SRW #5: Exposition

By request, from Guy.

Stover’s Rule of Writing #5: Exposition

First, a reminder of something that should be obvious but sometimes isn’t:

Exposition is the delivery of information to the reader. Period.

So is every other element of writing.

Deliver information is the only thing your language on the page does. The only thing it can do. Are you with me? The most in-your-face action-packed-thrillaminnit scene is, at its core, exposition . . . it’s just a bit more vivid than the narrative elements we usually apply that word to.

Exposition is fundamentally exactly the same as narrative and scene, and is subject to all the same general principles. Remember what we were talking about before, in the section on Scene? I use the term “Reveal,” and we had four general categories: Plot (or Action)  Reveal, Character Reveal, Context (or Setting) Reveal and Insight Reveal.

The only difference is the intent of the author. With the Scene Reveals, the author wants to draw you into the action. With Exposition Reveals, the author only wants to efficiently deliver the information you’ll need to understand a current or subsequent (usually, though sometimes previous) Scene.

So the basic Rule of Exposition is: Don’t. (Subject to Rule #1, of course.)

That is, don’t write paragraphs or (gods have mercy) pages of simple information you want your readers to absorb. Because they won’t. Most people skip over those parts and go to the next scene anyway.

That’s not to say you can’t get away with it. Plenty of people have. There are enormous (and enormously awkward) essays on the 19th Century whale trade in Moby Dick. Those who undertake an unabridged version of War and Peace will discover whole chapters devoted to explications of Tolstoy’s “Common Man” theory of history. However, unless you are a talent on the order of Melville and Tolstoy, leave that shit out.

There will always be, however, an irreducible minimum, so the trick is finding ways to bury the necessary exposition within dramatic scenes. In trying to do this, there are two guiding principles.

The first one comes courtesy of the redoubtable Perry Glasser, my one-time novel-writing coach:

Never tell your readers anything until they absolutely need to know it.

Think of your story — your world, your characters, everything — as being Top Secret, Need-to-Know only. If your readers don’t need to know, don’t tell them at all. If they do need to know, save it until they can’t go on without it.

Take Heroes Die, as an example most of you will be familiar with. The entire Prologue is a chain of exposition (mostly *ahem* cleverly disguised *ahem* as Setting Reveals). Hari’s relationship with Shanna gets profiled in the context of explaining his reaction to viewing the Servant of the Empire cube . . . in which we also find out an assolad of information about the Studio, the caste system, Caine and Pallas and all kinds of shit. What we don’t find out about is Hari’s childhood, and his relationship with his father. That stuff becomes a feature of the first scene with Duncan in the Buke.

In fact, most of the scenes in the early parts of the book contain at least a sentence or two of Now That We’re Here, You Need to Know This. Sometimes whole paragraphs. Shit, the whole Underwood-Clearlake Adventure Update business is there to be Caine’s version of Basil Exposition. Even later, in scenes like Lamorak in the Theatre of Truth, you finally get some of Karl’s backstory . . . but most of his backstory is withheld until it’s directly pertinent: when he betrays the woman who loves him.

From my point of view, a decade and a half on, the exposition in HD looks pretty clunky and overdone — I was only gradually learning how much I don’t actually need to say.

Hell, I’m still learning how much I don’t need to say.

Again: Never tell your readers anything until they absolutely need to know it. And be sure they really need to know it; if you’re not dead-bang certain the information is essential to understanding the story, leave it out. Your editor will tell you  “something needs expanding here — I’m not sure why XX is YYYing . . .” Then you’ll find one nifty change in a line of dialogue on the next page, and everything’s golden.

The second principle is my own:

Never give your readers facts when you can give them stories.

People don’t pay you for nifty ideas, or for realistic settings or deep world-building. Things like that are features of story, not story itself. Present your exposition as a story within the story, and readers will rarely even notice they’re being fed exposition . . . because it still tastes like story.

Probably the clearest example of this in my work comes at the beginning of HD Day Two; I had already introduced the villain–Kollberg–but I needed to establish him as a legitimate threat,  in terms of his intentions and of his capabilities. I also needed to establish just how far out of Hari’s reach he is; I wanted to make it clear that Hari can’t fight back on any level.

Anyway, the point is that an assload of expository bullshit is encapsulated in a brief biographical sketch of Kollberg’s upbringing and career. This is a trick I nicked from Homer himself; in the Iliad, the minor named heroes are introduced with a capsule biography (and often a line or two about their home and lands) just as they are getting killed by the main characters. The first time I used it was when we get the POV of Meremptah-Sifti in Iron Dawn. It’s also echoed in the “This is” sequences in Revenge of the Sith.

You have to be careful with this kind of shit; it can become an end in itself. But used well, it’s not limited to capsule bios.

For example, the “Now” storyline in Caine Black Knife is about 80% straight exposition. Maybe more. “Gift” is purely expository. “Below Hell” is exposition until the entrance of Tyrklld, and even after that, most of what’s going on is Context and Character Reveals, a style that the rest of the “Now” sequence follows. “Eyes of God” is nothing but exposition . . . but being presented as a story — Caine and Tourann exchanging information — most people barely noticed, if they registered it at all.

Part of the reason I got away with this is structural: by framing the “Now” sequence as an investigation, getting people to tell him shit he doesn’t already know is the spine of the story . . . and then in the “Prince of Lies” chapter, he starts telling other people shit they don’t already know, which again works (for me, anyway) because investigation narratives are always built around facts: collecting facts and fitting them into a narrative to explain their interrelationships.

The other reason I got away with it was the “Then” sequence, which obliquely depends on the information revealed in “Now,” and thus is only maybe 10% exposition shuffled into the non-stop asskicking.

Which brings us back to –

Stover’s Rule of Exposition: Don’t.

When you get really good at this shit, your exposition becomes story . . . which means it’s not  “efficient delivery of information” any more. When your narrative requires point-of-view characters to discover the necessary info, it’s not exposition, it’s a plot point.

Stover’s Rules of Writing

Hey. A lightning visit because I have recently made contact with one of the several writers who ruined my life by teaching me how to do this shit.

While I was in college, I did about twelve credit-hours of independent study in Writing the Novel (which was actually the earliest and most embarrassing attempt at what eventually became Heroes Die).

His name is Perry Glasser, and his website is

here.

I bring this up because he does sometimes take on Intertubes hopefuls and helps them (for money, you understand) figure out how this shit is done, and because he’s a damn fine writer.

Also because his work is often considered “too commercial to be literary,” and mine is often “too literary to be commercial,” and I’m a huge fan of bitter irony.

Briefly . . .

For anyone local who might be interested:

Matt,
I just wanted to let you know that the second meeting of Club Caine will be at 645 this coming Friday and once again at the Panera Bread in Schaumburg. If you wanted to let your blog followers know that’d be great. We’ll be discussing days 3 and 4 of Heroes Die. Thanks.

Joshua

Y’know, every time I read “Club Caine” I think of an underground bar and grill where you cover your bill in cash . . . or fight in the cage . . .

Stover-Level Kick-Ass Alert

So I took the Fabulous Robyn to see Kick-Ass this afternoon.

You’ve probably heard a lot about this movie. I am here to tell you this:

It’s better than that.

As the final credits rolled, the Fabulous Robyn turned to me and said, “Oh. My. God. I think that just became my favorite movie. Ever.”

My response was an awe-struck “Holy shit . . .”

This film, I will tell you, was made–and made well–for us. For exactly us, as in you and me. The kind of people who like my books, and the kind of person who writes them.

Most of you will have seen Galaxy Quest, a few years back, a combination satirization and celebration of everything geeks loved about Star Trek.

Imagine with me a moment . . .

Imagine what Galaxy Quest might have been if I wrote it. And did the stunt choreography. And it starred Clint Eastwood, and included a sequence where Clint brutally stomps Steven Seagal to death. Are you with me, here?

I won’t pretend that Kick-Ass is that good.

It’s better than that.

Important Disclaimer: If Steven Seagal ever reads this post, it’s nothing personal, man. I’ve seen you interviewed, and I’ve watched a few eps of your reality show, and you seem to be a genuinely decent guy. I just don’t like your movies. And I thought it was a funny line.

Question Time III

From The Other Scott:

Have you given any thought to opening up the Overworld setting to other authors? If so, who would you be willing to let play in your yard?

I had always hoped to turn the Earth/Studio/Overworld milieu into a shared-world franchise (having been a reasonably devoted fan of both Thieves’ World and Wild Cards) . . . but the books have never become successful enough to warrant it. Maybe when the current Caine contract expires, I might be able to interest a small press in something like it, but don’t hold your breath.

From Daniel:

You must have done significant research into the Bronze and Iron Ages for the Barra & Co. novels. Where do the true events of what happened involving Joshua & Co. split from your works? Did he actually succeed in wiping out the Jebusi?

Also, will Faith play a more prominent role in His Father’s Fist?

I didn’t so much do research as read other people’s research — Kathleen Kenyon in particular — and I corresponded a bit with Eliot Braun, the director of antiquities at the Tel Aviv museum, as well as Dr. Nick Wyatt of the University of Edinburgh, who was (and may still be) the primary authority on  pre-Judaic Canaanite religions.

Joshua is an ahistorical figure, and there is no generally-accepted evidence of an Isaelite invasion as described in the Old Testament, nor of the Exodus itself — the premise of the Barra & Co books is that cultural myths handed down since the Bronze Age are all founded in fact. So, basically, my depiction of the invasion of Canaan was structured to depict how it could have happened — a way that is consistent with the archaeological record, while still conceivably being the root source for the Moses/Joshua stories.

Which is a very long and roundabout way of saying that there isn’t really an answer for your question. Sorry.

From Michael Dorus:

So I’ve been taking a lit class and they’ve been having us analyze different stories and the themes and how they are impacted by the time the novel was written and what have you. When you write are you trying to incorporate these things or are you just trying to tell a good story?

Thanks!

PS Are you with the cubs, or… them?

All I’m interested in is a good story. But writing a good story is difficult enough that there is simply no way (for me, anyway) to write well while self-editing for or against contemporary relevance. So the answer is: No, I don’t intentionally incorporate these things . . . but they’re in there anyway.

The God of War novel is in the spirit of RotS, though some deviation from the game story was inevitable. Things that are exciting and fun to do in a game usually make a narrative describing them both nonsensical and boring.

As for your other question:

There is a family legend that my father’s grandfather was an acquaintance of Cap Anson, and that said great-grand passed up the opportunity to buy a share in what became Major League Baseball because he was certain there was no goddamn way people would pay real money to watch grown men play a kid’s game.

So instead of obscene wealth, I got four generations’ worth of heartache watching the fucking Cubs lose. I don’t know if my nieces and nephews escaped the Curse; one can only hope it will die with me.

And finally, inevitably, for Guy:

Why is the sky blue? How do they get cheese in a can? Are we there yet?

1.) Because air scatters short-wavelength light more than longer wavelengths.

2.) They cram it.

3.) I’m there already. Where the fuck are you?

Question Time II

First, from Andrew:

This is just a general question, not on topic to anything you’ve mentioned above.

You’ve now written some stories with a main one person viewpoint and a minor viewpoint or two, you have CBK where its just one viewpoint, from what I recall (though you could argue past and present Caine viewpoints are like writing in more than one), and a novel with several different viewpoints from various characters.

Which do you like to write the most? And which do you think you write best? And which is the easiest for you to write?

Without a doubt, I prefer the first-person story, simply because it imposes certain necessities on the storytelling: you only say what the character sees, hears, feels, thinks, whatever. A lot of the decisions are made for me, which makes the whole process a hell of a lot less work.

It does, however,  limit the layering of plot (because nothing important can be depicted directly unless the POV character is present). It also tends to focus all the readers’ attention on the viewpoint character, and the other characters can be depicted only in terms of their relationship with the narrator, or what the narrator observes and conjectures. Conrad and Fitzgerald both had characteristic dodges around this constraint, but neither of them was writing adventure fiction. Guys who were, rarely indulged in 1st person in their major works (with, of course, the exception of the hard-boiled detective genre, which ever since Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout has become almost exclusively 1st person, and with the sub-genre of Men’s Adventure, dominated by such luminaries as Alastair MacLean).

Part of the reason Blade of Tyshalle was constructed the way it was, in what is essentially a 1st person omniscient voice, was so that I could farm all my available skills to present a story that I knew was too big for one book. And because I came up with what I consider to have been a especially nifty narrative conceit, relating to Kris’ flash and the Caine Mirror, and I am powerless to resist the Rule of Nifty.

Where I think most of my really good work has been done is in L3PO (which is not a droid designation, though it probably should be). This stands for Limited 3rd Person Omniscient, which is the style of Revenge of the Sith, for example: each scene is presented through the 3rd person viewpoint of one of the characters present, and depicts not only their actions but reactions and thoughts. Doing that sort of thing allows me to give a character like Berne some recognizably human drives and emotions, and make a character like Tallann (who, after all, is a major player in only a single sequence of Heroes Die) vivid enough that a number of the book’s admirers still have not forgiven me.

Now from Shane:

We all know that Barra was Robyn’s RPG character. Was Leucas yours? Or was Barra the only character you borrowed from other campaigns.

And while we’re at it, have any other RPG characters made it into your books? I recall you saying that the Heroes Die setting at one point or another was an RPG setting. Are any of those characters from said RPG?

I ran the game that featured Barra and Leucas. Kheperu is loosely based on a character from that game played by a friend of ours who was really into transgressive behavior; it wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Kheperu as a radically scaled-back version of his character, with a little bit of age and cynicism mixed in. Sheshai (in Jericho Moon) was inspired by a character played by another friend of mine; the original character was also a survivor of Jericho, but was much more of a cheerful con-man and trickster thief kind of thing, which didn’t suit the tone of the novel.

Some thirty years ago, I devised and played an RPG character named Caine . . . who bears scant resemblance to the guy in the books. The RPG character was a ruthless infiltrate/eliminate loner (well, okay, more than a scant resemblance), who had very little in the way of a human personality. Most of the things that make Caine more than just a first-person shooter arose from my training and experience as an actor and playwright, and from how much my own conscience complained about the rotten things I was having so much fun making the RPG version do. At the time, I thought that RPGs were the coming game-style of the future (remember: I’m OLD. When I graduated from college, the most powerful PC was the Commodore 64. Apple was still making the Apple IIe, and had just debuted the Macintosh with what was, I think, a nine or ten inch monochrome monitor).

The whole thing can be blamed on Stephen R. Donaldson,  whose The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever inflicted upon the world an epic quest fantasy full of disturbed, dysfunctional characters — every one of them broken in some way — dealing with incurable disease, rape, incest,  the inevitability of guilt and all that good shit, and really had me rooting for every one of them. Because he took this shit seriously.

You can also blame Alan Moore, whose Miracleman was a transformative experience for me, because he was using some fairly strict SFnal concepts to inject actual verisimilitude into one of the goofiest four-color franchises ever.

The city of Ankhana was indeed originally created and developed as the foundation of an RPG campaign . . . which never really happened, because by that time I’d graduated from college and wouldn’t be hanging out with gamers again for another ten years. But I liked the map I’d drawn (inspired by the Paris of The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and when I set myself to seriously work on a story where RPG characters are real people, and the NPCs are also real people who do not know their lives and deaths are entertainment . . . well, shit. I already had a city, right? I lifted Ma’elKoth whole from my first attempt at epic SF/F, because in that tale, he was the uber-villain who was secretly the father of the hero . . . and I was 30,000 words into it the night The Empire Strikes Back opened in Champaign-Urbana. I believe I was the only person in the theater whose reaction to The Scene was a shout of “Fuck! God damn it, I am completely fucking screwed!”

And from Tim:

And when can we look forward to the World of Ankhana MMO being released? I am very much looking forward to pointing myself at Khryl’s Saddle, hitting R, then sitting back and enjoying the trip.

So? Get to work, fucker. Sit back, my weeping hemorrhoids.

Seriously: I’ve had an inquiry or five from aspiring game developers about the Earth/Studio/Overworld thing, but so far no one has offered to write me an Enormous Check. All of these folks are well-intentioned, and they obviously are possessed of excellent taste and exemplary character. One or more of them might be the next Gary Gygax, for all I know, but I’m looking for the Enormous Check part as insurance  that whoever I’m dealing with is serious, committed, and already successful enough that they wipe their asses with stacks of hundreds.

Question Time

Hey. Been away. Now I’m back.

I know I’ve been piling up a backlog of unanswered questions . . . but now I can’t find them.

*sigh* The pain of long comment threads . . .

So we can have Question Time: stuff you have already asked and I’ve failed to answer. Or even new stuff.

From Alex:

In the Acts of Caine, we see pretty much every deity mentioned throw down some kind of power (with the exception of Prothiun(m?)). Even Rudkirisch(sp? Sorry I don’t have Heroes Die handy)gets to throw his weight around during Ma’elKoth’s ceremony and Khryl is in two of three acts thus far in the form of Knights. Are we ever going to see Tyshalle throw down some metaphysical power, within the limits of the Covenant, that is?

Also, what’s a horse witch?

Lastly, and this deserves nothing more than a “go to hell” as it’s a nosy question, but you seem to talk a lot about Wisconsin politics for guy from Illinois; did Wisconsin rack up another sff author?

1.) It’s unlikely that you’ll see Tyshalle personally intervene; to paraphrase Marade in CBK: Caine is his miracle.

Sort of.  It’s complicated.

2.) Wait and see.

3.) The Fabulous Robyn and I snuck across Illinois’ northern border a few years back. But we’re still more Chicago than Milwaukee, if you see what I mean.

From Grego:

Matt, not being a M:TG type guy, will I be able to pick up the book and start reading it without any backstory? Is it self-contained?

It’s reasonably self-contained, though it does reference some earlier storylines. Test of Metal concerns the activities of a Planeswalker (read: super interdimensional wzzrd person) by the name of Tezzeret, who is the villain of a previous Planeswalker novel, Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell. If you feel the need to have some background for ToM, this would be the one essential book to read (AoA does, in fact, concern the interactions of all the main characters of ToM, and establishes their personal relationships).

There are also some references to the free webcomics that are posted on the Wizards’ M:TG site. Anyone who reads “The Seeker’s Fall” over there and then reads Agents of Artifice will have all necessary background for the enjoyment of this story.

And from dr. krog:

sort of on topic: anyone done Kendo or Kenjitsu? Looks fun and cool. Don’t know much about it other than I read that the Return of the Jedi choreography was based on it. Any practical benefits?

One of my bestest friends evar is (last time I checked) a 4th dan black belt in kendo. It’s a swell sport. I have been to a couple of matches and it’s really fucking cool to watch.

However, it’s worth noting that when this friend decided to learn some streetfighting, he came to the Degerberg and studied savate.

Practical Combat

Hey –

The previous thread reminded me of the merits of a couple of books on fighting that are worth your attention — especially any of you who aren’t training in a combat art but who still want to write realistic hand-to-hand. They are:

GET TOUGH, by William Fairbairn, who taught practical combat to his colleagues in the Shanghai (!) Municipal Police, and later to British commandos and US Rangers during WWII.

KILL OR GET KILLED, by Rex Applegate, reputedly a friend and collaborator of Fairbairn. This is the military version of the Get Tough stuff.

Some of their techniques are a little outdated for serious martial artists, but it’s worth pointing out that Applegate’s style is exceedingly practical, and can be effective even when used by inexperienced fighters. The updated 1976 edition of Kill or Get Killed was published by the US Marine Corps as Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication 12-80.

That’s all.

And from the University of Iowa . . .

Hey. Too busy with Caine for a long post today, so I’m including a bit of mail that just tickles the crap out of me . . .

As per your request, here’s the run-down of what happened this morning when I presented “Br`er Robert” to my Fic Writing class.
The presentation/discussion is meant to focus on Craft aspects of the story, so all of my prompting/questioning was aimed in that general direction.
I started off asking how people felt they could relate to Frankie (and Decker, to a lesser degree), and how that was established in the story.

The general consensus was that the most effective part of Frankie’s characterization in terms of getting people to relate to him as a character was his constant seeking of validation from Decker; it showed him as insecure, petty — and human, in spite of the horrendous shit they were doing. Even the one guy who admitted he didn’t particularly like the story said he really connected with Frankie in the scenes where he was trying to impress Decker.

Then I asked whether people were afraid, and how the writing brought them to that point. A lot of people (girls in particular, not that it’s a commentary on gender identity) were a bit frightened just by the fact of the situation depicted, but shit got -real- when Frankie started getting a bad feeling, and Bobby “grinned like a hungry wolf” and said not to mess with “that /Brian Patch/.” I read the line “He tossed his head like a lizard swallowing a mouse and the chunk slid down his little throat,” and I saw several people shiver. I don’t think anyone disagreed that they were feeling The Fear while Decker was being eaten.
Someone brought up, before I had the chance to ask the relevant question, the way the beginning and end were tied together, and how it’s always a big risk making that sort of general, fable-like statement at the beginning, where the audience is just sort of “floating in space”, but that it really paid off at the end as a second “Holy shit, the tables have turned”-type realization (in addition to the obvious one of the Patch boys ruining the shit of Frankie and Decker).
The TA asked what genre people would have put it into and the first person said, as though it were obvious, “horror”. Someone else disagreed; he said it was “Too self-consciously literary” for that (the same clever bastard who brought up the beginning/end sequences before I got around to it).
I never really thought of it like that.
Anyway, as for a demographic breakdown, it was pretty obvious: alot of the business/economics/engineering/other boring shit majors, the ones taking the class for an easy “A”, weren’t big fans. One of them responded to the question of genre with “messed-up”, amusingly. The general idea I got from them was that they just weren’t comfortable with the subject matter, which turned them away from the story.
Fuck ‘em.
As for the people who were there because they enjoyed writing and reading — Creative Writing undergrads, English majors, curious Art students — ate it up. They loved the style, the pacing, the characters, the setting, every inch of it.
I reckon you’re a writer’s writer.

Anyway, I know the blog is more about your Caine Stuff so I don’t much see why you would, but you’re more than welcome to publish this on it if it’s your wish. Hit me up over e-mail if you’ve got any questions about the reactions it got.

I’ve left off the author’s name, because I haven’t gotten around to asking him if it’s okay to publish.

So this is cool for my authorial vanity, and also because I might be able to work some of the techniques behind this story into an upcoming SRW.

Many thanks to the Big Guy for the discussion summary — and for being kind enough to think of using the story in the first place.

Put Up Yer Dukes, Pilgrim. SRW #4

As promised, some technical details on the construction and depiction of something a lot of people tell me I’m good at: the fight scene.

Actually, what I’m going to talk about is the construction of the Scene more broadly; the Fight Scene is only a specialized version. What makes a good fight scene  is what makes a good scene, and the reverse. This means I’ll be starting with fundamentals, so people who’ve done assloads of creative writing classes may want to skip ahead.

The word “scene” comes from the origins of Western theater, the Greeks. Skéné is the Greek word for stage or booth — the setting where the action will take place. It eventually came to generally mean the aggregate dramatic elements revealed to an audience in a discrete unit: setting, action, verse, song, whatever. These units are called scenes because they take place on the skéné (Yeah, I know, but I’m summarizing, not historicizing).

In the theater of Ancient Greece, where they didn’t have curtains to close or stage lights to dim, each scene begins with the entrance or exit of a character, and ends the same way: entrance or exit. This tradition runs all the way through Shakespeare to Restoration theater at least. And it’s important, so hang on to that idea; scene breaks are measured by entrances and exits is because that’s when something changes.

Let’s say this again:

THE SCENE BEGINS WHEN SOMETHING CHANGES.

There’s no such thing as a “Nothing Happened” scene, you follow?

A scene in narrative terms (prose writers, critics and scholars having adopted the theatrical usage — which is also important) must do at least two of the following things (I call ‘em Reveals) : Reveal Plot, Reveal Character, Reveal Setting, and Reveal Insight.

I use the term “Reveal” because that’s one of the old-time theater terms as well. A reveal is the raising of lights, drawing back curtains–even Oedipus lowering his hands from his face to reveal his bloody eye sockets. A reveal shows the audience something important. Something that they need to see, not just hear about.

As a general rule, the more Reveals you have in a scene, the more important and generally cool the scene becomes.

Reveal Plot usually (not always) means advancing the plot by at least one crucial step; it should at least represent a new view of  departing and oncoming events.

Reveal Character means putting on display something which will alter, or at least shade, the audience’s understanding of the character(s).

Reveal Setting means showing the audience something that will enhance or alter their understanding of the environment. This includes moral, ethical, and metaphysical considerations. (“Wow, he’s a bad guy after all!” “Hmm. I guess it actually IS wrong to club baby seals.” “Holy Shit, the Gods are REAL!”)

Reveal Insight means that the character(s) finally Gets It, whatever the It might be. Getting this It should be at least mildly transformative for the character, and for the readers as well. My all-time favorite Insight Reveal in my own work is from Heroes Die:

You could thumb the emergency cutoff, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theater, close the book . . .

But you don’t.

The reveals, by the way, is where the Show, Don’t Tell idiots step on their dicks (or perform anatomically comparable fumbles). If you’re only doing one Reveal, you don’t need a scene. Usually you can handle it with a sentence or two. If a Plot Reveal requires your protag to get to Aunt Sally’s, but nothing along the way will Reveal Character (etc.), all you need is

James T. Protag went to Aunt Sally’s.

and you’re done.

Same with any other solo Reveal.

Jimmy Protag eventually accepted that Aunt Sally was a homicidal alien bounty hunter.

All over Jimmy’s town, buildings had been disintegrated.

But in fact, it was a cook book.

If the sequence you’re working on does not perform any Reveals, leave it out. You’re wasting your energy and the attention span of your readers.

A good fight scene is exactly the same thing as any other scene. You don’t have to be a soldier (I’m not), or an assassin (despite what you’ve heard, I’m not that either) or even a particularly tough individual (I’m also not). I don’t have to be, as long as my fights Reveal Plot, Reveal Character, Reveal Setting and Reveal Insight.

At least two of them. All of them is better.

Now, homework: take a look at a scene I believe many of you are familiar with: Caine’s attack on Berne in Day Two of Heroes Die.

It begins classically, with Caine’s entrance, and it ends classically, with the entrance of Kierendal.

The exercise for the class is to find the elements of that scene that are put on display for the audience. All four of the Reveals are here (several of them multiple times). You don’t need to post them here or anything like that. Just think about it. This is homework for your brain, not for my ego.

Now, your SRW for the day:

Rule #3: Don’t forget to bring the funny.

Seriously. Embarrassing shit happens to everybody. Even in the most dire of situations, a lot of what people talk about is deliberately humorous. In intensive care wards, at funerals, on battlefields, I don’t care, somebody’s always gonna try to lighten the mood, because that’s what people do. Even if they don’t say it out loud.

Furthermore: your readers like the funny. The most successful TV shows are ones that make you laugh. How long would anyone keep watching House if Hugh Laurie wasn’t so fucking funny? I don’t think five minutes pass on that show without somebody saying or doing something that’s gonna raise at least a chuckle. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an incorrigible punster; the porter scene in the Scottish Play is crass and crude and pretty damn funny. I find myself enduring incredibly preposterous over-the-top moster-movie melodrama every week because Supernatural makes me laugh.

Don’t forget to bring the funny.