Yet another fandom-to-FFXIV pipeline victim. Science major, healthcare worker. Veteran Star War. I will never be over Haurchefant. We still respect Din Djarinn here.
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND VALUABLE LESSONS YOU CAN LEARN AS A WRITER. I SAY THIS AS A READER AND A PROFESSIONAL GENRE EDITOR.
[Image description: Screencap of page 372 of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. Some bits have been highlighted.
Confident writers parse out exposition, bit by bit, through the entire story, often revealing exposition well into the Climax of the last act. They follow these two principles: [highlighted in purple] Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension. [end highlight]
Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a pro gressive pattern: Therefore, [highlighted in yellow] the least important facts come in early, the next most important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition? [highlighted in purple] Secrets. [highlighted in yellow] The painful truths characters do not want known. [end highlight]
In other words, don’t write “California scenes.” “California scenes” are scenes in which two characters who hardly know each other sit down over coffee and immediately begin an inti mate discussion of the deep, dark secrets of their lives: “Oh, I had a rotten childhood. To punish me my mother used to flush my head in the toilet.” “Huh! You think you had a bad childhood. To punish me my father put dog shit in my shoes and made me to go to school like that.”
Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false. When this is pointed out to writers, they will argue that it actually happens, that people share very personal things with total strangers. And I agree. But only in California. Not in Arizona, New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else in the world.
A certain breed of West Coaster carries around prepared deep dark secrets to share with one another at cocktail parties to validate themselves one to the other as authentic Californians–“centered” and “in touch with their inner beings.” When I’m standing over the tortilla dip at such parties and somebody tells me about dog shit in his Keds as a child, my thought is: “Wow!
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Also, note that this is for a book specifically on scriptwriting; when writing a script, the acting, set design, editing, etc. can all do a lot of heavy lifting on telling the story so there’s a lot that doesn’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) in the script. The script contains only the dialog and the bare bones of direction the rest of the creative team needs to get them headed in the right direction. Written fiction–short stories, novels, etc.–needs more detail in writing because we don’t have all these other things adding to the story, just the bare words on the page.
