The necessary evil that is exposition

I'm trying to write a story after a long and fruitless break and I can already feel the rust showing. Anyway, onto my current problem.

The story is a semi-standard high school classmates meet each other years later while working for the same company. The guy was the kind who stayed invisible all year and the girl was the most popular girl in his school.

I'm trying to think of a way to get a lot of background information out without exposition or even expo-speak. There's a lot I feel the reader should know about my characters (battles with depression, abusive relationships etc.), but I'm looking for better ways for them to organically grow in the story rather than be shoved down the reader's throat.

1. Character is going through a shoebox of old greeting cards; memories come flooding back.
2. Character is lying on his shrink's couch, spilling his guts.
3. Two characters meet after many years, "so what have you been up to?"
4. Character is filling out a loan application with employment history section. "Hmmm, what WAS I doing five years ago?"
5. Character is moving/having house painted/renovating. Shoves sofa from the wall, finds something that triggers a flood of memories.
6. Character orders a double-caff-light-soy-triple latte at Starbucks. The barista is a cute little pixie/rugged hunk that reminds him/her of the old flame that dumped him, triggering a flood of memories.
7. Character is attending his first Alcoholics/Narcotics/Sexaholics/Rage-aholics/Shopaholics Anonymous meeting; has to stand up and tell his story to the group.

Flashbacks are your best bet, just find a foil for them to be thinking backwards....a loot better than going on and on about them in the present.

I would interrupt their reactions to each other filtered through their experiences.

Betty's smile was enchanting. A ray of sunshine burning through my Prozac ladened past.

Exposition isn't a bad thing. To me it's more how it's used. I tend to drop stuff here and there throughout the story as I feel it's necessary. Sometimes I need it to explain an upcoming scene, and other times the information could come out during a scene to help flesh it out or give the characters some more depth.

I agree that big info dumps can slow down a story, but the info itself isn't a necessary evil -- it's necessary to tell the story.

I think it depends on how much exposition you want to give at any one time. Flashbacks might be better for longer explanations, but you could have shorter ones as well.

The characters could discuss some issues. If they have high school in common, I'd think that'd be an easy way to get some of it out there because that is probably what they'd talk about a lot of the time, until they find new things in common.

PennLady said:

Exposition isn't a bad thing. To me it's more how it's used. I tend to drop stuff here and there throughout the story as I feel it's necessary. Sometimes I need it to explain an upcoming scene, and other times the information could come out during a scene to help flesh it out or give the characters some more depth.

I agree that big info dumps can slow down a story, but the info itself isn't a necessary evil -- it's necessary to tell the story.

I think it depends on how much exposition you want to give at any one time. Flashbacks might be better for longer explanations, but you could have shorter ones as well.

The characters could discuss some issues. If they have high school in common, I'd think that'd be an easy way to get some of it out there because that is probably what they'd talk about a lot of the time, until they find new things in common.

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I'm in the middle of a big info dump as we speak....not character pasts or details, but the history of the building they are in. Its going on abit and I suppose I could try to work in the details as the story moves but then it becomes..."secret passage" wait, did I mention those passages were added by so and so so they could...

So right now I'm "dumping" and maybe when all is finished I can see about breaking it up and spreading it around

Re-visiting old sights/sites [together] is a prompt of memory for either.
driving past a hospital may well prompt statem,ents about being treated post abuse. . .

lovecraft68 said:

I'm in the middle of a big info dump as we speak....not character pasts or details, but the history of the building they are in. Its going on abit and I suppose I could try to work in the details as the story moves but then it becomes..."secret passage" wait, did I mention those passages were added by so and so so they could...

So right now I'm "dumping" and maybe when all is finished I can see about breaking it up and spreading it around

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If I didn't say it before, there's nothing wrong with info dumps per se. Sometimes it's the best way to keep things moving and get the stuff across to the reader.

LaRascasse said:

There's a lot I feel the reader should know about my characters (battles with depression, abusive relationships etc.)

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Two words:

"by LaRascasse"

IRL there is no exposition, its all inside quotes. But IRL people share much from common experiences, culture, etc., or theyre fulla shit and someone needs to make the reader aware of it.

PennLady said:

I tend to drop stuff here and there throughout the story as I feel it's necessary.

Click to expand...

I most often try to do it this way too.

LaRascasse said:

I'm trying to write a story after a long and fruitless break and I can already feel the rust showing. Anyway, onto my current problem.

The story is a semi-standard high school classmates meet each other years later while working for the same company. The guy was the kind who stayed invisible all year and the girl was the most popular girl in his school.

I'm trying to think of a way to get a lot of background information out without exposition or even expo-speak. There's a lot I feel the reader should know about my characters (battles with depression, abusive relationships etc.), but I'm looking for better ways for them to organically grow in the story rather than be shoved down the reader's throat.

Click to expand...

One way that I've found works is that someone in the story keeps a diary, or a sort of 'captains log' of their thoughts.

Another is the coincidence or similar thing happening years later.

Such as the young man is being berated by an overbearing and downright bullying boss. That reminds him or the object of his affections of something from their youth, or she may have had an abusive father or boyfriend/husband in the intervening years and has just had strips torn off her by a rather rude and nasty employer. I've seen it in real life and made a few friends that way after comforting them from a big dressing down.

I remember telling a colleague who enjoyed doing that to there that it was only not professional, it created a bad image and just put everyone on the side of the victim, even if they deserved a telling off. As I shouted back at him going into a meeting "If you've got to give someone a proverbial slap on the back do it in front of everyone. If you've got to give them a slap across the face, do it behind closed doors."

Little things like that which happen sadly from time to time do make us dwell on certain episodes that are similar from our own past. It will also bond the reader with the character in the story and also the author.

That's just a few ideas I use. One other way is to 'hook' the reader with some information, then relay it back in little nuggets like in the film Batman Begins (2005), which is a great example of using past and present tense in a narrative.

Just had to say that I don't think exposition is an evil, necessary or otherwise. It's just part of the story. I get that you don't want pages of laying out the back story, and that's fine. There are plenty of other examples given of how to get out the background information and/or any explanations you need.

PennLady said:

Just had to say that I don't think exposition is an evil, necessary or otherwise. It's just part of the story. I get that you don't want pages of laying out the back story, and that's fine. There are plenty of other examples given of how to get out the background information and/or any explanations you need.

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There are plenty of times when it works. I just finished my "dump" and think it was necessary, I basically gave a history and layout of the building where several scenes take place and this way the reader will know everything about it and I can avoid the "wait, there was a secret door...why?"

KIng has gotten ridiculous with his info dumps, they are chapters of dumps. I keep thinking back to Black House (the sequel to the Talisman with Peter Straub) I was eighty pages in and we are still being introduced to the town a person at a time. who was this to who who was fucking who

I felt like I was reading that section of the bible you know...and so and so begat so and so who begat who begat...

One of the very small number of books I put down without finishing. I gave it to my daughter and when I asked her a few weeks later about it she said, "It wasn't going anywhere I gave it to my room mate. Daddy's girl in a variety of ways

What everyone else said.

And I'll try to remember some of the tips as well. I've used flashbacks and just a character thinking about the past. I've even put a "Cast of Characters/Dramatis personæ" at the beginning of the story with a short bio for each character. Although I did pare it down quite a bit before posting, it still got hammered in the comments and feedback.

Bramblethorn said:

Two words:

"by LaRascasse"

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Ah, so you want it all to be implied..

Less flippantly: one option here is to mix up narrative modes. If you really need the readers to understand the intricacies of fractional-reserve banking, but you can't figure out how to put it in the protag/narrator's mouth without sounding artificial, don't put it there. Instead, cut to a medium/perspective that's appropriate for the kind of info-dump you want to deliver, then cut back later.

For example, I started one story like this:

From September of 1928 a weekly advertisement accompanied by a portrait appeared in all the major European newspapers:

REWARD OF $1000 OFFERED — to any person providing information leading to the location of Josephine Hart, late of Massachusetts, daughter of Mr and Mrs Joseph Hart. Miss Hart is aged twenty-three, five feet eight inches tall, with brown hair and green eyes. Small round scar on back of left hand, beauty mark above left eye. Last seen in Paris, July 19th. Reward may be claimed at any office of Hart and Hayworth Shipping, Inc.

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That's a massive info-dump, but because it's in a medium where we expect info-dumps, it's not as obnoxious.

So far so good. It's been challenging, but I've managed to establish the narrator's depression without using the d-word itself.

One of the drawbacks of having the reader see everything instead of an info-dump is that I have to contrive situations where that information can come up.