How to best do Exposition?

[Saelune]

Watching Cinemasins' Everything Wrong with Warcraft video, and a major gripe he has, and well, alot of people, in many things, is exposition.

Exposition is describing the world, the background, the characters and their relations.

The problem that often comes up is we, as viewers new to a setting that the characters would be well informed on, we need that information. If characters just come and go talking realistically, we may be left in the dark. However, it can be very jarring or just silly when everyone painstakingly elaborates on everything.

So how do you elaborate the world without everyone sounding silly? Im focusing mostly on movies, but also any non-interactive visual media, like TV as well.

Games and books can deal with exposition differently, but if its relevant, Id like to hear it too.

 

[JoJo]

A common technique when introducing a world that is unfamiliar to the viewer is to have a protagonist who is inexperienced in that world. Think your farm boy, your hobbit from the Shire, your Arthur Dent. This way they can naturally ask questions about the world to more experienced characters, and we can learn about the world as they do. Of course ideally there shouldn't be too much information at any one time, the viewer will get bored and a sense of mystery makes things much more interesting.

 

[CaitSeith]

Avoid exposition dumps, or try to give them the simultaneous goal of developing the characters or moving the plot forward. Try "show; don't tell". You can draw parallels between the fictional world and our real world just with the visuals (one image is worth 1,000 words) so the setting becomes more self-explanatory. Choose carefully what you need to expose and when it is necessary. Is it necessary to explain in detail where the magic in your world come from? Or being in a fantasy world is a good enough explanation? Not everything needs to be spelled out. Good exposition focus in what makes the world unique and how it is relevant to the plot and the characters.

 

[happyninja42]

I think a lot of exposition could be left out of most standard scifi/fantasy movies. I mean, they use so many common, ubiquitous tropes, do they really need to explain things? Especially with visual media, where you can use commonly understood symbols and presentations to pack in a lot of backstory, you don't really need to delve into the minutia.

I'll use Warcraft, since you used it yourself. We don't really need to know the details of Draenor, you can easily show that their world is dying, you know, with images of a royally fucked world. Bodies of animals and people scattered around, carrion animals feasting on the remains. People looking like refugees, etc. Maybe have a narration of "Our world is dying, we have to find a new home, Guldan, our mystic, says he has found a new world for us, but what is waiting for us on the other side? And at what cost, will we get there?"

boom, 2 sentences, maybe 3, and you've established the motivation for the horde. "World A is fucked, let's move to World B"

You then show Guldan doing his obviously necromantic magic, draining the life from the victims to fuel the portal, and boom, the audience understands the basics. Everything else can be presented visually really, at least for that story element.

I think the main issue Warcraft had, was the fact that the movie expositioned at the audience, and then doubled down with the same exposition to the other people in the movie. Another thing I found funny about Warcraft, was the way they presented the Kirin Tor. They kept talking about Kadghar's involvement with them, as if he was a Nazi Youth or something. He kept saying "I'm not with them anymore! I renounced my vows!" and people would be suspicious of him simply for being part of them. But they never explained why the society would shun Kirin Tor like that.

Eh, kind of rambling there.

Let's see, general tips on how to handle the exposition well. As Jojo mentioned, doing it in small chunks is important. Small, digestible bits, directly related to what is being presented is, I think, key. Don't exposition about some faction, and then not show them for 25 more minutes of screen time.

 

[Fox12]

The trick is to weave exposition into the narrative in a way that feels organic and real. It's definitely a trickier skill to learn, but I would argue that it's one of the most important. The thing is, the audience doesn't need to know everything about your fantasy world from the beginning. You can still be feeding the audience important back knowledge near the end of the story.

Another thing to remember is that you don't need to tell your audience everything. Your audience isn't stupid. For instance, you don't have to tell you audiance that your protagonist is living in a dictatorship. Show them cameras on every corner, propaganda poster on the walls, and black surveillance trucks, and they'll figure it out for themselves. No one has to say a word of exposition, and the main characters can all act like this is totally normal, which itself tells the audience something.

 

[Vanilla ISIS]

In a movie, it's good to have a distraction.
Something to watch while the characters talk.
For example, in this scene from Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones is having an expository conversation while Will Smith is doing some CGI slapstick in the background to distract us.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I like when it's delivered naturally through conversation. Feels more organic this way than simply having someone explain it to the viewer/reader. I like the way the Malazan series does it. You get almost no exposition and the characters simply interact with each other in ways that make sense for the world. A character will explain something to another every now and then, but only when it seems natural. Consequently, this makes the first book rather difficult to get into for some people. I didn't find it all that hard, but I seem to be in the minority in that regard.

 

[Baffle]

I hate it when someone goes into a lot of detail describing a character the first time we meet them in a book. Like... the plot has to just sit down and have a breather while we're told about someone's unusually broad shoulders and ancient-looking tarnished nosering. Books would be much better if they just put pictures of each character in an appendix (the section of the book, not the organ).

 

[hermes]

In TV and movies, avoid at all cost having characters talk about things that everyone in the world should know. Remove every line that starts with "I thought X was so and so... and worked as such and such". That is the worst kind of exposition. I would much rather have a voiceover scene at the beginning of the movie that having the characters talk about the way the world works like they were talking to a clueless tourist.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The trick is to weave exposition into the narrative in a way that feels organic and real. It's definitely a trickier skill to learn, but I would argue that it's one of the most important. The thing is, the audience doesn't need to know everything about your fantasy world from the beginning. You can still be feeding the audience important back knowledge near the end of the story.

Another thing to remember is that you don't need to tell your audience everything. Your audience isn't stupid. For instance, you don't have to tell you audiance that your protagonist is living in a dictatorship. Show them cameras on every corner, propaganda poster on the walls, and black surveillance trucks, and they'll figure it out for themselves. No one has to say a word of exposition, and the main characters can all act like this is totally normal, which itself tells the audience something.

Not so sure. "Show, don't tell" is common advice, and for good reasons, but telling instead of showing always is going to work, in the sense that the information will be got across. It's not that the audience might be too stupid to see what is being shown, but that what is seen and what is intended are often not the same thing, hence zillions of weird fan theories.

In a movie, it's good to have a distraction.
Something to watch while the characters talk.
For example, in this scene from Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones is having an expository conversation while Will Smith is doing some CGI slapstick in the background to distract us.

Second that. I was going to use an example form Doctor Who were, shortly after the computer starts giving a report in a fairly dull voice, a monster turns up and starts shooting the place up, and nobody tells the computer to stop talking.

 

[sageoftruth]

Timing can be useful in this case. It requires a bit of judgment regarding how you expect the audience to feel. Basically, you'd want to deliver the exposition at a time when the audience cares to hear about it. That's usually why it's a bad idea to frontload exposition from the start.

If it's a character's backstory, give the audience time to get to know the person, and time to learn to care about him or her to the point where they will want to learn more about the person. Perhaps have the character do some things that don't make sense and then deliver some backstory right when the audience is wondering why the character has been acting funny.

If it's about the world itself, it may be necessary to frontload some of it, but I agree with Fox12 that you don't need to tell them everything. Leave some mysteries to be revealed when they seem most relevant to the current plot. In The Matrix, Neo and the audience had no idea why these men in suits were chasing him around his office, or who was giving him instructions over the phone. By the time he'd taken the red pill, there were so many questions that it was a relief to hear Morpheus explain everything.

 

[Fox12]

The trick is to weave exposition into the narrative in a way that feels organic and real. It's definitely a trickier skill to learn, but I would argue that it's one of the most important. The thing is, the audience doesn't need to know everything about your fantasy world from the beginning. You can still be feeding the audience important back knowledge near the end of the story.

Another thing to remember is that you don't need to tell your audience everything. Your audience isn't stupid. For instance, you don't have to tell you audiance that your protagonist is living in a dictatorship. Show them cameras on every corner, propaganda poster on the walls, and black surveillance trucks, and they'll figure it out for themselves. No one has to say a word of exposition, and the main characters can all act like this is totally normal, which itself tells the audience something.

Not so sure. "Show, don't tell" is common advice, and for good reasons, but telling instead of showing always is going to work, in the sense that the information will be got across. It's not that the audience might be too stupid to see what is being shown, but that what is seen and what is intended are often not the same thing, hence zillions of weird fan theories.

In a movie, it's good to have a distraction.
Something to watch while the characters talk.
For example, in this scene from Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones is having an expository conversation while Will Smith is doing some CGI slapstick in the background to distract us.

Second that. I was going to use an example form Doctor Who were, shortly after the computer starts giving a report in a fairly dull voice, a monster turns up and starts shooting the place up, and nobody tells the computer to stop talking.

It's not that you can't have expository dialogue, it's that it needs to be written in a realistic way. The Men in Black example is perfect. The dialogue is something that makes perfect sense within the world, and it sounds like something real people would say. Bad expository dialogue conveys information, but it was clearly forced into the scene, because you realize that normal people would never talk this way in real life. An example of bad exposition would be Interstellar, where a scientist explains a wormhole to the protagonist, who should already know what a wormhole is. It would have made more sense for him to explain it to his 12 year old daughter. As for narrators, they can be used to great effect, but in film they're almost always used poorly as a lazy way to convey information to the audience. I've always argued that, since film is a visual medium, it should convey as much information visually as it can. This gives the film more time to focus on the main ideas of the story.

 

[maninahat]

A lot of good points have been made so far, the one I was told was that if you want to introduce an important plot point early on for later use, disguise it as a joke. The audience is familiar with Chekhov's Gun; even if they don't know the writing device has a name, they can easily recognize when something is being set up for later. Everything in a movie or story is meant to have a purpose for being there, and if it isn't immediately obvious what that purpose is when a new object is exposited about, everyone knows it will become apparent later. Hence why you introduce the gun as a punch line to a joke; people will assume your alligator shooting car serves the purpose of making us laugh, and not being a vital thing later on.

If you want to see exposition badly done, read The Invisible Library. The book is end to end exposition dumps, redundant information and needless hand holding. Apparently the writer is terrified of the prospect of you figuring things out for yourself, so she will chime in with a few paragraphs telling you what subtext you might have missed.

Essentially, we need to only be told as much as is necessary to paint a picture in our minds. If its going to take rafts of explanatory notes to describe that picture, you as a writer maybe need to make it simpler.

 

[Bobular]

I hate it when someone goes into a lot of detail describing a character the first time we meet them in a book. Like... the plot has to just sit down and have a breather while we're told about someone's unusually broad shoulders and ancient-looking tarnished nosering. Books would be much better if they just put pictures of each character in an appendix (the section of the book, not the organ).

I second this. If your description of a character takes a whole page your doing it wrong, if every character is described like that then I'm going to stop reading.

An example of bad exposition is a Song of Fire & Ice. Martin is awesome at world building, but sometimes it drags on for far to long, I don't care to know about every knight's banner and will have forgotten it by the time I turn the page, oh wait there's more banners on this page too.

 

[Igor-Rowan]

Let me try to explain:

THIS is exposition led to the absolute extreme, characters don't have motivation or backstories, they have profiles that must be read out loud all at once so the audince gets to know, but does not gets to care. In the first few minutes, we get scrolling text and narration to set up the world. There are other ways to weave in the narrative, use something like the opening of the show that uses images to give impact to the words, or better yet, don't tell them anything. Just show a normal pair of kids, then throw in the mystical elements slowly, but surely, since it's a picture use the visual part since "an image is worth thousand words", flashbacks and camerawork are your friends here. You have to stabilish the lore, but feels it might be hard to keep track, keep it short and to the punch.

I'll use this example:

Spoiler

First, there is text to give some clarity, but it's not overused, notice how the words sync with the actions on-screen, then halfway, the narration stops and each girl is introduced using the music alone, and finally the main event of the show: supervillains and defeating them. When you're a kid, you'll certainly notice this almost musical way of introducing the show and the characters, when you're adult, you can break it down about why it works the way it does and why it's brilliant as an opening since you might see this show for the first time.