The Exposition Junkyard

Most stories have backstories that explain why the main story is happening to begin with. That’s how life is – there’s a history to everything, even little things (like why I decided I wanted pizza for dinner instead of chicken enchiladas). Some histories are intriguing, the kind you would actually want to know. Others (such as my pizza story) are of little interest to anyone, sometimes even the people involved.

With a good novel, you want a nice, clean-cut backstory. Easy to explain; easy to comprehend. Even with a complicated backstory, as most full-length novels include, you want it kept to a minimum of details. Otherwise, your audience will go crazy trying to figure it all out. Trying to decide how to tell your audience the backstory is the tricky part. And it’s an issue I struggled with in chapter two of my novella.

The easiest, most convenient way to fill in the audience is to just dump a load of information on them and hope they don’t crumble beneath it. As goes my favorite line in The Great Muppet Caper, "It's plot exposition. It has to go somewhere."

This happens most often when you’re writing a shorter story. You don’t have enough time to unravel the backstory slowly, as in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (which literally stretched the suspense over the entire novel). Maybe your audience needs to know right away what’s going on. And that’s when it turns into a monster and you start trying to dump it anywhere it will fit.

The favorite trick of every writer is to cover your tracks in a swamp of info infested dialogue, what I like to call the exposition junkyard. That, my friends, is where stories go to die. If you leave your backstory rotting there, your story will not be interesting to anybody but you (and possibly that close-knit group of friends who also have this problem in their novels and hope saying they like yours will get you to endorse theirs).

Allow me to give you an example of the exposition junkyard. Let’s say there’s been a murder involving royalty in one of my make believe country. That murder and all the politics involved are key to the things that happen during the rest of the novel. But I’m not sure where and when I should inform the audience about what’s going on. So I cram the important pieces of plot exposition into a dialogue section, hoping that the dialogue will disguise the information and make it digestible. Here’s how it turns out:

“It certainly is a beautiful day, Jane.”

“Yes. If only it wasn’t also the anniversary of my beloved uncle’s murder. He died four years ago. But the whole kingdom is still mourning his death, even the peasants.”

“I remember hearing about it. That poor man was stabbed ten times. It’s no wonder your father, the Grand Duke, won’t allow any suitors inside his tenth-generation castle without the royal guard nearby.”

“It’s the war between Sulsbury and Dellenvere that has me worried. My uncle’s death made the people of Sulsbury hate us, sworn allies of the Dellenvere people – a race that has degenerated too much to still keep an alliance with us, the people of Orlan.”

“Never mind, Jane. We will forget all of this tonight at the ball, where your sweet, innocent, beautiful sixteen-year-old sister, Alice, will at last join you after two years of waiting for her coming of age.”

“Yes. Poor Alice. Father has kept her behind palace walls since my uncle’s death, worrying about her safety. And because of this, the people of Orlan begin to fear him too much. A wise ruler should not invoke that much fear in his people – unless he wishes to be like the Earl of Sulsbury, who rules by fear alone and whose empire is built on the horrid practice of slavery.”

…What’s wrong with this method? Succinctly put, the author is insulting the audience’s intelligence. How? By expecting them to believe this could possibly be a real conversation. It’s quite obvious from the beginning that both Jane and the unnamed friend understand the situation. So if they were to talk about this situation, they likely wouldn’t go through and remind each other of all the individual details. A keen audience will quickly find it boring, amateurish, and – well, boring.

Look at that same passage written differently, still in dialogue, but with more care given to how it was written.

“It certainly is a beautiful day, Jane.”

“Yes. I only wish it wasn’t also an anniversary.”

“If you’re referring to your uncle’s murder, then I’ll say what I’ve said a dozen times – you have to let it go. That was four years ago.”

“The rest of the realm is still mourning; what makes me any different?”

“You are the daughter of the Grand Duke. You are nobility. Can you pretend to have forgotten what weight that position holds?”

“My father doesn’t seem to care too much about my position. He only worries – about me, about Alice, about our whole family.”

“It isn’t that bad, Jane.”

“He won’t even allow any suitors inside this castle without the royal guard nearby.”

“Well, betrayal has a tendency to make leaders worry. After all, Jane, your uncle wasn’t just murdered; he was murdered by a spy of Sulsbury. And now that that horrid Earl of Sulsbury has decided to blame us for his war with those degenerate Dellenvere people – well, what leader in your father’s position wouldn’t worry”

“I still don’t understand why we have an alliance with Dellenvere. Maybe if we didn’t, Father wouldn’t have to worry as much.”

“Never mind, Jane. You need to forget all of this for tonight at least. Alice will never forgive you if you wear a sour face to her coming out.”

“Dear Alice. She’s gotten so beautiful, I can hardly believe she’s still just sixteen.”

Notice the difference? In this section, the dialogue is FLUENT – i.e., it moves along at a decent pace and doesn’t feel all broken up with choppy sentences. The information was given, but selectively. Instead of dumping it all in, I carefully chose which pieces were most important and then wrote it out as two people would actually talk about it. It still isn’t perfect; there’s ways I could improve it. But for a starting point, it isn’t bad.

Now that the foundation has been set, I can include the other pieces (the Earl’s practice of slavery, the fact that Jane’s people are called the Orlan, Alice’s life behind castle walls) as filler material for other conversations or even for narrative later on. Splitting up the information not only keeps the audience from a severe headache, but also allows the other characters in the story to have a key role in exposition.

Well, there it is, folks – the first step in avoiding the exposition junkyard. Now I’m off to see if I can apply this post to that novella of mine…

Sincerely,

            Yours Truly