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1. 
   

   Mea
   Mea · Jul 18, 2015

   When I start anything, my exposition always feels so clunky and unnatural. I have no idea how to smooth it out or what to do about pacing. >.>
   
   This is mainly a problem I've been having with my LMS novel, which is tentatively named Lines of Faith. I have so much conflict and worldbuilding to set up and I have no idea how to do it, and at the same time I don't want the story to start dragging.
   
   So yeah. Just venting.
2. 
   

   Vervain Creator
   Vervain · Jul 18, 2015

   Some advice that a friend of mine gives people (including me) -- you should know everything about your world. Your reader should only know 10%, also known as what's absolutely story-necessary.
   
   One of the important things about writing is that you don't *need* to give every detail to set something up. You don't need to explain why some conflict is happening, you just have to show why the conflict would be realistic between the characters or the world.
   
   I generally try to figure out two things.
   
   A) Is it completely necessary to understand the world/conflict?
   
   To take an example from Lines of Faith, it is completely necessary to know that Analia is struggling with her faith, because it's the central part of a conflict. You have a dozen possible ways of introducing that which could all show something different about her character, and they would all work to advance that plotline.
   
   It is not necessary to know, for an example I didn't actually see, exactly how, when, or why the city was built/expanded. While that could be an interesting tidbit, and it's necessary for you as the author to know -- in order to know how long it would take to get from church to the hospital, for example -- it's not something the readers need to see.
   
   B) Will it take the readers out of the story?
   
   There are a lot of interesting tidbits you might be seeing. Things that will set up your work, set up in the intricacy and the foreshadowing and politics and that's so much fun. But it's dangerous to drop a lot of information at once, or even to drop a little information at a bad point in the narrative, because that can break the reader's immersion.
   
   Let's say I was reading Lines of Faith, again, and they were on the train, and all of a sudden you inserted a sentence about something like, "The train lines had been built a hundred years ago" -- yeah, no, that's something that would take the reader out of the story.
   
   And sometimes it can be really hard to look past the writing and figure these two things out. Who knows how many times I had to stop while I was writing my first draft of Balance, because I was torn between "but this is so cool and opens up a new layer of conflict" and "but the story needs to keep moving right now".
   
   A good tip I started implementing: Read your story out loud. Read it to yourself. Read it to a wall. Read it to a pet. You'll not only catch typos, but you're more likely to catch awkward sentences, bad exposition, and places where the story needs to keep moving. Read it to a sibling or a friend, and they'll be able to point out ones that even you don't hear.
   
   And when it doubt, cut the exposition and show it through how your characters are acting or what they're noticing.
   
   For example, in my rewrite of Balance, my MC scorns magic, and he tends to notice people who are addicted to it (because his little-sister figure is addicted, and he considers it a severe abuse of the abilities that the nation's Goddess gave them). I'm not going to state that outright, obviously, but reveal that through his actions and how he perceives magic, magic-users, and the magic-addicted.
   
   Bleh. This ended up being long xD I hoped this helped in some way, even if I did ramble a bit! <3

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