Sneaky
March 2, 2023 12:44 am Leave your thoughtsYour audience isn’t stupid. Well, probably not. Over-explaining your narrative is tempting when you are starting out or trying to establish the setting or the intricacies of your main character. If you’re not as experienced in authoring a novel you might be tempted to use the extra word count to splash around, sometimes it’s why you may see excessive explaining in the beginning of a novel whose author has chosen to add a prologue.
^^^Side note – PROLOGUES ARE DANGEROUS
Again, you might be tempted to write one, specifically, if you have a giant sci-fi epic adventure series planned…but if you’re writing something smaller, and generally speaking, my opinion is to stay away from indulging in a prologue. Usually, you find the author dumps info and half the story is in the beginning, you can predict the end, or you get to know this barely-related backstory to everything that isn’t a major factor that happens in the present or you find the book could have gone without. Sometimes you realise the author wasted 20 pagses of word count and about an hour of your time. ^^^^^ 
Back to your audience being stupid, let’s assume you didn’t try to write a novel with 3rd Wave Feminist themes and your audience, therefore, is not stupid, the temptation to overshare and explain every tiny thing is sometimes a problem.
There are reasons someone may do this, maybe they aren’t confident they’ve conveyed the themes they intended. Maybe they forgot they’d mentioned the relevant stuff earlier after another round of editing.
Dialogue is another place where people fall into sneaky-telling, telling an excessive amount of information in areas that seem mismatched when you could just show or STFU until later when it’s more appropriate.
“I feel like eating fish for dinner but the last time I ate it, I found out I was allergic. (YOU CAN END IT HERE) And that day I ended up in hospital, but it was when I discovered my husband was squeamish because I threw up. He has a problem with that stuff, and it would no doubt come into play next week when we have dinner at the neighbours’ house.
Okay. I don’t care about the backstory behind the husband right now. I care about your craving to eat fish, barely even the fact you’re allergic.
I guess in a film, the character could be remembering her last encounter with eating fish and then a flashback would happen showing her in hospital throwing up(?) But…You have a medium with more dimensions than sight, so use it effectively.
Over-explaining is often a waste of word count. Tying up a loose end or ending, a long-running intricacy/subplot can be done effectively without ten pages of telling the reader how they should feel about the scene or action. You need to write intensely and with artistry to make them feel a certain way.
If you have to reaffirm how the audience should interpret something that has happened in the book, then you aren’t doing a good job as a storyteller!
TLDR:
*Don’t sneaky-tell or info dump, it shows lack of skill or a lack of confidence in your writing and also your opinion of you reader’s intelligence.
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