Exposition

What is exposition? Exposition is writing designed to explain. In fiction, it’s often referred to as “information dumping,” and it’s usually indicative of a need for further drafting. Sure, it’s necessary sometimes, but unless you’re John Steinbeck, you’re not going to find serious readers who will tolerate much of it. It’s essentially announcing “here’s a bunch of information I didn’t bother crafting into story.” Exposition should always be evaluated for necessity with the most critical eye available. Nine times out of ten, there’s no justification for it. Steinbeck used exposition in his novels, but not as a substitute for developed story. Steinbeck also editorializes, but here’s the catch: he earned it. I certainly don’t flatter myself that I’ve accomplished or earned what he has. Exposition should be justified—not wholesale (totally not a thing), but passage by passage, and if you’re comfortably inside the word count, you almost always should bring the passage into narrative present.

John was angry.

A vein in John’s forehead bulged, and his face turning burgundy while he screamed at Jim for leaving the classified documents unsecured.

Which one of those is a better experience for the reader? Which is more engaging? For this reader, it isn’t the first one.

Exposition has other problems in narrative writing, mainly that it confiscates your toolbag and leaves you with just a hammer. Everything is not a nail, and without wrenches, screwdrivers, saws, drills, and lathes, you can’t build a tight ship or story. A finely crafted story needs planing, sanding, and beveling. Good luck doing any of that with a hammer.

Oddly enough, I see writers default to exposition to portray emotion and mood, giving away the chance to develop a scene, show the mood, and move the story forward:

Fear infected the office.

People didn’t spend time in the breakroom any more. Angela covered her keyboard when she typed in her password, and Tim started changing his every day, sometimes twice a day. Everyone looked over their shoulders during even the most mundane conversations.

It’s not necessary to argue that the second passage is better than the expository sentence, but let’s look at what makes it better: first, the reader is trusted to see the fear instead of suffering a pedantic narrator who tells the reader a mood that’s easy to portray through behavior. Second, behavior develops character and can be used to move the story forward. Character actions need to be true to the characters and their motivations. If you don’t know why a character does something, stop until you figure it out—not knowing character motivation is a cardinal sin that can doom a piece of writing before the first draft is complete.

Knowing the characters inside and out is essential to good fiction, so if this is something you struggle with, write character sketches for the characters who are in the story. Authors and narrators can only reveal things in a text that they already know, and if you’re writing plot-centric work, make sure you take the time to fully develop the characters you’ve created to act out your scheme—if they aren’t real and three-dimensional for you, they won’t be for anyone else. On that note, unless you have a clear rhetorical purpose for using one, eradicate tropes from your work.

What is a trope? In simplest terms without connotation, a trope is essentially an archetype: a recognizable character or pattern. When tropes aren’t justified, the definition picks up emotional charge and tropes become stereotypes, or, even worse, clichés. Tropes can be extremely useful if they’re employed with purpose that fits cleanly into the narrative structure. I use tropes to say things other characters can’t and to make statements the narrator can’t. A light hand is best when using tropes, which should never dissolve into pure stereotype—each character should have individuality.

Another problem I have with excessive exposition is that it’s usually front-loaded with the author’s prescriptions for how the reader should interpret the text. This is where audience consideration comes in.

The first question to answer, of course, is who is my audience? If you can’t answer that, put your pen down until you can. If you can’t define your audience, how in the world can you effectively, respectfully communicate with them? No one wants to read a “to whom it may concern” story. No one. Readers want to be engaged by the text, not talked down to by it. If you want readers to trust you, you have to make the first leap and trust them to interpret without explicating the text. Don’t explain what you haven’t built—it’s not there. Do the work of creating it instead of insulting audience intelligence. If you’re writing a piece for a challenge, you can rest assured that the audience consists of sophisticated, educated readers who know the craft of writing. No editor is going to embrace being talked down to by a text, nor will serious readers, and insulting the audience is not a path to victory.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. Do the hard work of specifically looking for flaws and weaknesses in your work—pretending they aren’t there won’t solve any problems or improve the piece. Empty praise from readers who don’t have empirical knowledge about craft and literature can be counterproductive, and if your rationale is “I know it’s good because my fans like it,” you’re probably going to encounter a lot of disappointment that could be avoided by looking at every piece as something with potential to be better than it currently is. Try trading in “I know this is good” for “How can I make this better?” and see how that affects how well your pieces perform.