Last week, I was inspired to write a short story, but it needed a lot of background information to be included before the action happened. As I was planning it out, though, I couldn’t figure out how to explain it without boring the reader.
In the years I’ve been writing, one technique I’ve found to work is simply to write the story, exposition and all. Afterwards, it’s usually a case of taking a step back and trying to carve out a structure from what’s on the page.
In this case, I had a character that should have arrived at a place by 6pm and was uncontactable by phone until 8pm before finally showing up at 9:30pm. I initially had the action take place at 8pm, with the characters holding a conversation between that time and 9:30pm.
Looking back over what I’d written, I realised I could dispense with the 8pm call and set the action nearer 9:30pm. That had the effect of both reducing the explanation and intensifying the surprise as the arrival was now completely unexpected. I also placed much of the exposition into dialogue instead of descriptive paragraphs.
That meant I could start the action earlier and it took off with gusto. I wrote so much that I was able to split the narrative, with a cliffhanger between the two parts.
Gavin Cameron 