“Show, don’t tell.” Narration is telling; exposition is showing. In trying to learn more about how to use exposition well in writing, I’ve found two perspectives particularly helpful. First, Jennifer Paros, in an essay, “The Ol’ ‘Show Don’t Tell’ Thing” counsels that authors should allow their reader to “enter a world, instead of just hearing about it.” Granted, this is just a different way to say “show, don’t tell” but in a way that might stick better.

Second, several authors refer to the Hemingway Iceberg principle. Hemingway described it this way:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

The challenge here, of course, is knowing what to include and what to omit. I will admit I probably tend to give too much detail and too little leading the reader gently to draw their own conclusions.

Given below are some examples, some good and some less good, of the use of exposition as food for thought.

Exposition vs Back Story

Exposition is part of a play or work of fiction in which the background to the main conflict is introduced.

Backstory is history or background especially created for a fictional character. You may have created a rich history and profile for your characters as part of the character’s backstory. A character’s backstory may include details from a previous work in a series. Elements of your character’s backstory may be appropriate for inclusion as exposition, but not all of it will necessarily be included in your story.

Why is exposition important?

• Establish tone and voice.

Kira Jane Buxton introduces her readers to her protagonist, S.T., and her plot with imagery that hints at the themes that are to come: lots of creatures, the importance of trees, and a unique airborne perspective. Rather than just telling the reader what’s unfolding, she leaves it to the reader to begin to tease it out.

I should have known something was dangerously wrong long before I did. How do you miss something so critical? There were signs, signs that were slow as sap, that amber lava that swallows up a disease-kissed evergreen. Slow as a rattlesnake as it bleeds toward you, painting the grass with belly scales. But sometimes you only see the signs once you’re on the highest branch of realization. – Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton

• Relate circumstances important to advancing the story.

Neil Gaiman introduces his setting so simply: “It was only a duck pond.” It doesn’t take long for the reader to realize there is so much more to that duck pond. 

It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm. It wasn’t very big. – The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel, Neil Gaiman

• Or not. Establish a feint, a misdirection, an expectation.

Chuck Wendig begins his book Wanderers with an introduction to the Sakamoto comet. He could have simply stated the fact, “Yumiko Sakamoto discovered a comet.” But Wendig’s “She discovered it, but she really didn’t mean to…” description leaves the reader, along with characters in the story, to determine what role – if any – the comet has in the unfolding events.  

The woman who discovered the comet, Yumiko Sakamoto, age twenty-eight, was an amateur astronomer in Okayama Prefecture, in the town of Kurashiki. She found it on a lark, looking instead for an entirely different comet – a comet that was expected to strike Jupiter. – Wanderers, Chuck Wendig

• Explain relationships among characters.
• Provide context for a character’s actions, reactions, and behavior.

In the first scene of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh, the protagonist Mildred Hayes rents advertising space on three billboards that she uses to put the local police on notice for their failure to find her daughter’s killer. The opening scene conveys volumes about Mildred.  

• Critical for world building, for example, in scifi and fantasy.

Techniques for Adding Exposition

• Include in narrative.
• Include via dialogue.
• Include via internal monologue.
• Start in the past.
• Start in the present, then flashback in time.
• Go back and forth in time.
• Insert memories.
• Shift perspective.
• Include footnotes.
• In screenplays, use title cards (think Star Wars).

Effective use of exposition – Do’s

• Include only what is needed: ground the scene or provide the reader context to understand what’s happening.
• Use exposition in moderation – if you’re describing or explaining something in the story, the action has stopped.
• Tie exposition to the conflict in your story to help ensure that you’re not introducing extraneous background that will deflect from your plot.
• Balance exposition and narration with action and imagery.
• Aim for Hemingway’s iceberg – just enough information that the reader can tease out for themselves what’s important about your characters, scenes, and plot.

Betsy provided an excellent example – the beginning of Twisted Twenty Six, by Janet Evonovich:

Some men enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever.  Jimmy Rosolli did this to my Grandma Mazur. Not forever, but for an afternoon last week when he married her in the casino at Atlantis and dropped dead forty-five minutes later.

So far as I know, the trip to the Bahamas was a last-minute decision, and the marriage was even more unplanned.  I guess they were just a couple of wild-and-crazy seniors having a moment.

My name is Stephanie Plum. I’m five seven with shoulder-length brown hair that curls whether I want it to or not. I’ve inherited a good metabolism from my mother’s Hungarian side of the family, so I can eat cheeseburgers and Haagen-Dazs and still button my jeans. The hair and a bunch of rude hand gestures I get from my father’s Italian ancestry. – Twisted Twenty Six, Janet Evonovich

I agree with Betsy: “In three paragraphs we know the main character is feisty, can eat anything, has lots of personality in her family and has a problem on her hands with Grandma Mazjur. The description of her out of control hair and rude gestures indicates she probably flies by the seat of her pants most of the time. Even if you haven’t read the prior 25 books, you get a clear idea of who you are dealing with.” Evonovich could have just told the reader those things: My name is Stephanie Plum. My father was Italian. My grandmother liked to travel… but we wouldn’t get the delightful color and context that she provided in her introduction through exposition.

Challenges to effective use of exposition – Don’ts

• Starting a story or chapter with too much exposition, burying the start of action under pages of background.

See Danee’s Dilemma, Chapter 1 Before and After, below. Diana originally started her story with a lot of backstory, and seemed like she was trying to tell the whole story in the first few paragraphs. She revised her first chapter to jump right into the action, introducing her protagonist and a more indirect introduction to some of the challenges Danee will face with respect to her relationship to her grandma.  

DANEE’S DILEMMA, CHAPTER 1, BEFORE Grandma Talley’s haunting words clutter my mind. The words she’d blurted out two years ago while standing over her beloved Arthur’s deathbed. It’s difficult to focus on what Ms. Stevens is saying. The rain starts beating on the windows and brings me back to the here and now. Skinny, nervous Ms. Stevens, my Psycho/Social nursing instructor, is pacing in front of the class. “Students, I’m giving you a journal assignment for this quarter.” I sit up straighter.  I’m a first year nursing student working on my associate degree. I didn’t always want to be a nurse—not until after I’d watched my comatose Grandpa neglected in a narrow nursing home bed with dull, metal side rails. It had been in the month of October, the time of year when the cool, dry air sucks the moisture out of the leaves causing them to lose their grip and flutter to the ground. It had been the time of year when I decided I wanted to become a nurse instead of an elementary school teacher. I’d make a better nurse than those nursing home nurses, I told myself. They didn’t care. I found out later they were just too overworked to care.    I think about that day in October–I think about it a lot. Grandma Sara and I’d sat for hours in plastic patio chairs next to Grandpa’s nursing home bed watching his almost lifeless body linger. Grandma had worn her full-length denim skirt, a bright blue turtleneck sweater, white ankle socks, and Reebok tennis shoes. Her short, chunky arm rested across Grandpa’s sunken chest.

DANEE’S DILEMMA, CHAPTER 1, AFTER We turn off Highway 12 onto the main boulevard of Ocean Waves, Washington, a small coastal town. “It’s good to be back,” I say. Yet coming home without Mama here makes my heart ache. Tyler lets out a big sigh. “Remind me not to do an all-night drive again. If our paychecks hadn’t been late, we could have gotten here in plenty of time before WSU’s registration ends today. It’s a wonder we didn’t crash.” “Yeah, that’s a miracle.” I sip the last of my energy drink. “I did enjoy spending the summer in warm, sunny California, though.” Tyler gives me a quick glance with narrowed eyes and then focuses again on the road as he drives. “Yeah, you had it good enjoying the cool breeze while serving tables outside. You weren’t stuck in the kitchen flipping greasy burgers all day. Several times I felt like I’d pass out from the heat.” My body tenses. Oh, geez. Is he trying to make me feel guilty? “I would have traded you places, except the boss wanted me working in the waterfront section.” “Because you’re prettier than me.” “What?” I try to think of something to change the subject before our discussion gets heated. Then Tyler pats my hand. “Thanks.” “Thanks?” I ask.   “For being my friend. When most of the kids wouldn’t talk to me at school, you always did.” That’s kind of him to say. I feel warm inside. “I consider you my best friend.” I look over at Tyler. He blushes and straightens his slender physique. He’s wearing the same tank top and shorts from when we left California last evening. “Tyler,” I shriek when noticing his plum-colored fingernails. His head whips around. The car swerves. “What?” “You still have polish on. I’m pretty sure Californians don’t think much of it when men wear that stuff, but people up here can be cruel.” He raises his fingers off the steering wheel, and his eyes widen as he stares at his nails. “Oh, man. I’ve got to get this junk off before I get home. My parents can’t see this. Do you have some remover?” “Nope. You don’t?” I ask him. “I guess I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead. I’ll stop at the Mini Mart. Will you run in and buy some?” he begs. “I don’t want anyone seeing me.” A bit later, with polish-remover fumes overpowering the air inside the car, we pull onto Bass Road where I live with my grandparents. They raised me and are wonderful, loving people, except a little on the overprotective side. They were against my trip with Tyler even though I’m eighteen, a new high school graduate, and legally an adult. I think they’re afraid of losing me like they lost Mama. I hated going against their wishes, but I needed some breathing room. “Good luck, Danee,” Tyler hollers after dumping me and my luggage off at my grandparents’ cedar-shingled house at the edge of Goose Lake. He backs his beat-up Subaru station wagon out the gravel driveway and tears away like he saw a ghost.

• Introducing all your characters and plot points in chapter one.

Betsy Dickinson described an example of an author trying to introduce all the characters and all the story conflicts in the first chapter. “I picked a book from my free Amazon Prime books that looked like a great suspense story. The setting of the first chapter was a neighborhood party. The author introduced all the characters and their full backstories (including parenthesis – an average of two or three per page) in the first chapter. There was too much information and I had no clue as to who her main characters were. The way it looked, there were at least 10 people I would need to keep track of. I never read chapter 2. There were hints that perhaps someone was having an affair and that couples were lying to each other, but not enough about their actions to help me understand where the plot might go.”

“For my pea-brain [Editor’s note: Betsy does NOT have a pea brain.] I like characters to be introduced as the story progresses. I don’t want to have to work to remember who they are and why they are important to the story. They have to mean something to the main characters and to the plot. I prefer the suspense of trying to figure out why characters are doing what they do. Giving it to me all at once gives me no reason to continue reading.”

• Starting a story or chapter in the middle of the action, followed by pages of background.
• Not enough background: your characters are suspended in time, space, and circumstance, leaving your readers untethered.

Just one example of many from my WIP, Rash, helpfully pointed out by my dear critique partners. I drop my characters – and my readers – in Vienna, which I say is rocking, but don’t provide any exposition (or description for that matter) for the readers to come to that conclusion themselves.

“Vienna looks like a rocking city,” Kayden said. Once they got checked into their hotel, the four took to the streets to explore the city.

“I may have to put this on my list to come back and visit again.” Piper said.

Sadly, it doesn’t get better for paragraphs and paragraphs. Learn from my shortcomings: use exposition to enable your readers to enter the world you’ve imagined for them rather than just telling them how great it is.

• Adding background that doesn’t contribute to the character’s goals, motivations, or conflicts and doesn’t help advance the story.
• Resist the temptation to drop in tidbits at the point you realize you need them; makes it seem contrived.

I found this book, Missing Sister, a debut novel by author Elle Marr. It starts off well and is generally well written, but when the protagonist travels to Paris to see what she can find out about her sister’s death, Marr used this line “Thanks to a trip to France …” as a mechanism to tell the reader that her character was familiar with Montmartre. It was a small thing, but it seemed contrived to me.

I set down my duffel bag before the austere wooden entrance to Angela’s building. Thanks to a trip to France we took as a family, I recall Montmartre was the center of Parisian street are about a century ago. Artists splay in chairs beside colorful tableaus or black-and-white photographs every five feet. – Missing Sister, by Elle Marr

• Avoid relating information among your characters that they would already know as a way to convey background to the reader.

References, Additional Information

1. Lexico. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/exposition
2. Jennifer Paros: The Ol’ “Show Don’t Tell” Thing; https://www.authormagazine.org/archives/2015/2/1/the-ol-show-dont-tell-thing
3. Alan Rinzler: Ask the editor: Tips for blending in the backstory; February 8, 2010. https://alanrinzler.com/2010/02/ask-the-editor-tips-for-blending-in-the-backstory
4. Mellanie Szereto: Backstory vs. Exposition; January 10, 2018. https://contemporaryromance.org/2018/01/backstory-vs-exposition
5. Harvey Chapman: Handling the Exposition of a Story. https://www.novel-writing-help.com/exposition-of-a-story.html
6. Julia Houston: World Building: How to Cut Down on Exposition; January 22, 2018. https://proofreadingpal.com/proofreading-pulse/writing-fiction/world-building-how-to-cut-down-on-exposition