When you try to shove too much world building and backstory into the first pages of your story, you kill your pace and eliminate the action. What is happening right now, in this moment? What does the reader need to know to understand only what is happening right now? That’s what you should reveal. When you’re working on the beginning of your story, focus on the present scene. Instead, she used a single line to share what the reader needed to know to understand the present scene. Meyer didn’t go into a whole spiel about how Cinder came to be a mechanic or run that booth. This is a great example of how to use exposition in the beginning of your story.

The second line transitions from exposition to a description of Cinder’s booth. The first line is exposition: Meyer is telling the reader what Cinder does for work and where. It was squeezed into a shady cove between a used netscreen dealer and a silk merchant. Without a sign, her booth hinted at her trade only by the shelves of stock android parts that crowded the walls. Meyer writes:Ĭinder was the only full-service mechanic at New Beijing’s weekly market. However, Meyer doesn’t lose the scene or present moment while doing this, and she only provides information the reader needs to know right then. Using Description and Exposition in World/Setting More Description, Less ExpositionĪfter Meyer shows Cinder removing her foot and sitting back to wait for her friend to arrive with the new one, she uses a mixture of exposition and description to flesh out the current setting and provide a bit of needed backstory. Layering your story in this way makes it more interesting, keeps the pace up, and gets to the inciting incident faster. You describe the important parts of your world – the parts impacting your characters – and how your characters feel about and fit into their world all at once. When you show your characters interacting with your world instead of only describing the world or the character, you accomplish more with fewer words. Instead of saying “Cinder was a cyborg,” Meyer shows Cinder’s bodily state and her determination to upgrade herself. All of this is shown through the action of the character working to remove her too-small foot.īeginning with action in this way allows your reader to get to know your world by your character’s interactions with it. The first two sentences of Cinder reveal the main character, that the character is a cyborg, and that the current screw has been in use for a long time. Her knuckles ached from forcing the screwdriver into the joint as she struggled to loosen the screw one gritting twist at time (1). The screw through Cinder’s ankle had rusted, the engraved marks worn to a mangled circle.

Cinder marissa meyers