Writing Worlds: Exposition
One of the trickiest things in writing is getting the lore and rules of your world across to the reader or viewer in a natural way. If it’s mishandled, it can become an info dump that’s a slog to get through. At worst, it’s an incoherent mass of worthless information that doesn’t apply to anything. So, how can we make sure we’re giving our audience the right information at the right time?
Only Tell Your Audience As Much as They Need to Know
In the opening for Avatar: the Last Airbender, we are given a basic understanding of the magic system, and one special person who can use all the magic. He disappeared, and now there’s a war. When we cut to the first scene of Sokka and Katara fishing in the South Pole, we know as much as needed for this scene to work. We know there’s magic, a war is going on, and the special person is missing. Sokka then somewhat clumsily explains that magic is unique to a culture, and it’s so commonplace that he’s dismissive of it as being an interesting topic. We also get to see magic for the first time as Katara does a very basic demonstration. Then they stumble upon Aang frozen in an iceberg, and the glowing eyes makes it pretty clear he’s going to be important. Finally, we meet our main antagonists who are hunting the very special person. Everything established in the intro has played a role in the story. Compare this to the Shaymalan movie, and we’re told too much. Katara sets up at the start of the movie that Toi and La have come to the mortal world, and goes on a whole tirade about Spirits, but it’s not relevant to the first scene. We’re being given exposition that is not immediately relevant, and so it’s clunky and excessive.
Let’s use another example: Ba Sing Se. It’s name dropped quite a few times in season 1. However, other that it being implied to be the capital and the site of Iroh’s greatest military defeat, we are told nothing else about Ba Sing Se before the Gaang arrives there. We know nothing of its ring structure, the dai li, lake laogai, the ju dees, or the Earth King being a puppet. About the only thing we sort of know is that its walls are impressive. We only know as much as is needed. Ba Sing Se is not immediately important so it’s only being name dropped as an important location for later, because a big important city would be important in-world too.
Compare this to RWBY’s intro. Salem tells the origins of Dust, and how mankind came from dust. That mankind learned to use dust to fight off the Grimm. She then talks to Ozpin who asks her about the value of a single light from a smaller, more honest soul. This seems fine enough. Except, most of what we were just told wasn’t helpful. Ruby doesn’t really fight with dust unlike Weiss, we don’t see Grimm until we reach the Emerald Forest, and we don’t know how priceless or valuable dust is to know whether Torchwick’s robbery of a Dust shop is closer to being like robbing a jewelry store, robbing an ammo cache, robbing a bank, or robbing a general store. Ruby gets excited about the appearance of a huntress, but we have no idea what a huntress is. The intro, if it wanted to be stronger, should have focused more on the soul aspect, fleshing out that souls manifest shields and powers, and that brave warriors with strong spirits fight back against the darkness that lurks in this world. We have a basic explanation of auras, semblances, and what a huntress is, even if it’s still somewhat vague. But the audience goes into the opening scene understanding that the important thing in this scene is not the dust, its the strength and purity of Ruby’s spirit or soul, and her willingness to combat the darkness that lurks in this world, be it villains or grimm alike. The opening scene introduces the audience to what huntresses do, and so the exposition should inform the audience what a huntress is and what they do.
People Focus on the Unusual while Ignoring the Mundane
Catelyn Stark never explicitly says there is not a Godswood at Riverrun where she grew up. She doesn’t have to. All she has to say is that the Godswood is creepy and she’s never gotten used to it. She also highlights that Ned had a Sept built for her, letting the audience know that Ned and others in the region had no reason for a sept to exist until a southern woman married into the noble family. I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to spend my days reflecting on when the Vatican was constructed, the founding of Jamestown, or how my family came to settle in the area I now live. These things are just aspects of the normal world I live in. We don’t tend to reflect on the normal, but rather to fixate on the abnormal. Think of it like this: how often do you think about any one of your neighbors on a given day? Probably not a lot unless you’re well-acquainted and friends. Otherwise, you probably pay little attention when you see them outside. If you were narrating your day as you head to work and spot your neighbor watering their garden, you might spot that you notice it, but wouldn’t think much of it. But if you saw them dragging a really oddly shaped bag across their lawn toward the backyard, that suddenly seems more suspicious. Suddenly, you might spend your entire commute thinking about your neighbor. When did they move in? How have they presented themselves to yourself and the neighborhood thusfar? You wouldn’t normally think about it, but something happened to put your neighbor on your mind. That’s a great way to lead into exposition. Something has happened to warrant your protagonist’s attention, and now they’re actively reflecting on what they know about the thing that caught their attention.
Make the Audience Want Exposition
I’ve heard it said that one of the best ways to get exposition across is to make it a mystery. Make your readers ask questions, and then reward your readers with the exposition that answers these questions. This is why lore-heavy shows can drop information bombshells and have fans react positively and begging for more. The story left gaps in the lore, which left the audience pining to figure out how the pieces fit together. So, when the story connects the dots, it’s an incredible catharsis. Let’s use Pearl from Steven Universe as our example. For all of season 1, all we really knew about Pearl was that she was the fussy intellectual perfectionist of the mom squad, she’s a little overprotective, and she had feelings for Rose. It wasn’t until the second to last episode of the season that we got the first nugget of Pearl’s true past, as Jasper dismisses her as “some lost, defective pearl”, which was also one of the first indications in the show that there were multiple copies of a single gem type, as up until that point, we’d never seen two of one gem type before. So, in Back to the Barn, when Peridot dismisses Pearl as being just a servant drone and then spells out for the audience that pearls are a slave race that serve other gems, this was a payoff for Jasper’s earlier remark. But the show paces itself perfectly here, as just as one dangling plot thread is addressed to satiate the desire to know more, Peridot also remarks that Pearl looks really fancy, and literally hands the audience the big juicy question: who did Pearl belong to? For the next 3 seasons, this was one of the biggest aspects of Pearl’s character, and every time a new important gem showed up, the audience speculated whether or not this gem or this type of gem could be Pearl’s owner, with Morganite being one of the better suggestions. If you can get your audience begging to know more, they’ll much more happily sit through exposition. And it doesn’t even have to be long. Jasper’s entire relevance to Pearl is literally one throw-away line, and Peridot shares most of the lore about pearls on homeworld in just a minute or two of dialogue. You don’t need to lock your audience in a room and rant about your world to them. Make them want to know more on their own. Just don’t pull a RWBY and have to release a companion book to answer all the lore and worldbuilding you forgot to explain in the actual story. Like what a huntress is. The thing that the main characters are training to become. Or what the fuck is a semblance, which is their main super powers. Or just wait and explain a core worldbuilding mechanic in the 5th installment. That won’t irritate your audience whatsoever.
Express Exposition Through Dialogue
When writing a scene, I like to always do the rough draft in a script format because in a script format, I can’t have a character think about the important thing that I want the reader to know. While narration exposition is doable, as I discuss with Catelyn’s thoughts on the Godswood and the Sept, sometimes it’s better to handicap yourself to not rely too heavily on it and force yourself to get across exposition through dialogue. In Game of Thrones, when the royal procession arrives, Arya excitedly exposits about Jamie being the queen’s brother, the hound, and impertinently asking where the imp is, referring to Tyrion. This might seem egregious, but I think it’s honestly flawless. If you’ve ever talked to a small child, this is exactly the way they talk. They point out every little thing and talk eagerly about it, even when it’s rude or impolite to. Robert and Ned also make it clear they haven’t seen each other in a long time, as Robert has never met Bran, who is 7 in the books and 10 in the show. Robert also immediately asks to go see the crypt so he can pay his respects to Leanna. Again, we get masterful exposition through dialogue. Robert bemoans that Leanna was buried in a dark and dreary crypt instead of some idyllic hilltop, he asserts that he murders someone every night in his dreams, and also implies that the later drunken whoremongering sides to him that we see later are all shallow attempts to fill the void in his heart when he lost Leanna Stark. Arya is more clumsy in her delivery of exposition, but she’s also a child. Arya is used to establish characters, likely people she’s heard about but never seen, which is why she’s so excited. Meanwhile, Sansa has met these people before and just wants Arya to stop annoying her, and shushes her excessive talking. Let’s compare this good exposition to bad exposition. In the Once Upon a Time episode The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the fairytale counterpart of Sheriff Graham enters a tavern with his pet wolf, and a bunch of background extras talk very loudly amongst themselves about how the Huntsman was supposedly raised by wolves, and cries when he kills. Not only is this clunky and unnatural because they are gossiping about him while he’s in the room and able to hear them asking about his backstory, but we the audience have already seen the huntsman cry after killing a deer. So the people saying he cries when he kills things is redundant exposition. It is noise. But now for the gif in question I used to represent this part: Avatar episode 12: The Storm. One of, if not the best episode in the entire award-winning series. And Iroh spends a good 80%+ of it committing the worst exposition sin there is. He sits a bunch of characters down and explains the plot. In any lesser show, this would be a death blow to the episode, but Avatar is no lesser show. So, how come Avatar can commit this egregious writing sin? A few reasons. Firstly, Iroh was present for the backstory. He is an eyewitness who knows the truth. Secondly, the topic he is covering is a painful and traumatic memory for Zuko, something he wouldn’t freely share with people. Zuko would never tell anyone about this backstory, so the showrunners need Iroh to tell the crew and the audience the backstory. Thirdly, they asked. The crew, and the audience, wants to know why catching the Avatar matters so much, and what crawled up Zuko’s butt and died. Daddy issues, that’s what. And finally, it’s thematically relevant. The Storm is an exposition dump. That is its purpose as an episode. But it doesn’t feel like it because of pacing, characterization, and most importantly, parallels. This episode makes it clear that Zuko and Aang are foils. Despite being on opposing sides, they come from similar backgrounds, made big mistakes, and are seeking redemption for their actions.
No, I’m not done shitting on RWBY yet. For those of you not invested in seeing how this train wreck will end: fireball, blackhole, or nuclear ice age, let me introduce you to Jaune Arc. He’s the descendant of multiple generations of huntsman and heroes. And he doesn’t know what Aura is. A basic component to living in his world, and more importantly, for going in the job field he’s at Beacon Academy to train for. Jaune doesn’t know basic shit that is vital to living in his world. I know he forged his transcripts and he’s at anime warrior hogwarts, but there is a line between being dumb and getting low grades on history homework and not knowing a key aspect of his world. Your character can be dumb, they can be as dense as my self-doubt. But for the love of Cthulhu, they should know they’re in an action anime. Unless you are writing an Isekai or a Hidden Magical World like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter, you have no excuse for a main character to be this stupid. This is literally the world and culture they were raised in. They should know what is “normal” for their world. This is like if Ron had no idea Hogwarts was going to sort him into one of four houses, or he had no knowledge of the virtues of Gryffindor despite literally every one of his older brothers and both of his parents also being sorted into Gryffindor. And Ron’s still not going to be getting high marks in his classwork anytime soon. Ron is of average intelligence at best, at least when it comes to his grades. But at least he knows the basic crap everyone in his story knows about how the world works.
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