No Feather Dusting!(and not that kind either…)

There’s a lesson pounded into the heads of playwrights that authors of stories could benefit from. Playwrights are warned to avoid something called “featherdusting.”

Featherdusting was a trope in melodrama (nevermind what it means in today’s slang…) where the butler and maid discussed the background and the details of the household while cleaning a room together. Usually, one of them, often a housemaid, wielded a feather duster, hence the term.

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This kind of scene front loads the drama with a mountain of details that have no emotional resonance because we don’t careyet about the characters, the events, the lives that we’re being told about. It’s all secondhand and flat like those old stage sets painted to look like a snow covered mountain, another tired and out-of-date convention. You don’t need painted snow if the actors, believably shiver and huddle when they come on stage. The audiences imagination fills out the picture and is much more invested when they do

I seen this A LOT in the books I’ve read lately. Someone drives up to a friend’s house and they just happen to muse on the architectural style the history of the place the neighborhood… Really? You’ve been there 100s of times and every time you drive up you think “…