Rethinking exposition.
Exposition. It’s a pain.
I write historical fiction and I try to weave information in via dialogue. However, sometimes passing necessary information via dialogue is either tedious or ridiculous or both. For example, two people born and raised in the 12th century wouldn't have a conversation about what a tally stick is, they'd just know. That’s like two adults in the 21st century having a discussion about what a credit card is.
“So what’s that bit of plastic?”
“Oh, this? It’s a form of money.”
“Really? I’ve grown up my whole life in Los Angeles, and I’ve never seen anything like that. We can really pay for our plane ticket to Rio with that?”
“You bet!”
“Really? How does it work?”
“Well, there’s this thing called ‘credit’….”
I’ll stop there. Not just to spare you from a silly conversation, but also a very boring one. Sure, it keeps me in the story, to a certain degree (although someone this ignorant seems strange and artificial), yet the long-drawn-out description of modern finance that’s likely to follow will make me wish I hadn’t stayed in this particular story. Nevertheless, injecting information like this is often necessary. If the drama of a 12th-century story centres around financial fraud, the reader might very well need to know how tally sticks work.
Generally, I try to pass information in the recommended manner, weaving it into the narrative without it becoming overbearing, boring or obvious. But it’s difficult. Building a historically accurate story usually means correcting preconceived notions about the Middle Ages, seeded largely by Hollywood’s “vision” of the past. As a result, I often find myself making statements like this to my alpha and beta readers:
“No, medieval buildings weren’t grey stone ruins, they were whitewashed and painted, often with colourful designs.”
“No, women generally didn’t walk around with their hair uncovered.”
The above issues are easy enough to dispense with. A conversation about what to paint on the walls of a great hall serves the first purpose, and a risque young woman telling her friends she’s going down to the market without a veil would pretty easily cover the second. Yet there are difficult moments. The tally stick is a perfect example. I could contrive a tally stick explanation by having a child ask questions of their parent who “educates” them and so the reader too. I’ve seen a lot of these explanations, and sometimes they come off. Other times, most times, they come off as exactly what they are: contrived.
On the other hand, I could just have the narrator explain it. The narrator — unshackled from the back and forth demands of dialogue or the need to sound “natural” — can in fact explain tally sticks in a few lines, a single short paragraph, and then we can get on with the story. But then I’d likely be accused of using exposition.
When I’m confronted with issues like this, my instinct isn’t to look at advice lists. Things with titles like: “Twelve things a writer must do, and twelve they should never do,” etc. I’ve found most of them to be vague and often contradictory, instead, I turn to authors I admire with a track record of success, and in this case, the question of exposition got me thinking about the big names in fantasy and sci-fi. After all, if exposition is difficult in historical fiction, in science fiction or fantasy, it has to be a nightmare. Whole worlds need inventing. Without the context of the world, it’s impossible for the reader to know what the stakes are.
“Captain, the enemy ship is armed with phigureite weaponry.”
So is the enemy ship dangerous or pathetic?
Seeking a bit of wisdom, I looked at Tolkien, Robert Jordon and Frank Herbert. I noticed instantly that all three used a huge amount of exposition, but they handled it by putting the lion's share of their world-building outside the narrative.
LOTR starts with a long prologue that explains Hobbits. It's literally called "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters". It's not written like a regular prologue, instead, it's like a travel essay. Here Tolkien explains what hobbit holes look like, what their clothes are like etc. Things that are done in the movie with a camera by just panning over Bilbo's house, Tolkien did in an expository essay at the beginning of his book. Once he does that, he doesn't have to worry about it in the narrative. And it's not short. In the edition I have, it's 16 pages long. Could you imagine if he tried to “slip” that much description into his narrative? A narrative many people feel is already description heavy? He also ends LOTR with seven appendices where he explains the origins of the dwarves, the history of various kingly lines etc. The appendices are over 100 pages long. Frank Herbert did the same thing. Dune ends with nearly 70 pages (in the copy I have) of expository essays in the form of appendices. Jordan did similar with a detailed 17-page glossary.
But I can already hear the dissatisfaction. I imagine a conversation between an author and a reader about exposition to go something like this:
R: “I need to know how magic works in your world, otherwise, these first chapters don’t make sense.”
A: “Ok, I’ll add a conversation where one character explains to another. Maybe in a classroom environment, that seems natural!”
R: “Ugh. A classroom. I get bored enough hearing teachers drone on in real life. You need to keep the action going.”
A: “Ok, I’ll just describe it in the action, in a fight maybe. It’ll be an action scene and, I’ll just slip some explanation in here and there.”
R: “I hate long descriptive passages. And besides, is slowing the action down to explain things even realistic? Would people in a magic fight even be thinking about the origin of the other guy’s school of magic, or would they just be fighting for their lives?
A: “Fine. I’ll just drop it into a short prologue or maybe an appendix, just a page or so. Just get it out of the way.”
R: “Read an appendix? I don’t even read prologues. If it’s part of the story, it should just be in the story.”
A: Slumps in chair.
So what are you going to do? Ask a group of writers or readers in any forum, and you’ll get all kinds of opinions. I sometimes believe that the push to keep it all in the story is a result of visual media. People are used to visual explanations. It’s easy to show what a hobbit looks like in a movie, but in a book, descriptions and explanations need to be written; they’ve got to be squashed in there somehow.
On the other hand, a lot of movies start with a prologue. Even the Star Wars movies start with a short expository essay (the scroll at the beginning) explaining important bits of context for the opening of the story. In A New Hope we learn in the prologue that a civil war is being waged between the Galactic Empire and a band of rebels; the Rebels have won their first victory and in the process managed to steal the plans to the Empire’s trump card: the Death Star, and Princess Leia has them. How would this have sounded if C3PO and R2-D2 had to explain it in their opening scene? The first spoken line of the movie is from 3PO (R2-D2’s bleeps and bloops not included here):
“Did you hear that? They shutdown the main reactor! We’ll be destroyed for sure! This is madness!”
How do you segue from that to a conversation about current politics, especially politics both 3PO and R2 are already very aware of? And how do you do it without sounding lame and contrived?
Anyway, I guess my point is that I think exposition is sometimes necessary, but it can be handled in different ways.