What You Should Know About Exposition and Pacing

Exposition. It’s not a dirty word, though many people would have you believe that it is. It’s an essential part of fiction and, handled correctly, it is as valuable as any of those scenes we talked about last week. Exposition is not only essential to the story itself, but it can help you pace your story in a more effective way. So, what is exposition?

If you look at the dictionary, you’ll see some guff about how exposition comes at the beginning of the story to introduce the characters and set the scene. Yikes! Be very careful about opening a story with exposition. You’re much better off starting, as I’ve said before, in medias res, or in the middle of the action. Alternatively, you can open with a change in the status quo: the character just received a terrible diagnosis, or a handsome stranger just arrived in town.

My definition of exposition is it’s essential information, either factual or novel-specific. It answers the who, why, where, when, how, and what of the story. Where and when the story takes place. The weather. The characters and how they relate to one another. In a story based in a very specific world, literally as in science fiction, or figuratively as in a submarine, a government department, or a little town called Hobbiton in the Shire, you have to make it believable and understandable to the reader.

There are a number of ways to weave that ‘background’ information into the action: Let’s look at some of them:

“I can’t see,” Gail said with a sneeze. “It’s black as pitch in here. It’s probably haunted.”
“Well, it’s no lighter outside, honey,” Scott said, reassuring as always. “And at least it’s dry. Anyway, it will be dawn soon. Look, I know this creepy old house isn’t ideal, but it’s better than being stuck out there in some bloody Irish field miles from civilization in the middle of a gale.” He paused. “I’d be more worried about rats than ghosts.”

This my attempt at showing how you can establish time of day, location, and a sense of the environment without any expositioning whatsoever. Well, the exposition is actually there, it’s just carefully disguised.

Dialogue is an excellent way of revealing details to the reader. However, you have to be subtle. Don’t have one character tell another something they already know. For instance:

“As you know, Michael, I’m a single mother with two boys, Brian aged six, and Steve aged four…” At which point Michael replies, “For goodness sakes, Janice, I’ve lived next door to you for twenty years. Why are you telling me things I already know?”

A minor caveat to that would be if the character doing the explaining is suffering from a brain trauma and doesn’t remember things. There may be other reasons for such inelegant information-dropping, but I can’t think of any.

Compare that exchange between Janice and Michael with the small dialogue exchange I posted above it. It tells you the characters are in Ireland, in an abandoned house, just before dawn, in a storm. Sure there are things we’re not told — what were they doing in the field in the middle of the night, for instance — but if the writing is lively enough, we’re happy to keep reading and let the writer reveal more information as she goes along.

Another way is to reveal details in the thoughts of the characters, even in the middle of the action. CS Forester (The African Queen; the Horatio Hornblower stories), was an expert at this. Look at this brief paragraph:

“The French nobleman who had given Hornblower fencing lessons had spoken of the coup des deux veuves, the reckless attack that made two widows — here was an example of it.”
CS Forester: ‘Hornblower During the Crisis‘

In thirty words, Forester has revealed that Hornblower is a trained swordsman, and trained by a Frenchman, which implies excellence. The author demonstrates that Hornblower is familiar with fencing terminology, and that he is facing an opponent who is not nearly as clever as Hornblower himself.

We can also see that this brief comment comes in the middle of a swordfight, one in which our hero’s life is on the line (the comment about the move making two widows suggests both opponents are likely to die as a result of this manoeuver), but he is still clear-headed enough to identify the move, and remember his training.

In the famous fencing scene in The Princess Bride (you saw it coming, didn’t you?), Inigo and the Man in Black exchange banter about various fencing masters as they duel. I have it on good authority (BFF, Jane), that the comments are accurate. The conversation reveals two well-matched swordsmen, both men of honour, who have studied their craft with equal zeal. Oh, and neither is left handed!

Dialogue isn’t the only option. For instance, you can use the character’s internal monologue to convey the same information. Here are two examples, the first a flat ‘just give me the facts, ma’am,’ version, and the second in the form of an internal dialogue. See which you prefer.

HMS Belfast is 613 feet six inches long. She is a cruiser of the third Town class and is moored near Tower Bridge on the Thames.. In 2019 she received 327,000 visitors.

In his soul, Danny had been born a seafarer. Not a sailor, which suggested little white hats and lots of deck scrubbing. No, he wanted to be a seafarer, complete with weathered cheeks and a bushy beard like he saw in his storybooks. The nearest he ever came to this dream, alas, was during his monthly visits to HMS Belfast moored on the Thames. He still felt a thrill as he ran his hand up her polished wood. Almost, he thought, he could hear her purring in appreciation. He’d visited her so often that he felt he knew every inch of her 613 feet and six inches. Don’t forget those inches, son, every one of them counts. He smiled up at his father. He got it. Dad was as much married to the sea as he ever was to Danny’s mother. So he only worked on the ferry to Spain, he was still a mariner. That was another good word, Danny thought. As soon as he was old enough, he’d join the navy. Maybe one day he’d be stationed upon a ship even more impressive than this cruiser, HMS Belfast.

Now, I know the second is about twice as long as the first, but it humanises the details. It reveals those dull statistics in a way that seems romantic to Danny and his father, as well as revealing Danny’s obsession. This is one of several ways you can weave exposition into the narrative without it deadening the flow.

Our next option is Letters. These can be a helpful way of inserting essential information into the story. For one of my favourite examples, read the lyrics of The Mountains of Mourne by Percy French. Here’s the first verse as a teaser:

Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight,
With the people here working by day and by night.
They don’t sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat,
But there’s gangs of them digging for gold in the street.
At least when I asked them that’s what I was told,
So I just took a hand at this digging for gold,
But for all that I found there I might as well be
Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.
Percy French, ‘The Mountains of Mourne’

These lyrics reveal how a talented writer can capture facts, a sense of place, and a sense of homesickness in a letter to his girlfriend back home in Ireland. There are many other examples, Dracula (Bram Stoker), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), and The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens) are just a few examples. The most important thing about using letters as a means of inserting exposition is to remember it’s supposed to be a letter. Yes, it should relate the important information you want the reader to know, but you also need to make it reflective of the character writing it, as well as the relationship between them and the intended recipient. Take a leaf out of Percy French’s book and make the letter entertaining, fun, and heartfelt.

Likewise, exposition can come in the form of a flashback. This is, or can be, closer to the simple prose but you can probably guess the important difference: Suppose that you’ve already established the predicament your character is in at the start of the book, and so hooked the reader. Now you have to explain how the character got there. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights the story begins with a visitor being given the owner, Heathcliff’s, bedroom and subsequently encounters the ghost of Heathcliff’s dead lover, Cathy. Then the housekeeper starts to tell the story of their doomed romance, all of it a flashback.

Imagine you were writing a story about a catastrophe, for instance. Let’s say it’s the sinking of a huge ship. You could, of course, start the tale with the passengers coming on board and sharing information about this great liner. Or, you could start when the ship hits, let’s say, an iceberg. As your main character tries to find a lifeboat, she flashes back to the first time she ever heard of the ship. Or you could start the story in the lifeboat and then go back to the beginning. Opening with the action piques the reader’s interest and will keep them reading even when you have to introduce some backstory.

I’d suggest you read as widely as possible to see how writers use these techniques. My favourite practitioners of making exposition seem seamless are Tolkien, Frederick Forsyth, and CS Forester. Here’s a great example of Forsyth telling us the time and the temperature in a way that we almost don’t notice:

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad
Frederick Forsyth, ‘The Day of the Jackal’

It’s wonderful, isn’t it? And notice, too, how he saves all his punch for the last four words. How can we stop reading at that point?

Finally, there’s the paragraph or more of information you want the reader to know. World-building, you might call it. The details may include the time, day, year, location, and any technical data it’s essential for your reader to know. If your character is an astronaut, for instance, you may need to tell us something about his training and his concerns as he prepares to launch. The reader doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand what you’re telling us, but if he is a rocket scientist he needs to be sure that you know what you’re talking about.

Exposition and Pacing

There is a time, however, when putting in a paragraph of exposition all on its own is important, and the best example of this is when you need to cool down the action.

In one of the scenarios I offered above, I suggested you might write a story about someone on an ocean liner that sinks. Imagine your heroine feels the ship lurch and hears people screaming. She asks a crewman where she can get a lifeboat. “Ain’t none left, love,” he says and hurries away.

Now that you have the reader’s attention and concern — maybe the woman has a baby, or is pregnant, adding to the tension — you can leave her standing there and give us a paragraph of exposition. This is carefully calculated to ensure the reader doesn’t toss the book. They want to know what happened to that nice lady who helped others into the last lifeboat and said she’d wait. You could add to the tension by moving on to the Captain giving the order to abandon boat. Or our heroine’s husband who is waiting for her in New York. But if exposition is needed, use it to your advantage and place it where it will control the pace of the story.

Everyone wants to write a page-turner. Unfortunately, some writers feel there should constant action, rushing from one climax to the next without drawing a breath. No, that’s just as bad an idea as no action at all. As I said in my post about structure, the story needs to have a series of rising and falling actions. Nothing drops the action more effectively than a poorly executed block of exposition. But if you use it carefully, disguise it when you can, and include it when you need to. Written with grace and style, of course.

Next week: We’ll look at subplots.

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Published on March 05, 2024 22:31

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