Fantasy and sci-fi are legendary for exposition dumps. See, worldbuilding and its ilk is often quite important to the story, even to the point of being a part of the pitch to get the reader interested, but too often it imitates oil in water, separating out from the rest of the story. The result, for most people, is a sudden lump of Something Different, of writing that doesn’t have character or plot or much interest at all, a sudden intrusion of a history textbook into the novel that was previously quite enjoyable. As authors, we want to avoid this, but the question is: “How? How do we do exposition without kicking the reader in the back of the knees, holding him at gunpoint as we recite, and incidentally advertising to him that the rest of the book isn’t worth the effort?”

The solutions come in all shapes and sizes. Some work better for different authors and different styles. I have my own answers, answers I’ll be explaining today, but they won’t work for everybody. My solution is to some extent dependent on the POV I usually adopt (See these articles for more on that topic)- a third person near perspective which jumps characters only at delineated scene breaks. They’ll translate well to first-person, the other perspective I use, but I can’t vouch for others. Second person in particular will likely have issues here.

Generic Solutions

Before we look at my particular preferences, it behooves us to consider a few common methods used to solve this across fiction. The first, of course, is just to work really hard to make the info-dump interesting, combined with trimming it down as much as possible. Here humor may be helpful, if the tone of the book suits. This trimming down can mean taking the information down to its bare-bones, as Powers does semi-regularly in the latter two books of his Vickery and Castine series. While I don’t find his sum-ups there to be ideal, they do accomplish the job: giving the reader just enough context to get the reference to a previous book’s plot, assuming he hasn’t read it already, without overly slowing the narrative.

The second and very popular possibility is to make the main character an outsider or an initiate. This has two benefits. On the one hand, you get to explain the world naturalistically, as the character learning about the world. You can even incorporate misconceptions into this learning, allowing for more twists and turns as the character trips up against their misconceptions, misconceptions the reader shared (this is a legitimate way of lying to the reader). On the other hand, many parts of the world can remain hidden, both the parts that you know but want hidden for plot reasons and the parts you just haven’t gotten around to deciding on. Writers are all too often bad with numbers and economic-social-military realism, and this allows you to hide the fact you don’t trust your research-and-calculate abilities to give plausible population numbers for your fictional empire.

The downsides of this approach are significant, though. The naturalistic incorporation of exposition too often fails to keep it from very obviously being exposition- exposition delivered in an in-story classroom can be just as boring as when it’s dumped directly onto the reader. If he didn’t have a reason to care about it when it was offered directly, he’s not going to care about it when it’s given indirectly. The novice nature of the protagonist also limits the stories that can be told, besides bringing up the tight-rope of making him competent enough to matter but not so competent the reader can’t believe he’s new to the world around him. Use it if it fits your story, but don’t rely on it every time.

Another solution, one my perspective preferences bar me from using, is to have the narrator be an individual character explaining story elements to the reader. The Magician’s Nephew and The Chronicles of Narnia in general use this technique effectively. The narrator has the style and tone of a storyteller by a fireside, telling a tale to his children, and so the explanations flow naturally in the tone and environment of the story and its fourth-wall-straddling narrator.

My Solution

The problem, in my eyes, is that exposition isn’t the story part of the story. It’s not plot; it’s not character; it’s not emotion; it’s not empathy; it’s not dialogue; it’s not action. It is setting, but if the appeal of a story was its setting, we’d all be reading RPG source-books, and the most interesting parts of The Lord of the Rings would be the language appendices. That’s not to say setting can’t be interesting (I’ve certainly read some massive info dumps, and I can think of some works I’ve read with fascination that were all worldbuilding). It’s just not what we look for in stories. That being the problem, the solution seemed simple to me: incorporate the exposition’s information into other elements of the story. The character’s thoughts, descriptions, and dialogue are particularly fertile ground for this.

The goal here is not to make expository dialogue or character-thinks-explanation-at-audience or thinly disguised versions of the above. That sort of pseudo-naturalistic exposition is less a solution to the problem, more of a displacement. The exposition is still there, still causing an issue. What I want is to incorporate it in dialogue that’s also doing characterization, plot-conflict, and all the others things dialogue should do. Characterization in particular harmonizes well with incidental exposition, as character immersed in a world will naturally refer to it as they think, speak, and act out their character.

Let’s work with an example, using a superpower idea that I doubt will ever see the light of day¹ in an actual story. The ‘exposition’ version, summarized, is the following:

“David had tested his abilities extensively over the past few weeks- stealthily, for the one form, and at home for the other. In his own body, he could tell he was stronger, faster, and more durable than before, and that by a fair margin. The two alternate forms he could assume, however, took that to another level. The first warped him into something ghoulish, humanoid but occupying the uncanny valley, a little ogre-ish, with limbs too long and nails that cut rather than bending when he pressed them. In that form, he could slip through the shadows unseen. The other was more pleasant, at least, if more conspicuous by lack of enhanced stealth: a man of exceptional comeliness, full-garbed in early medieval armaments, with an innate certainty of how to wield them. He much preferred that second form; if nothing else, he did not have to struggle with hunger every time he smelled or saw another human being, as he did in his ghoul-form.”

This is a fairly elaborate power, with bits I left off for the sake of brevity and because the protagonist wouldn’t have a way of knowing them yet. Note how even here characterization is peeking through. Even if not wanting to be a cannibal is an unexceptional trait, the method he’s taken for testing them speaks to his character, just a little. We can make this better, though. In my preferred method, all these pieces of information will get spread out across the narrative, each being linked to an event, a thought, or a bit of dialogue. If the setting or backstory information is important, as much of this is likely to be, opportunities to do so won’t take long to appear.

For example:

• He goes out to confront the local supervillain; we enter the scene in medias res, as he prepares to ambush his enemy.
  • David peered out of his concealment, glad for once of this form’s enhanced senses, even if it meant he had to deal with salivating every time he saw a passer-by. He’d have one chance only, and he was lucky to have that much. Well, not luck, not precisely. He grinned.
• • This segment could have included a more direct allusion to his ability to hide in shadows, but I judged that too much information, liable to make this segment exposition-heavy. In the actual story, pacing and other factors will limit the amount of information you can convey this way without alerting the reader to the exposition.
  • It also uses a sensory description- ‘salivating’- rather than the more clinical terminology of the previous expository method. While my method does not have this advantage integrally, I do believe it makes it easier to use sensory descriptions than an info-dump would.

• He disengages briefly from the resultant fight, managing to duck into the lee of a nearby warehouse to consider his options.
  • I don’t have much time. He could switch to his other form, the transformation was near instant, but he needed the preternatural ability to melt into the shadows this malformed body possessed. Another solution, then, and he cast around for an idea….
• • Note how the consideration of his options leads naturally into considering his abilities, though not comprehensively covering him. At this point in the scene, if I were to write it in full, his shadow ability would have played very little role, being alluded to at best- Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, if somewhat over-simplified, have it right in saying we can’t solve a problem with a tool the reader doesn’t already know about. By informing the read of this tool, though, I’ve added it to my toolbelt.
  • Besides introducing another form (a second at least, possibly a third if his base form has been exhibited already), this segment implies some of the differences of ability between the two.

• Some time later, he considers how to present himself to a possible ally.
  • Riban would be expecting the ghoul he’d fought Gerhart as, David knew, but he still flinched from going out on a social occasion looking like an ogre, complete with its thick, pallid skin, inhumanly gangly arms, and calcified nails. He tried the other form on to compare it, but it gave no comfort. It was his face, that he could tell, just as the ogre’s face spoke of him, but the warrior made it somehow beautiful- an impression his gold-filleted armor and patterned sword did not dissuade.
  • Here the character self-describes, but he self-describes not to tell the reader what he looks like (even if that’s part of why I’m having him say it) but to reason out the character decision he’s making: do I go out looking utterly hideous or as somebody recognizable? I hint too at a deeper question of his: his disturbance that the monster reflects his own features, albeit distorted, and that he does not live up to the idealization which the warrior presents.

For all that I advocate this method, I must give caution. Sometimes flat-out description is necessary. If the information is needed early in the story, you may just have to bite the bullet. Also, if the perspective you’ve adopted allows it, using the viewpoint of other character can fill in necessary details the protagonist alone would never reach. The main character of my current story really doesn’t consider how terrifying he must look from the outside, being an obviously inhuman man of exceptional stature and even more exceptional skill in combat, but the deuteragonist absolutely does notice this fact, given their initially inimical relationship.

In Sum….

This method of stuffing exposition inside of other elements of the story (especially, as noted, characterization) is not perfect, nor am I perfect in applying the ideas. If properly used, though, it provides a way to eliminate much of the info-dumping that could easily plague a story while making its information serve a second purpose immediately, not just in its re-appearance in the plot later on. With some ingenuity, it allows us to smooth the reader’s path while slipping him the worldbuilding and backstory unawares, setting everything up so that when each bit of information bears fruit he can appreciate it properly, instead of viewing it as a belated justification for spending more time than he wanted slogging through backstory.²

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – The mechanics don’t jive with my usual setting preferences for a long-form story. Honestly, they’re more adapted for a superhero or urban fantasy story.

2 – It also serves to allay my not quite justified distaste for directly informing the reader of such elements. Incidentally, footnotes can be useful. In my stories, I’ve rarely used footnotes, but my currently-being-drafted project includes a fair number. I use them to provide translations of certain terms, a few bits of context to elucidate cultural elements I made up for the story, and (in current plans) for pronunciation of certain words I made up. Beware of over-doing the footnotes, though. A fair number of readers will be irritated with you if you overload the book with them; many will just plain ignore the whole affair.