Exposition vs. dialogue

[Bramblethorn]

Lots of different relationships can be romantic, but I think only a heterosexual relationship can be a Romance -- unless RRA or some other organization has changed the definition.

There is/was a relevant RRA ("Romance Readers Anonymous") but that's a mailing list rather than an organisation, so I think you might have been referring to RWA (Romance Writers of American) here?

In any case, I can't find info on how RRA defined romance, so RWA's the only one I can respond on.

While RWA wasn't supportive to LGBTQ+ content in the old days, their official definition of "romance" doesn't restrict it to hetero, and to the best of my knowledge it never did. (Quite possibly in the early days people just took that for granted.)

It certainly wasn't part of the definition as of 2005, because in that year they ran a poll which proposed restricting the definition to "one man and one woman". The resulting conversation was about as unhappy as you might guess, enough so that in 2016 RWA apologised for it and for its effect on their LGBTQ+ members. But they never acted on the survey responses, so AFAIK the proposed hetero-only language never made it in.

These days they definitely do include non-hetero material. As Tad noted, gay/lesbian romance gets nominated for RWA's mainstream romance awards these days, and RWA's "romance trailblazers" awards include several gay and lesbian romances going back to 1974: https://www.rwa.org/Online/Awards/RITA/romance_trailblazers.aspx

Currently their definition requires only "A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work" and "An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love".

My story ("Loss Function") definitely fits into the first of those. Whether it meets the second is debatable, but from the feedback and voting it appears a good percentage of readers think it does.

On this site, lesbian romance usually seems to end up in Lesbian Sex, but I'm not the first to put it in Romance, and overall most readers seem to be reasonably accepting of F-F stories outside LS. I suspect not so much for M-M, unfortunately.

 

[NotWise]

My reference to RRA was mistaken. It should have been to RWA. Apparently, I'm not up to speed, and Lit is behind the times.

 

[TadOverdon]

Revising, and still trying to turn backstory from exposition to dialogue.

The thing I'm learning by doing it, which is both very small and huge, is how much of the backstory detail does not matter. A paragraph of description of an event or sequence of events told in synopsis form may be only intended to communicate the viewpoint character's emotional takeaway from the incident. The same information can be conveyed by the words and affect of the character when they talk about what happened, without going into the details.

Enthralled, Lauren had attached to Janet with a vengeance. They'd done everything together. Whether in or out of bed, Janet somehow always led. She'd talked both their ways into jobs on Jon and Frank's food truck. When Lauren had surprised herself by falling for Jon, rather than being jealous Jan had maneuvered it so that they all became a foursome.

The long-suppressed memory of what had come next still stung. Lauren pushed Janet away. "You ended us."

"I gave you up." Janet looked stricken. "When I married Frank…he wasn't who I thought he was. He changed."

"Don’t hang it on someone else."

"I'm not blaming him. Okay, maybe that is what I did, and it was wrong. I loved him, and he had his own ideas of how things were supposed to be, in a marriage. I didn't want him to leave. We were all so fixated on getting along, on building this business., this thing." Janet's vehement dismissal of Blue Oasis, shocked Lauren. "You and Jon were crazy about each other, anyway. And I guess I just thought, you know, 'Time to grow up.'"

She pulled Lauren close again and kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. "God, my heart has been in two pieces for so long. I'm so sorry."

 

[electric1]

I hate when authors lay out chucks of exposition before getting any plot going.

Start the story in the first paragraph, or better yet, a little before the first paragraph. Mix in the background as it becomes relevant to your story. Don't waste the readers' time telling us anything we don't yet have reason to care about.

 

[SamScribble]

Don't waste the readers' time telling us anything we don't yet have reason to care about.

Spot on. As a grizzly old editor I knew was wont to say: 'I need to know this why?'

 

[Auden James]

It all depends on your skill level or "mastery of the art." The first chapter of Nabokov's Ada or Ardor is nearly pure exposition (with just a little dialog about the expositioned things sprinkled in at the end), but it is exposition full of style and meaning. Just take a look at the first chapter's annotations on Ada Online to see for yourself.

Hence there is no right or wrong answer to your question in the abstract—it depends on the concrete author (and, probably, type of writing).

 

[TadOverdon]

Some self-indulgence on the general topic of expository backstory and killing your darlings: a chunk of exposition that had to be excised and discarded. The character never grew central enough for her backstory to matter to this degree. There's a lot of first draft-itis in this, but I wanted it to live somewhere anyway.


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Chelsea was coming off four years playing a teenager on the young adult streaming drama Bridgetown when she landed the lead in Tara Nova. The property had started life as a viral phenom on the Internet, a web comic satirizing the superhero movie genre. To a failing, franchise-starved studio sliding toward bankruptcy, Tara's main virtue was that the IP was available and cheap.

Backed with an infusion of Chinese money, shepherded by a platoon of producers and scripted by seven writers who spent a year sanding the cutting edges off of the story and leeching out all the irony that had made it popular to begin with, the movie finally shot in Tunisia and was released to minimal industry expectations.

One trade reviewer dubbed it "Deadpool meets Captain Marvel, with more tits and less wit." Chelsea laughed and retweeted that, to the chagrin of the studio and distributors.

Tara Nova went on to earn half a billion dollars domestic and twice that in foreign box office, cleaning up in the Far East. And Chelsea West was instantly an A-lister.

Becoming "Tara" didn't make much use of her Stanislavski. There was some acting involved, but the movies mainly challenged her patience and athletic endurance. A lot like fucking the director, really.