“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Information Dump” by faculty member Peter Turchi
An excerpt from an essay by faculty member Peter Turchi, published by Fiction Writers Review.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Information Dump
A couple of semesters ago I noticed something strange about the fiction I was getting from undergraduates in an advanced class. I had seen it before, but hadn’t thought much about it. This time, I just asked them.
These undergraduates were good students. When I had them write exercises, the results looked like plausible parts of stories. When they had free rein, though—when they got to submit a complete draft of a story of their own devising, with no constraints—not one of the drafts included an entire page without dialogue. Not even close. There were no extended expository passages, no descriptive passages, there was no extended narration. These stories were nothing but scene—in fact, in many cases, they were almost entirely dialogue. Several of them could have passed as radio plays.
“What’s the deal?” I finally asked them. “Every published story we’ve read has narration, often entire paragraphs of narration, and exposition. In your stories, it’s all talk-talk-talk; no one stops to take a breath.”
“That’s just it,” they said. “We don’t want to be boring.”
“Boring?” I said. “We can’t tell if this conversation on page five is taking place in a motel room or a submarine. Would it hurt to slow down long enough to establish the setting?”
They shook their heads, sadly. They had a very disconcerting habit of acting as one.
And that’s when I named the evil they feared: an information dump.
[…continue reading at Fiction Writers Review.]
