Telling Readers a Thing
Picture the scene. A writer has embarked on their quest to transform the world with their latest piece of fiction. They sit at their desk, or in a coffee shop, or in a library with very uncomfortable seats. Their neck is craned awkwardly as they lean forward into their typing, and by the end of this writing session will have become incredibly sore. Pillows will be needed. Soft pillows. They are typing prose at lightning speed, leaving multitudes of spelling errors for tomorrow’s author to deal with. They do so because there is a Thing that they have come to realise, and they must get it onto the page.
Their work may not be about the Thing but, right now, getting that Thing out of their head and into the text is the most important task in the world. Attempts at conversation or socialisation are met with silence, automatic responses, or hostility, for these are only distractions from the task at hand. Any food, no matter how delicious, will be half eaten at best until the end of the writing session, at which point it will be devoured in seconds. But amidst this frantic composition there will be pauses, some great, some small, and many of them will be about the exact method by which the Thing should be imparted to the reader.
Telling Readers a Thing is the result of our hypothetical writer deciding that pacing, description, characterisation, and at times punctuation are all unacceptably slowing the Thing down. The integrity of the Thing must be preserved, and all other prose will be warped by its presence and like it, damn it.
The end result is a form of aside glance, or a wink at the camera, but without the self awareness that these imply, or any intention of comedy. It is the abandonment of artifice because the excitement of imparting the Thing is simply too great to delay any longer. The kind of things that exemplify Telling Readers a Thing are classics like And That’s Terrible and Ayn Rand’s seventy page monologue in Atlas Shrugged, which may serve as an early indication as to why this is not a recommended practice.
Telling Readers a Thing generally takes three forms. In each case I will point out a work that, by all accounts, is guilty of doing this but in my opinion remains eminently enjoyable.
The first is an uncontrollable urge to explain every cool aspect of the setting, to the point where it seems like the work is nothing but a travel brochure. I dub this Giving Readers the Lonely Planet Guide. This frequently overlaps with settings that are not of this Earth, where the author has clearly been developing many ideas that they want to use and they want to make sure the reader understands every last one of them. Every. Last. One. It also usually comes from genuine confusion as to how to impart expository detail that the reader actually does need to understand for the benefit of the story. The arch-example of a work that is does this and is still well regarded is JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The reason that Tolkien got away with it was because he genuinely understood the medieval epic genre that he was imitating, and because he did it with such genuine conviction. However, heed well that even people who enjoy Lord of the Rings often struggle with beginning which is almost entirely Telling Readers a Thing about Hobbits, and that there is a reason the book trilogy is not to everyone’s taste.
The second comes from a different place; it is the compulsion to demonstrate the hundreds of hours of research the author has done on a particular subject, and is not always done because the author thinks this information is cool. The author might really enjoy guns, planes, the complexities of medieval Breton economics, but in many cases it’s that they are not going through that amount of research without making everyone else suffer through it too. This is Telling Readers How to Correctly Assemble a Nuclear Warhead. The end result is a sudden genre switch from novel to technical manual. A futher potential embarrassment in this case is showing off all this research only for it to turn out to be incredibly inaccurate. Larry Niven manages to mostly pull this off in his fiction, because his works are generally highly character driven and there is a far greater ratio of plot to technical manual, but this also makes those few uncorrected mistakes he does make extremely obvious for the experts in those fields.
The third is perhaps the most difficult of all to deal with, because it comes from the heart. This is when there is a piece of ethics, morality, or philosophy that the author simply has to share with their readership in its complete, unabridged form. This is Telling Readers What is Wrong/Right with the World. If characters spouting moral opinions are doing so in character, or are argued against by non-strawmen characters, or if any number of other subtleties are in place then this is not Telling Readers a Thing. This is when you are reading a public speech from the author and you know that’s what it is, and you just can’t do anything about it. It’s time for a Public Service Announcement and you won’t get any cookies or cartoons until you’ve listened to it. Dickens gets away with it because he was writing in the mid 19th century, where such things were not only expected but encouraged. In essence this is a Grandfather Clause, because Dickens genuinely had an impact with his open criticisms of the workhouse and treatments of poverty in Victorian Britain, and because he became so foundational to storytelling in the English language. The only way you can hope to replicate Dickens is by historical sleight of hand.
Terry Pratchett is an example of coming close to Telling Readers What is Wrong with the World but averting it. Each Discworld novel is, in its own way, a strong expression of humanist philosophy, and with a few exceptions you always finish one of his books with a strong impression of a moral stance. However, his work frequently involved parody and satire, where aside glances were already constantly flying out at you, in that environment a moral or ethical aside glance functioned happily. It was also because he possessed enough writing talent to both have characters give voice to his opinions whilst having them remain that character. If you wish to gain insight on expressing moral opinions without turning into Telling Readers a Thing then you could do far worse than reading the Discworld novels in sequence from Mort to Thud!.
This not a mockery of having a Thing you need to get on the page, or that you wish to explain to people. The art of essay writing is entirely based around finding compelling ways to Tell Readers a Thing whilst showing how you came to that conclusion. This is myself offering advice that Things should be inserted into literature, particularly novels, with great care, and that heavy-handed is not a literary synonym for weighty. If I had wanted to write a purely mocking article it would have turned into 10,000 words about how laughable I find Atlas Shrugged. Instead, I’m hoping that a few more authors will keep their counsel just that little bit longer, and work their Things into their stories in a way that both does the idea justice and is supported by the rest of the work. Things are valuable, the trick is to help the reader understand how, and you will never do it by slamming the story to a halt.
