In politics, an axiom drilled into the head of every candidate for office is that when you’re in a debate or answering questions from the press, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Attributed to President Ronald Reagan, this means that explaining is essentially a defensive act done by a candidate who has been asked to clarify a position, previous statement, or misdeed. It’s a distraction from what the candidate wants to talk about, which is a broad-brush description of how they will make the lives of voters better. Politicians should be sketch artists, deftly describing a better future state without getting bogged down in details. This is why candidates who are “policy wonks” often do not get elected. They spend too much time explaining, which is an intellectual act, as opposed to inspiring, which is emotional.

Authors of Genre Fiction Love to Explain

In genre fiction, unlike politics, explaining is highly prized. We’ve all read thrillers, horror novels, and other genre novels in which the author devotes paragraphs and even pages to describing a character, place, or event in meticulous detail, while the plot is put on hold. This seems especially ironic because genre fiction tends to rely heavily on plot, so why would you deliberately make it grind to a halt so that you can take a detour into the past life of the character or describe the geography of a town?

When authors do this, they’re basically hijacking their own story to intercede and provide an “information dump” to the reader that, in all likelihood, the reader doesn’t need. Instead of limiting the information presented to the reader to that which the characters themselves experience, the author steps outside the story and becomes the omniscient source who knows everything. For some reason, information dumps are very common in genre fiction.

The most highly skilled genre writers, such as James Patterson, avoid this by deftly weaving background information into the forward-moving scene so that the action never stops. A phrase here, a phrase there, and soon the picture is complete.

A good way to describe this balancing act would be to compare a novel to a film. Generally, film directors stay behind the camera and record the actors going through their scenes. The result is that the audience knows only what the actors experience or tell each other in real time. A few films have used voiceovers in which a disembodied voice speaks directly to the audience and explains various aspects of the story. Classic films that use a voiceover include The Shawshank Redemption (Morgan Freeman doing the v/o job), Goodfellas (Ray Liotta), and Memento (Guy Pearce). But these are the exceptions, and the voiceovers are all characters in the movie, not an anonymous god-like narrator. And movie directors sometimes show us scenes that one group of characters cannot see or know, such as in the use of multiple points of view.

Literary Fiction = No Explaining, Please

One of the hallmarks of literary fiction is the discipline the author imposes upon themself to show the reader only what the characters are directly experiencing themselves. The author stands in the background, directing our attention to what they wants us to see. They are the unseen hand. They don’t stop the action to pull you aside and say, “Here’s a bunch of stuff I think you need to know.”

But there are limits to how literally you can take this approach. For example, in The Hours, a Pulitzer Prize winner, author Michael Cunningham begins the “Mrs. Dalloway” chapter thusly:

“There are still the flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation (though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour.

“It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.”

This is an information dump—deftly handled, but nonetheless it’s the author giving us information they thinks we need to know right off the bat. This includes the name of the protagonist: Clarissa, as the author tells us. In New York City. And the author also tosses in a tidbit about the protagonist, parenthetically: “…(though she loves doing errands like this)…” How do we know this except the author takes us aside and tells us?

In this case, Cunningham’s reasoning may be that because the book comprises the stories of three women from different eras, they must be clear from the first sentence whom they’re talking about.

In any case, the language counts. A skilled author like Michael Cunningham—and James Patterson, in his own way—knows how to deliver information in a way that’s effervescent, bright, delicious, and stimulating. Which brings us around to the real Golden Rule of writing: “Do whatever the hell you want—just don’t be boring.”