Keep Content Relevant

The first book of a series can be a pretty tedious read. Most of the time, that happens because of exposition dumps. What are exposition dumps? Well, that is what this blog post is partially about. It’s also partially about how to avoid that and why it can be bad for a series if you start off the first book like that.

Especially in the fantasy and science-fiction genre — in genres which are not set in our world and our time where the reader is aware of how things work —, first books in a series or first chapters in a book might be filled more with worldbuilding topics than with the actual characters who should be introduced.
Naturally, the author wants to tell the readers about that cool new world or spaceship or other thing they invented and are going to place the story in. Worldbuilding is a long and tedious process and requires a lot of work from the author. It’s only logical to try and put as much of it as possible into the story so the audience can appreciate it properly.
Unfortunately, the best way of making the audience appreciate the hard work is not to cram it all into the first few chapters or have it take over the first book. Exposition dumps are not the best way to communicate the information the reader will eventually need.

First of all, it is the author who has put a lot of time, research, building, and rebuilding into the world they’ve created. They have focused very much on all the things, be they new monsters or animals, a whole map of the world, cultures, technologies, or other things. They have gotten very invested in that new world and have done a lot to make it three-dimensional and lived in.
The reader, on the other hand, has not gone through that long process. The reader has bought this book in the hopes of having a good time with it. They’re expecting to read a riveting and interesting story with twists and turns and great characters they can grow attached to (or, in case of the antagonist, hate with glee). The world is important to them, too, as a setting, and they can grow to love it almost as much as the characters (or even more), but the world is not why they’ve bought the book.
Because of that difference, the author might find themselves starting the book with a long chapter or two about the world they’ve created, telling the audience about the inhabitants or the history or both. The reader, on the other hand, is waiting for the story to start and wants to meet the main characters and get a glimpse at the stakes.
What to do in that case?

The easiest way to avoid exposition dumps is to be aware that they are bad and that, while you as the author really, really, really want to tell everyone about that cool world you’ve built, it’s not a good idea to do it all at once. Do it as it becomes important. Give readers the information about the world they need to understand where the plot is going. Introduce cultures as they appear. Explain gender conventions as they become important. Give the reader a run-down on the monsters in the woods as the main character travels through one and gets attacked.
Content is relevant when it is connected to the plot, no matter whether that plot is internal or external. Rules of behaviour which the main character detests and ignores, much to their disadvantage in court, can be introduced when they’re first ignored, explaining to the audience that everyone else does X while the main character does Y. The big monster in the lake becomes relevant when the main character goes for a swim in the lake or is hired by the local fishermen to kill it. There’s no need to mention it in the first chapter before the main character is even introduced.

There’s another negative aspect to an information or exposition dump, though. If you dump all information on the reader in chapter one, two, or three, that information might not become relevant at all until chapter thirty-four. Especially fantasy novels tend to be long and it might take the average reader a long time to finish them. Information that is dropped in an early chapter and hasn’t been used before will be forgotten or mostly forgotten by the time it comes up as relevant in a chapter towards the end of the book. This is not good — readers shouldn’t have to sheave through the book to chapter two to understand what is going on in the chapter right before the climax.
The best solution to this problem is to give information if and when it becomes relevant. Before the characters have to climb down into the tomb of the lich, give the reader the reason why they do it and what they hope to accomplish there. Do not talk about the tomb of the lich in chapter one, but in the chapter leading up to the descent.
This is even worse when you’re setting up information about the world which will not even be relevant until book number four of a series comes out. It usually takes years for book number four to be released and by then, the reader will have forgotten most of that information or they might remember things wrongly. They will have built up a lot of expectations about that bit of information and in the end, most will be disappointed this way or that with how you use it. Those who do not remember it will be flustered by the story at the point at which it becomes relevant because they don’t understand what is happening.

Instead of using an exposition dump at some point in the early story, keep the information back until it becomes relevant. Yes, you worked long and hard to create your world and fill it with cool things. Yes, it sucks to have to wait until you can tell people about it. Your readers, though, come for the story, not for the worldbuilding. Give them what they want and draw them in, rest assured they will also grow fond of the world you have created and will appreciate it in time.

Over-Candied Characters

At first glance, it might be alluring to create a character who has it all: good looks, mad skills, everyone’s love. At second glance, such characters are not very good. They’re what Mythcreants calls ‘over-candied.’ Now, I’m not going to go into the candy-spinach analogy right here, let’s just say you can’t have the good without the bad. Your character needs flaws. How candied is too candied, though?

First of all, over-candied characters are often referred to as a ‘Mary Sue,’ based on a parody of Star Trek fan fiction created a long time ago where a seriously over-candied character was called Mary Sue. Unfortunately, the female moniker leads to the problem that quite often female characters get tagged with it while male characters get away with the same or an even higher level of being over-candied.
Candy and spinach, on the other hand, are gender-neutral terms which is why I prefer using them. Chances are they will be used a little less gender-biased as well. Of course, it’s much easier for a female character to be called over-candied, too, because the idea of what a female character can be like is much more narrow than it is for male ones. It’s even easy to prove — give certain fans a gender-switched description of Batman or James Bond, and they’ll be screaming “Mary Sue!” from the top of their lungs whereas they’d never apply the same expression (or the male versions ‘Marty Stu’ or ‘Gary Stu’) to the originals. Make no mistake — both Batman and James Bond are seriously over-candied and clearly wish-fulfilment characters. They’re just getting away with it.

So, let’s look into what an over-candied character really is and what makes them a problem. An over-candied character is one who has so many skills and other positive aspects to them that they simply can’t lose. With this character on the pages, the people they’re with must win, there’s no other way that can end. With that, though, such a story has no tension. Tension comes from the possibility of failure. It must be possible for the main character or characters to lose.
An over-candied or over-powered character will not lose. They can do everything, they are beloved by everyone, and they simply will never be wrong. While that makes for a cool wish-fulfilment character, it’s not the kind of character who can and should carry a story.

In order to work as a main character of a story, a character must have both candy, some positive aspects, and spinach, some negative aspects. As a matter of fact, many stories follow two different plot arcs — an external plot that drives the story and an internal one in which the character has some character development and overcomes a flaw. To overcome a flaw, a character needs one, though. It must always be a real flaw, too, not just be presented as one. It must hinder the character in some way.
Some authors come up with ‘fake’ spinach for their characters, telling people that they are badly off (but they have rich friends who usually help out) or that they are horribly bad at public speaking (but they never have to speak in public, anyway) or that they are bad fighters (in a story about political intrigue where the last thing anyone will do is pick up a physical weapon). Spinach must matter in the story. If a character is supposed to speak in public, but is too shy, it is spinach. If a character has to go to war and they’re horrid with weapons, it is spinach. The flaw matters.
An over-candied character has no real flaws if they don’t matter. A balanced character has both candy and spinach. They’re not necessarily in a horrid place (although a dark setting might put them in a seriously dark situation at the beginning), but they’re also not just sailing through life without being touched by it. Like this, they can help create the tension for the story — and they can have their internal plot arc.

Both male and female characters need their balance of candy and spinach. It’s easier to get away with an over-candied male character because the acceptance of overly competent and overly powerful male characters is much higher. Yet, an over-candied male character will destroy the tension of a story just as much as an over-candied female one. There is no real difference here.
Make a female character competent where they need to be. Give them skills they can rely on. Then give them a flaw or two that will hinder them. Are they from a social background that puts them at a disadvantage? Do they have anger-management or shyness issues? Whatever you pick, it must be connected to the story you’re telling.
This will allow you to balance the tension. The character is competent at this, but they might have to rely on that and they’re bad at it. That makes the audience wonder whether it works out in some way. Perhaps they can turn things around by finding a way to use their skill here. Perhaps they can overcome their flaw and make it work that way. There’s options and with options comes tension. If a character is just overall bad at things, everyone will assume they’ll fail. If a character is just overall good at all they do, everyone will assume they’ll succeed.

On the whole, do what you can to keep characters from being over-candied. If a character can’t fail, then there is no tension. If there is no tension, there’s no true conflict. Without a conflict, you don’t have a functioning story. Make sure your character has flaws and make them real flaws that matter. Making them consider themselves ugly while they’re described as attractive is not a flaw. Failing at something that is not relevant in the story is not a flaw — not within the story that is. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count. Avoid over-candied characters — and avoid the ‘Mary Sue’ label when you can. It’s neither helpful nor is it used correctly by many people.

Why Grimdark?

Quick, what is the easiest way to make clear that a story is meant for adults (or, sometimes, for what an edgy fifteen-year-old sees as adult)? Grim and dark elements, of course. In a world where violence is frequent and people get sexually assaulted, a story must certainly be one for adults. Or so, one might think, some authors justify the more than liberal use of grimdark sauce. Why do people think that, though?

First of all, by definition, all stories not categorized as ‘for children’ or ‘for teens’ are adult stories. The Sherlock Holmes canon is made up of adult stories, even if children or teens might be reading it, because it was written with an adult audience (mostly the readers of the Strand magazine) in mind. Yet, the world of Sherlock Holmes is neither overly grim nor overly dark. It is the world of late-Victorian Britain. Yes, it had dark and grim aspects, but it’s not governed by them.
Not all adults want grimdark stories, either. If your life is grim and dark to a degree, the best escapism is usually found in the opposite — light and fluffy stories with happy endings. That is why you can see that when life is hard people want light entertainment and dark stories bloom when life is good. Humans often seek the opposite of their own situation when they consume media.
To entertain an adult audience, neither grimness nor darkness are a necessity. There are genres which have a tendency towards both — horror stories or thrillers, for instance. If you write about a monster killing all the teenagers in a summer camp or about a serial killer the police has a hard time catching, dark themes like murder (and not the simple, everyday variety, either), death, torture, and pain are to be expected. Rape might be happening.
Yet, the whole genre of cosy mysteries as it has evolved over the last decades partially goes back to the Golden Age of Murder when the classics of the mystery genre were mostly written, but it partially also provides readers with less brutal and grim mystery stories where the victim is not slowly drained of all blood while alive and then cut into small pieces — they’re ‘only’ stabbed, shot, or poisoned.

The worst offenders of the use of grimdark sauce recently, though, were the reboots of several shows for children or teenagers that were ‘adapted’ for an older audience — “Teen Titans”. “Riverdale”, “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, or “Fate: The Winx Saga”. The last iterations on screen of all of these stories (although at least the first three are long-running comics and have had their darker stories) were bright and positive, something for children or teens to watch and feel good about.
The worst of the examples might actually be “Fate: The Winx Saga”. “The Winx Club” was a bright series for pre-teen girls about six young women connected by a strong friendship. One interesting aspect of the original series was that three of the six main characters were not white — one was a Latina, one was Asian, and one was black. Another interesting aspect was that the Italian production company had young fashion designers dress the characters — so they were wearing what was top fashion in the 2000s.
The Netflix reboot, on the other hand, turns the bright fairy world of the Winx Club dark and dreary. The girls are dressed more like thirty-something women. Their friendship, which saved the day over and over again in the original series, is non-existent. Latina Flora is missing completely, replaced by a white ‘cousin.’ Asian character Musa is white as well now — at least the actress is definitely white-passing. The only character who is still not white is Aisha who gets sidelined and is the only of the five main characters who does not have a personal arc in season one. The most interesting of the six fairies, Techna, is missing completely, probably because the new series has gone back on the interesting concept that magic and technology can exist together.
What we get are burned zombies, genocide, a regular ‘you’re not really my child’ adopted daughter relationship (while character Bloom had a wonderful relationship with her adopted parents in the original series), a lot of death, a lot of grimdark, and not even proper witches (the witch trio called the ‘Trix’ in the original has been compressed into one fairy called Beatrix — be a Trix … really?). I will give the series that there are now male fairies and female specialists (fighters who protect the fairies), but that bit of a positive change can’t balance out the rest.

In a lot of grimdark stories, the authors consider the easiest way to make them so using gendered violence, such as sexual harassment and assault. Usually written by men, those rape scenes are often a throwaway, just to show how ‘dark’ the world is. The world is dark, so women who leave the house (or just exist in some cases) run the danger of being sexually assaulted. “See how dark it is?!” the author screams at you, “See how adult this is?!”
Admittedly, sex is an adult topic, be it consensual or non-consensual. You won’t find sex scenes in books aimed at children or teenagers. Yet, that doesn’t mean a book needs sex scenes in order to be adult. Adult is the standard setting for every book that’s not explicitly written for children or teenagers.
Sexual assault is also a very difficult topic for many people and likely to alienate a part of your possible audience. If the rape is an integral part of the story and dealt with well, then by all means use it. If it is just part of your grimdark flavour, leave it out.

Being an adult includes far more than just murder, blood, torture, rape, and other regular grimdark ingredients. A lot of stories manage to be for adults and about adults without adding all that. Grim and dark can happen in adult literature, but they are not a prerequisite.
If your story requires a dark and grim world, then make that world truly dark and grim, don’t smear grimdark sauce all over it and call it a day. In a truly grim and dark world, your main characters will truly suffer and truly be in danger, they won’t have any plot armour. In a truly grim and dark world, bad things happen to the characters we follow, not just to one-off characters who don’t play a role. Anything else is grimdark sauce and should be avoided.

What can we learn from that? Grimdark stories are those which give themselves a seeming depth by handing out dark and grim features, but don’t really use them. For them, grimdark is just a sauce, a condiment to be smeared all across the story, which gives it some flavour, but doesn’t add depth. There are truly grim and dark stories, but they incorporate those factors, they don’t just play with them. Don’t make use of grimdark sauce, it doesn’t automatically make your story more adult.

An Argument for Short Stories

Short stories are not as popular as novels, they say. Anthologies are less profitable and sell less well. Yet, anthologies sold pretty well in the past — as did short stories in general. Most of the Sherlock Holmes canon is in short-story format, so is all of the Father Brown canon. Authors like Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham did both short stories and novels about their heroes as well. The question is do anthologies sell less well because people aren’t interested or do they sell less well because there’s not many of them around and people therefore flock to other formats? After all, with the rise of e-books, where the page number doesn’t matter, novellas have risen to success as well.

Every type of story — novel, novella, short story — has its own challenges and advantages. A short story allows for less window-dressing, for less additional stuff.
Usually, a short story has only one plot thread, while novellas and novels can — and usually will — have several. This means that a short story can focus much more on a specific theme or motive, because all will revolve around a specific plot line. Where a novel could never consist of only three scenes about a specific theme, a short story can do that.
In a short story, control of the language is far more important than in a longer story. You have less words to work with, so every word counts for much more than in a novel. That is challenging in the beginning, but it can be very satisfying in the long run. The little perfection of a well-told short story can be immensely satisfying for both the writer and the reader.
A short story is more ‘on point’ — which some people love and others don’t. On the other hand, a short story has far less detail and doesn’t allow for too complicated a plot, either. As mentioned above, every word counts. So does every scene. A short story is generally ‘tighter’ than a novel or novella, having more action and development in less space.

One thing about short stories, though, is not to be underestimated: they’re short. This means that if you’re travelling a lot, if you’re commuting to and from work every day, for instance, you can have a small ‘snack’ while you do that. You can read one story in an anthology much faster than a novel of similar length to the anthology. Even if all stories focus on the same characters, each of them is contained and includes a full plot arc from beginning over middle to end. Reading one or two stories during the commute means not having to wonder about what will happen next in your novel, because you’ve read the end of those stories already.
Those short stories can be connected by a story arc, but they can be read fully in a much shorter time than a full novel. Novel series also contain a story arc running through all of them, after all. It’s not just something for a set of short stories, but it is something which can be applied to them as well.

Short stories are not to be underestimated, either. Many people think that you should ‘start’ writing with short stories, because they are not that long, then slowly expand to novellas and novels. As a matter of fact, a novel or novella is far more forgiving when it comes to writing than a short story is. A short story is tightly crafted, making every word count, creating a very dense experience for the reader.
Just because something is shorter that doesn’t make it easier to write. If you have ever composed a telegram (or, more modern, a Twitter tweet), trying to say as much as possible with as few words as you can, you will know what I mean. Sometimes, a short story is far more challenging to write than a four-hundred-pages novel.

Today, it’s possible for everyone to publish their short stories, either as anthologies or simply as shorts. With e-books and self-publishing, the way is wide open. The bottleneck of the publisher who doesn’t want to publish anthologies can be averted.
When you publish a set of stories, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an anthology, either. Epistolary stories are bigger stories told through an array of short stories. That’s a format I have discovered recently and which has proven useful for a few ideas I had before, but couldn’t really fit into a novel or novella format. Sometimes, different things which happen need to be seen in a more isolated way than a chapter of a novel (or even a part) or a novella within a set of several. A short story can be a very good choice there.

A short story is also a very flexible format. It includes everything from a piece of flash fiction with about 500 words up to a longer story with a little below (or even above) 20,000. 20,000 words are already a lot and can craft a much more impressive and powerful narrative than 500 — but in the hands of a master, a five-hundred-word flash story can be just as powerful.
It’s easy to focus on very short narratives and think everything which can’t be put into two or three scenes is too big for a short story, but that is not the case. 20,000 words are a lot — well used, they can give a lot of depth and a lot of action to the narrative. They can certainly give you a story of about 15 to 20 scenes, too (the average scene I write is somewhere between 800 and 2,000 words), and 15 to 20 scenes can tell a long story.

In the end, what you prefer to read or to write is up to you. All I’m saying is give short stories a chance. Try them out, see where they lead you, whether you love reading them and whether you enjoy writing them. If you do, don’t let others pull you away from them. There’s a place for a lot of different media on the market.