Babel Clash

Yeah, a dramatic pause can definitely go on too long. At which point it’s no longer all that dramatic. The obvious examples in baseball are batters repeatedly stepping out of the box. The literary equivalent is, no doubt, the overloaded exposition scene, the worst species of which involves the bad guy pointing a gun at the hero and smugly explaining the entire sinister plot, and how it was all working perfectly until that idiot McFinley went to the feds, though in fact the feds were in on it, too, well… some of the feds… since it was necessary to string them along until the shipment arrived… but you see, McFinley went to feds who weren’t in on it–

Oh, I must have dozed off there. Sorry about that. What was I saying? Oh, right, how to make sure nobody ever buys another one of your books.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a quick bit of exposition from the bad guy. I hope I can quote Die Hard without running into legal trouble:

McClane: “Why’d you have to nuke the whole building, Hans?”

Hans: “When you steal six hundred dollars, you can disappear. When you steal six hundred million, they WILL find you, unless they think you’re already dead.”

Not too shabby. Doesn’t make the audience roll its eyes.

And the lesson is…? Write a really good story that doesn’t need to be duct-taped together with implausible tedium in the final scene. Nothing to it, right? If I come across a surefire way to do that every time, without struggling through a dozen drafts, I’ll let you all know at once. (Wait, are you kidding? If I figured that out, I’d hoard it like a gold mine in the old west.)

In general, I’m sure the key to keeping dramatic pauses dramatic is to make them as short as they can be, and I think that applies at the level of action as well as overall storytelling.

I should add something to the above points about exposition. I think it’s only tedious and boring when it exists just to bridge gaps in an inconsistent story. Exposition can be great if it’s providing answers to questions that have been gnawing at the reader for four hundred pages. Especially if the answers are surprising. It also helps if the information is coming out in a plausible way: a cop explaining to a partner, a P.I. filling in a client, etc.

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