Too Much Exposition...

...and why there's no such thing.

As a writer in TV and film (I can't speak for novelists because I have no experience of publishing), the process of getting notes is an unhappy combination of painful and useful. You're getting your homework marked but, unlike at school, it is more often than not a piece of work that you give a shit about. You have done your best and, at the point of delivery, this draft was as good as it can be.

That is not to say that it can't get better; it can ALWAYS get better, but right now you don't know how to make it better because it hasn't had the time to percolate through your own internal filters and reveal its problems to you. Yes, I'm sure that's a mixed metaphor, spare me your notes.

But here you sit, your own critical faculties having been gazumped by fellow writers/producers/development execs, listening to the litany of rookie mistakes you have apparently made in the execution of something that, lest we forget, no one had ANY FUCKING CLUE how to execute before you took on the task.

How best to deal with that meeting (it involves grace, equanimity and an open mind) is a matter for another time, because right now I want to focus on one of the notes that drives me the most crazy: "too much exposition"…