The Most-Read Posts of “…On Anything Really” from 2013: “One Of My “Most Disliked” Tropes Of SFF / Epic Fantasy”
I wrote this post because it was very much in my thoughts as I was plugging away on Daughter of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book Three — but it appears to have struck a chord. 😉
“One of the great dangers of writing SFF is what the great Ursula Le Guin calls the “Expository Lump”, ie in lieu of a Vulcan Mind meld between author and reader, the author downloads details of worldbuilding, backstory, or other essential plot information in a giant lump of text.
Urrgh, I hear you all cry, quite rightly.
But there is an SFF trope ‘sometimes’ deployed to counteract this — or worse, simply to make the plot work — which drives me crazy as a reader…”
To read on, or refresh your recollection, click on: