Ah, this is where you input your destination-Īustin: Wait a minute… Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, presumably I can go visit my frozen self, but, if I’m still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the 90’s and traveled back to… oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.īasil: I suggest you don’t worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself. Luckily, we too have developed a time-travel device to transport you back to the sixties. Sadly, even this device is showing its age, and readers are wise to the trick of throwing in a character just for some shoddy expositional dialogue, à la Austin Powers’ ‘Basil Exposition’.īasil: We have evidence that Doctor Evil has developed a time machine, and has traveled back to the year 1969. Few things shatter that illusion quicker than the author popping their head ’round the door to give them a quick rundown of the salient facts.įor many authors, the fallback is a character who’s there to explain the world (think Morpheus in his armchair, explaining the Matrix). Nowadays, readers prefer realism – they want to suspend their disbelief and treat the world of the story as ‘real’.
It used to be that you could have an entire prologue in which a narrator explained everything the reader needed to know. First, though, we have to discuss what you should be trying to do. That’s why, in this article, I’ll be looking at the most effective ways to write exposition.
#Story exposition how to#
Most important of all, you’ll have to learn how to explain things to the reader without them realizing you’re doing it at all. ‘Exposition’ is the part of the story which explains or establishes things for the reader: who your characters are, what they look like, what they’re doing, what they hope to achieve, and myriad details about the world in which they live. This may mean also explaining things to your characters (for example, ‘magic is real’), but it might mean sharing things the characters already know (for example, that two of them are siblings).Įvery story requires a bit of exposition, but if you’re writing about an alien world, a place where magic exists, or just a group of characters with a complicated history of betrayal and lies, you’re going to have to get good at explaining what’s going on.
It’s an unfair reaction, especially when there are so many things to explain. Too much or too little and the reader will notice straightaway, rolling their eyes at your inability to explain things directly. Exposition is one of those horrible parts of writing that you have to get exactly right.