There’s a sense in storytelling advice that exposition is an awkward necessity you have to get through to make your story work. It’s presented as a kind of anti-plot material, something that takes screen time away from the all important “moving the story forward” and quickly leads to the audience disengaging. If you’re a bit clever, you can sneakily disguise your exposition by taking to heart mantras like “show, don’t tell” to wrap exposition in a sugar-pill of eventiness in the hope that your audience will briefly mistake it for more plot.
And, like, I get it. There is some mind-numbingly terrible clunky exposition in the world. Still, I’ve found myself wondering if this view of exposition and story isn’t entirely backwards.
To give some context, I got on to this train of thought while watching this video from an excellent playlist on different aspects of screenwriting.
I’d put off watching the video because exposition didn’t sound like a very interesting topic. And in fact I don’t entirely agree with the framing of the video, which still mostly views exposition as something to be minimised and mitigated.
What stood out to me in the video was the idea that good exposition isn’t peripheral to the story, it’s what drives the story forward. The soundbite he used is “attack with exposition”- deploy facts in such a way that they shake your characters’ understanding of their world, block them from their goals, shut down their possible lines of action and perhaps open up new ones. Seen this way, exposition is not anti-story, it is the heart of the story.
I’m tempted to go one step further. At the root of the “exposition gets in the way of the story” framing is the assumption that there’s this thing called a good story that’s what we’re really after when we watch a film or whatever. Everything else in the film should be in the service of telling a good story. Fair enough. So what is a good story, why bother with it? At this point you probably hear something muttered about conflict and character arcs, or maybe our innate humanity and storytelling genetics. To me, it’s never felt especially convincing.
Let’s reverse the idea that you should include just enough exposition to make your story work. Instead, let’s say that a good story should be crafted in such a way that makes the truth at it’s heart feel explosive.
Suddenly, exposition isn’t something you add to a story to make it work. It’s the animating principle that everything else is built around.
What excites me about this view is that it suggests a very different approach to writing. In trying to create a story, perhaps the best approach is not to think about characters, conflict, or even the values at stake. Could it instead be to consider the important truths - real or fictional - that you want to share with the audience, and set about uncovering a setting and a narrative where these truths can appear with their full explosive force, shattering lives, shattering worlds, and offering redemption? Is that the magic of storytelling, to transform what could have been mere exposition into revelation?