Exposition

There’s a scene in the Great Muppet Caper in which Lady Holiday, while interviewing Miss Piggy for a receptionist job, tells her a lot of personal information about her family relationships and the valuable jewelry (the Baseball Diamond…) she is going to put on display. When Miss Piggy asks her why she is telling her all this, Lady Holiday replies matter-of-factly, “Plot exposition – it has to go somewhere.

The word “exposition” comes almost directly from the Latin expositionem, which means “a setting or showing forth; narration; explanation.” In fiction, it’s basically the writer letting the reader know a bunch of background, setting, character, and/or backstory details that the reader needs to know in order for the story to move forward. In recent years, it also seems to be frequently taken as a special case of narrative summary, one that occurs primarily at the very beginning of a story (presumably because that’s where it is most obvious—on the first page, the writer is usually giving the reader a bunch of information—who’s present, when and where the book is taking place, what this particular place is like, who the viewpoint is, and, quite often, at least some hints about what kind of trouble the characters are in (or going to be in) and how they got there). And exposition often gets conflated with the dreaded infodump, and thus frowned on.

All of those are valid ways that a writer can provide exposition, but picking any one of them as “what exposition is” gives a false impression. Exposition can be done in dialog, narrative, action/reaction, or internal monolog or emotions…which pretty much covers most of what one can do in a story. In each instance, exposition can be slipped in as a brief phrase, or laid out in a long passage, as with Lady Holiday’s previously mentioned speech about her family.

For instance, the writer can say “Maria kicked a chunk of ice down the sidewalk and pulled her coat-collar up against the bitter wind coming off Lake Michigan” which gives the reader a general sense of place (a town very close to the shoreline of Lake Michigan) and time (winter) slipped into a sentence that is mostly about the actions of kicking ice and turning up a collar. Or the writer could say “At 10:37 on January 14, 1943, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Maria kicked a chunk of ice down the sidewalk,” which makes the reader do a lot less of the work of figuring out where and when this is happening, but also leaves the reader wondering why the exact time, date, and place of this particular action are important enough to be pinned down so specifically. Or the writer could provide a paragraph or page or chapter-long infodump of information about the history of Milwaukee, the supposed reasons why residents kick chunks of ice down the sidewalks in winter, and the imaginary origins of the activity.

In dialog, exposition can come in a series of brief exchanges- “Maria! What are you doing?” “Kicking ice chunks.” “In your new shoes? Come put your boots on.” “I hate boots.” “It’s cold and you’ll ruin your shoes.” “I hate the cold. I hate winter. I hate Milwaukee.” – or in a longer speech: “Maria! What are you doing?” “Kicking ice chunks. If I kick them hard enough, maybe they’ll slide all the way into Lake Michigan and melt. I hate winter. Why did we ever move to Milwaukee?”

Any and all of these ways of getting in background, backstory, etc. can work…and any of them can fail. One useful rule of thumb is that the longer a passage of exposition is, the more interesting and absorbing it needs to be to hold the reader’s attention. Infodumps are not automatically bad; boring infodumps are what you want to avoid. Long speeches are not necessarily a horrible thing to do; long dull speeches are nearly always a horrible idea.

One of the things to watch out for is providing information in the wrong order. Writers often worry that their readers won’t understand what is going on without a ton of background information, so they provide a prologue or an infodump early in the story that tells the reader a whole lot of background that the reader doesn’t see why they need to know. It is often much more effective to raise a question first and then provide the information that answers it. Not only does this make the reader more likely to remember it, it builds reader-trust; because the writer has answered a small question quickly and interestingly, the reader trusts that the big mystery (How are they going to get out of this mess?) will eventually be answered in an interesting or entertaining fashion.