Chalk Scribblers workshop: hiding exposition with Shirley Jackson

Resist the urge to explain.

It’s one of those storytelling rules that’s a lot easier to say than it is to follow. Sometimes our readers need to know certain things if they are to follow a story, but they’ll react badly to having an expository lump dropped on them. They are, after all, reading to be told a story and not to memorise a textbook on our fictional world.

Disguising exposition is a key skill in storytelling, whether we’re writing fiction or narrative non-fiction, and nobody did it better than Shirley Jackson. She was a master at throwing characters into deeply unsettling situations without wasting a word of explanation on what was doing the unsettling. Jackson knew exactly which dots to join in the narrative and which to leave her reader to join for themselves.

It’s a sleight of pen that every writer can learn from, so let’s put our heads together and learn from it.

The focus of the discussion will be the two stories in the reading list. The discussion will assume that everyone has read both of them:

• Charles was published in Mademoiselle 1948.
• The Man in the Woods was unpublished in Jackson’s lifetime but discovered and published in New Yorker 2014.

The stories have adult themes that may be explored in the discussion.