Listen to the podcast

On August 3, 2024, Kasie and Rex continued their sources-of-motivation journey with a look at exposition and its role in the story. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

Exposition

Agenda

• Quick Catch Up
• What is exposition?
• How much is too much?
• Strategies for layering it in

Segment 1

So we did exposition as backstory in Episode 186 and Episode 166. We looked at origin stories in Episode 170 and what you need to know when the story begins and core wounds and how they impact the character’s decision making. Episode 122 was the last time we focused on it and it’s been four years so we’re gonna look at all that again.

Let’s start with some exposition questions:

Who was Obiwan Kenobi before he was a Jedi?

Does it matter?

The key to exposition is always including what matters and leaving out what doesn’t. We don’t need every aching day of Ferris Bueller’s high school existence – in fact, we never even see him attend school (fueling the conspiracy theory that Ferris doesn’t actually exist and the whole movie is just Cameron’s fever dream). But everyone at school talks about him, so we know there must be days when he walks the halls.

Exposition is the stuff that happens before the story begins and the art of exposition is getting that information in the book or story, to the reader, so that what’s happening now makes sense without overloading them with the entire history of Shannara.

There are several ways to deliver exposition according to literaryterms.net:

• Backstory or prologue — the dreaded fact dump that precedes a story
• Inner monologue or flashback — where the character remembers or thinks about something that happened in the past and therefore gives us that prior knowledge we need
• Dialogue — where one character tells another about something that happened before the story so we (the reader) get that information, too.

Segment 2

Our friends at Kindlepreneur have created “the ultimate guide” hyperbole not intended to exposition and here’s what they say about the ways to provide exposition:

• Through narration – be careful of the POV of your narrator and only reveal what he/she would already know
• Through inner monologue – works well for a first-person narrative
• Through dialogue – avoid the trap of characters telling one another what they already know simply for the audience’s sake
• Through epistolary means – this is where the character finds news articles or letters detailing events that happened before the character arrived
• Through flashbacks – it can be tricky to go in and out of flashbacks. Some writers use italics to let us know what we’re reading is a different place/time.

How do you choose what needs to be included? It’s organic, actually. You’ll be writing a scene and someone will say or do something and you’ll think, “Well, they have to respond that way because of X.” And then you’ll think, “Did I put X in the story?”

Less is more – the reader probably doesn’t need as much exposition as you think he does. Sometimes short, succinct sentences can deliver as much needed information as a full paragraph.

Segment 3

Direct exposition – this is telling the reader exactly what they need to know when they need to know it. It can be done through details of a room or a person’s appearance. This link gives us five types of exposition – not to be confused with methods of delivery:

• Description — giving a complete explanation of the topic, with evidence, examples, and background history. This connects the reader to the point of origin. 
• Comparison — comparing two topics together gives context to the current story. Matters, like religious beliefs, can be conceptual or more concrete, like living in New York versus Australia.
• Cause and Effect — showing how past events become the source of the character’s current behaviors. For example, poor health is a by-product of low income, where health is suffering due to inadequate funds to afford healthier foods. 
• Problem and Solution — explains a problem and offers a viable solution. For example, making fresh food accessible to low-income families to better their health.
• Sequence — this is primarily used to describe a process, like detailing the manufacturing steps to make a crayon. However, you can also use sequence to illustrate a timeline of events to show backstory.

Segment 4

So how do you do it? This link provides some film examples. I think exposition is easier to spot in films because it’s usually a pause in the action while one character explains something to another. For example, Michael explaining how his family knows Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather.

An example of epistolary exposition is in Jurassic Park when the visitors to the park (and the audience) watch the informational video explaining how DNA was extracted from the dragonfly.

A flashback montage sequence in Up shows us the entirety of Carl and his wife’s courting and marriage. It gives us insight into the life they lived together with a kind of highlight reel delivered pretty quickly.

Some common pitfalls of exposition – for novice writers, likely to be caught in critique – are on this blog and include:

• Information overload
• Too much telling, not enough showing
• Not being relevant to what’s happening in the story at that moment.