For example:
Hugo never changed. He was ever a cheapskate, no matter how many books he got on the NYT bestseller list. Mary gestured grimly at the rusted fender. "Remember Madame Levin?"
Hugo grinned. "Yeah. Okay. I'll get a new car as soon as I get my next advance check. I promise."
Now I know we've all been told that dialogue isn't the place for exposition, that characters shouldn't tell each other what they both know. Right. Well, given that, how can we give the reader enough info to understand who the heck Madame Levin is and what the hell she has to do with the car?
If we can't do that, for goodness sake, leave Madame Levin out of it.
What's a way to slide in enough detail without having Mary lecture Hugo? Don't give Hugo the instant and total recall shown above (which isn't plausible anyway). Try something like:
Hugo never changed. He was ever a cheapskate, no matter how many books he got on the NYT bestseller list. Mary gestured grimly at the rusted fender. "Remember Madame Levin?"
Hugo echoed, "Madame... Levin? No."
"Our old French teacher?"
"Oh, yeah. Madame Levin. Ou est votre homework. Yeah, I remember her. What's she got to do with my car?"
"She had that old Volvo, remember? Used to park it along the fence to the football field?"
Hugo's brow cleared. "Oh. Right. And that second-stringer heaved up a hail-mary pass, right over the fence, and--"
"And it went right through her fender." Mary nodded at the car. "Same thing'll happen to you."
Hugo grinned. "Yeah. Okay. I'll get a new car as soon as I get my next advance check. I promise."
Too much? Well, then, maybe Madame Levin needs to remain in the distant, unrecollected past, not in this scene. This isn't a high school clique, after all, where the reader will put up with being excluded from all the injokes of the incrowd. :)
Alicia
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2 comments:
This brings to mind a lot of things. Yeah, Madame Levin doesn't warrant a mention here unless we want to confuse the readers (and make them put the book down)—and the long story doesn't help. But if we're setting something up with this Madame Levin story, then maybe we should try to make it more "personal": maybe Henry was the one who put a hole through her fender. (Fender? Really?)
On the other hand, sometimes we have to insert information that our characters might not really discuss, but that our readers need explained. (I'm thinking SF/F or historical worldbuilding.) Dialogue is often an even worse fix than leaving it out—but I think we can get away with slipping some things in through narration.
For example, I was recently working on a chapter set during WWII treaty negotiations where I mentioned Trieste. Sixty-five years after the fact, few people might remember that this Italian city was a hotly contested territory after the end of the war. Conversely, we don't need paragraphs on how the city was Italian, and later overrun by Yugoslavian partisans.
No one in the scene needed that explained, and the car is full, so I can't stick someone who doesn't know in there (which is often a clumsy trick anyway). But a first person narrator can slide in a sentence or two, phrased as commentary or reaction, pretty easily. (Kind of like what we've discussed in the setting examples, really.)
Yeah, we have to figure out that the reader needs more info, and then the most effective (usually most unobtrusive) way to do that.
Alicia
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