Shay responds. Exposition isn’t good or bad, it’s just a style.
Shay’s take on “Rethinking Exposition”
If you agree, stop reading and go do something else. If you don’t and want to argue about someone’s opinion on the internet (and be honest we all do) read on.
My interests lie mainly in fantasy and horror…so I’m going to use a seminal author from each genre for my examples: H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. In recent years Lovecraft has exploded from a “cult” figure to a household name. ‘Lovecraftian’ has entered the vocabulary of nearly every geek as an adjective, and any game, story, or comic book that wants to cash in on the hype need only append a few tentacles and they’re in!
What we might not think of as much with Lovecraft is his love of exposition…or at least his strong preference for it. Exposition can take the form of a protagonist or narrator speaking…and therefore can have a voice. Voice is what makes dialogue so interesting and fun to read (at least to me) and I’d argue properly voiced exposition is as pleasant and engaging to read as properly voiced dialogue.
Call of C’thulhu, for example, contains only one true line of dialogue. The rest of the story comes to us entirely through exposition. His less-known short story The Alchemist refrains from dialogue entirely…save for the final, revealing line of the story. A gimmick perhaps, but it worked. More often his tales are entirely expository. Doing so, Lovecraft honed a style of writing where exposition was not a grudging concession to efficiency. Rather, it was the story itself.
Tolkien has more dialogue than Lovecraft, but never shied from lengthy exposition. He had a knack for writing exposition that drew the reader in, and in a sober way that dialogue cannot always achieve. Consider this example from Fellowship of the Ring:
“There were rumours of strange things happening in the world outside; and as Gandalf had not at that time appeared or sent any message for several years, Frodo gathered all the news he could. Elves, who seldom walked in the Shire, could now be seen passing westward through the woods in the evening, passing and not returning; but they were leaving Middle-earth and were no longer concerned with its troubles. There were, however, dwarves on the road in unusual numbers. The ancient East-West Road ran through the Shire to its end at the Grey Havens, and dwarves had always used it on their way to their mines in the Blue Mountains. They were the hobbits’ chief source of news from distant parts - if they wanted any: as a rule dwarves said little and hobbits asked no more. But now Frodo often met strange dwarves of far countries, seeking refuge in the West. They were troubled, and some spoke in whispers of the Enemy and of the Land of Mordor.”
Here Tolkien indicates the passage of narrative time, unpacks the contemporary history of Middle Earth, and foreshadows the rest of the series. Score one for efficiency…but it does something else too. Years after reading it the phrase “strange happenings in the world outside” stuck with me. The voice, the tone, the ominous atmosphere…these are established in the way the text is ordered and presented. The details come relentlessly, in long sentences that threaten to overwhelm the reader only to stop short. All that information could have been relayed in dialogue, and perhaps successfully so, but also work effectively as exposition.
Tolkien and Lovecraft each had a strong expository voice. I discovered both of these authors as a teenager, and while their subject matters differed, both captured my imagination. Lovecraft’s exposition was a heady blend of archaism and verbosity. There is a vocabulary that comes with his stories…words like eldritch and stygian sent me scurrying to my dictionary, and I’ve not forgotten them since. Tolkien painted a vivid landscape and culture to his world; it’s still the standard for the image of a high fantasy setting in my mind, and probably always will be.
Ultimately, Tolkien and Lovecraft were authors who successfully created a sense of weight and atmosphere through exposition. That doesn’t mean exposition is the best way to do this, or the only way; however, it shows that despite what the top ten lists of YouTube tell you, it’s more about how you use it than whether you use it.