea where to go next. She gave examples from her own works of stories that she started with no concept of what would happen next until she wrote each part. Her techniques helped free many of the developing creative writers who took her advice from some of the psychological barriers that can lead to writer’s block, but I think it also gave them tools to better deal with life: Just because you can’t know all the official details, you can still make meaningful connections. You might never know someone’s background, or even their name, but that’s no reason you can’t value them as a friend.
