Anyone who's ever sat through death-by-PowerPoint knows that having endless gobs of faceless information unceremoniously crammed into your brain makes a handy sleep aid in a pinch. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely to be something you'd like to find yourself doing in a novel intended for the entertainment or enrichment of others.
And yet so many authors do.
Exposition is almost uniformly more fun to write than it is to read. The proportions of this particular discrepancy are frighteningly disparate: the more the author enjoys writing it, generally the less fun it is to read, likely because it keeps going long past the point where the reader stops caring.
That is because the writer's brain is threatening to explode. Don't be too quick to judge: you don't know what you're capable of writing until there's more within your mind than you can reasonably jot down in the time it takes for it to vanish forever into nothing.
It's a classic case of "curse this mortal shell and its slow-typing fingers."
Exposition tends to be where this all comes to a head. I'm not talking about the simple, subtle quirks of a given character's past that crop up from time to time throughout the work, I'm talking about the oppressively-thick preface wherein many authors metamorphose into somewhat narcissistic scholars of their own particular world.
Imagine, if you will, someone who has just seen the greatest movie they believe they will ever see. They love this film, they love the people who made it, right down to the best boy grip, and most of all, they love telling other people how much they love it. But no matter their devotion, their retelling rarely amounts to more than "and then it turns out his father is the angel of death! How ironic is that?"
(We'll get into the use of "irony" later. There isn't enough Internet for that discussion here.)
The point is that many authors are precisely like this fabled fanboy: they want to tell you everything about this world, they want to tell you all the various and intricate pieces that they have researched and/or designed and how neatly they all ricochet into a veritable kaleidoscope of beautiful interactions.
And they want to tell you all about it right now.
For a writer, the preface is generally an afterthought. It's the piece you add in when your test readers go "huh?" and ask a million questions about why the governor had to sentence the hero to have his hands cut off for writing in public, because you didn't make clear that in this world, literature is a sin and knowledge is a coveted possession of the aristocracy.
The preface or similar narrative blurbs serve to fill in the cracks. It creates a tepid baseline from which your reader can begin to interpret the world. It focuses the lens, so to speak. It's also an extremely dangerous tool in the wrong hands.
Much like PowerPoint.
The trouble with exposition is not knowing what to include, but where to stop, where to leave the gaps that will whet your reader's appetite for mystery and let your story unfold its own surprises without leaving your audience in a total fog.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
Personally, you could write a text book (and many authors seem to attempt exactly that) and still have it come off well if you give it the proper wrapping. If you're going to do early exposition, especially as a preface, then the how is easily twice as important as the what.
Voice.
In a preface, there is no dialog, no setting, nothing on which to build...but there is a character. Your narrator needn't (arguably, shouldn't) be a faceless self-insertion dully doling out the details on the world into which your reader is considering plunging themselves.
Like a lecture on economic theory, voice makes the difference between rampant somnolence and rapt attention. Give your "narrator" his or her own linguistic quirks to spice up the otherwise bland explanations of what ought to be a compelling world.
Kitsch gimmicks like a pirate's overdone "Arrrr's" are generally too much too soon, but that's not to say they're out of the question. If your chief antagonist is a serpent-blooded priest with a speech impediment, doubling or tripling a few S's within the initial narrative gives it an entirely new perspective than a faceless regurgitator.
Having one of your characters do the initial, out-of-sequence exposition offers an opportunity for warped perspective and half-truths that give your reader a false sense of understanding; one that can be broken to great effect later in the work when the plot or the hero violates this seeming "rule."
That said, be careful of which character you pick: a hero introducing his own story often looks narcissistic, as does an introduction by a romantic lead. If there's a character (living or dead) within the work who is already something of a historian, loremaster or scholar, it can be a wonderful introduction to their craft. Alternatively, bards and storytellers, gurus and wise men make spectacular selections.
As do villains.
But beyond simply re-skinning a base monologue, it can be much more fluid to map exposition over familiar elements of our own world as they exist within the work. Newsprint is a campy selection, but I have recently seen it done to spectacular effect, so don't rule anything out.
A character walking a lonely street with posters detailing the backdrop of the setting is one popular method in both film and fiction: the character themself is busy with their regular morning routine, paying no mind to the immediate world around him and the quite-obvious signs that hint at what happened in the days, months or years before.
Like a large impact crater with a green "Now Entering Chicago" sign hanging at an odd angle nearby.
The character's own dismissal can be of chief importance here: as an element of the world, it's unlikely they'll be as aware of the shocking implications of these all-too-familiar features of their world, which brings home exactly how long the situation has been like it is, or how terrifying it is that no one seems to realize how bad it all is.
Another popular method, and arguably one of the best depending on the nature of your hero, is to have the hero themselves be a complete neophyte to the setting in question. The examples abound in urban fantasy, where "normal" people suddenly find themselves in supernatural circumstances (see: Harry Potter) and have to adjust quickly to an entirely new set of rules, giving the audience themselves a necessary cross-section of a new and different setting.
The two methods of in-line exposition can be combined to great effect, with an unaffected denizen of the new setting calmly leading a wide-eyed newcomer through an average day-in-the-life without understanding why the latter is so blown away by the perfectly reasonable concept of flying sheep.
That said, in-line exposition is not without its pitfalls: not only can such scenes draw out longer than any preface, they can seem unreasonable within the context of the work. In addition, subtlety and symbols rely heavily on the reader's preconceptions, which can lead to confusion without a more specific explanation.
Sometimes, the best way to say it is simply, with just enough literary flair to keep it interesting. Such tidbits should be short (no more than a page or two at the most) to avoid overloading the reader, but they can save you miles of text spent weaving awkward patterns around a "subtle" implication of the same basic, well-known information about the world.
Naturally, many works, even in fantasy and science fiction, have no need for a preface. Exposition is easily done piece by piece within the context of a work without it showing up in lump sums early on and risking choking the readership. But, depending on your level of departure from normalcy (or the obscurity of your subject matter), they can be invaluable to keeping your readership engaged rather than scratching their collective heads.
Just be careful it doesn't turn into a dissertation.
A good rule of thumb is this: imagine your entire preface (if it takes the form of one) is being read to you by someone you do not know in an empty subway car on your ride home late at night. At about the point where you would seriously consider getting up and walking to the next car even if the speaker is still openly addressing you because the discomfort of staying far outweighs the need to be polite, it's probably time to stop.
If instead you're using an in-line, backdrop exposition, think of it instead like following a stranger's directions while driving to a friend's new house late at night. By the time you'd be so sick of empty country back roads that you turn around and head home (or at least back towards some place with streetlights) before you start hearing the banjos playing, it's time to take a break and let your hero breathe.
As to which method works best, take a long look at your world. Write down the elements of the setting that you want the reader to know up front, the framework that you can then subtly hint at later through social or environmental departures from the norm. Outline only, there's no need for in-depth details, since you yourself already know them.
Out to the right of each, try to write at least one symbol, object or scene that could highlight it without having to state it openly (or a scene that might lead a newcomer to address the weirdness directly). If there are any gaps, consider a preface. If you can't easily draw a line through the symbols you've collected, or if you find yourself repeating the same rote over and over again, consider a preface instead.
If, however, the elements you're looking to grant fit into a neat pattern such that they might all be found on the same street, or in the headlines of the local paper, or even collected in a brief TV news segment without seeming too disjoint, an in-line exposition may be a smoother, more welcome exposure to the same information without having to step outside the current of the work to explain it.
There is a balance between textbook and total mystery, and it's often closer to the textbook side than we as writers would like to believe. The lines between the elements of your work will always be clearer to you than they are to total strangers, even total strangers who think much the way you do. If all else fails, err on the side of too much information.
Or, ideally, undercut the information entirely to something only the later part of the book reveals, and then have your test readership tell you at exactly what point they got so lost that they had to set the book aside. The gaps will start to fill themselves in from there. It's sort of like taking a flute well out of tune to find the proper pitch again.
Of course, if a second flute player shows up, you'll just have to shoot one of them.
Getting your reader the information they need up front doesn't have to be a chore for either of you. Just make sure to treat it like part of the story, even if it seems like it's standing alone. Every bit of text between the covers has a voice whether you put one there intentionally or not. If yours sounds like your 3rd-grade math teacher, the effects are likely to be the same, no matter how interesting the world you're talking about is.
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