21.27: The Expository Throttle

Introduction

0:00[SPEAKER_02]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_02]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.

0:15[SPEAKER_02]: Season 21, episode 27.

0:19[SPEAKER_02]: this is writing excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: The expository throttle. [SPEAKER_02]: Tools not rules. [SPEAKER_02]: Four writers buy writers. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Robinette. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Erin. [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm Howard. [SPEAKER_02]: And as you know, this podcast is called writing excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses is a fast-paced, okay. [SPEAKER_02]: So...

Exposition Basics

0:41[SPEAKER_02]: made and butler exposition so we know about exposition and usually when we are talking about exposition we are talking about it as a way to convey information and how to avoid boring the reader by putting it in the wrong spot or going on and on too long or telling them things that they already know and everybody in the scene knows. [SPEAKER_02]: What we're going to talk about now is what I love about exposition is that it is a secret tool for speeding up or slowing down a scene.

1:15[SPEAKER_02]: So I love exposition weirdly and I feel like exposition comes in a lot of different forms. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to give you the definition of it and then then we'll talk about how to use it for this speeding up or slowing down thing.

1:32[SPEAKER_02]: So exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters, etc. [SPEAKER_02]: to the audience or readers. [SPEAKER_02]: It's literal meaning is a showing forth.

1:44[SPEAKER_02]: But you have to spend words on it, and that means that when you need to slow things down, that you can just kind of introduce a little backstory. [SPEAKER_02]: If you want to speed things up, you can skip that.

2:04[SPEAKER_02]: Do you all ever use exposition in kind of a conscious way to slow things down or speed things up?

2:12[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I use exposition a lot in the course of 20 years of Schlok mercenary, and in many cases I used it.

2:24[SPEAKER_01]: I had to use it in order to tell a part of the story, but

2:30[SPEAKER_01]: in order to deploy it in a way that I want people to feel rewarded for it, I would also use it to tell a joke and in later books I got better at this and the exposition would tell a joke [SPEAKER_01]: and set up a joke that happens later so that people don't just feel rewarded at the time they read the exposition, they get rewarded later for having read it because now now there's another joke for them.

3:02[SPEAKER_01]: Did I use it for pacing? [SPEAKER_01]: Accidentally, yes, it because it it necessarily [SPEAKER_01]: slows things down, or forces you into, if you're talking about scene SQL format, where scene is where things happen and SQL is where we process. [SPEAKER_01]: Exposition often functions well in the SQL area, because even though you're being given a bunch of new information, you the reader are also now being able to process what happened in the previous chapter or the previous

3:38[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love this because that's one of the things that I will think about is like, where are my natural pause points? [SPEAKER_02]: Because those are places where I can put that because I want things to slow down a little bit anyway. [SPEAKER_02]: And so, since we're paused, I can take a moment to explain something to you.

3:56[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sometimes I think of it as like marination moments in the sense of marinating meat. [SPEAKER_00]: So it's like you've thrown a lot of spices and juices at your reader, hopefully not, you know, actually. [SPEAKER_00]: And then like this is the moment where I, it's my actually often my favorite points, which is where you kind of stop for a moment and let it all sink in. [SPEAKER_00]: And I find the way it slows the pace down, but it's also because the pace is slower and because the reader is spending a little more attention on it, a time to throw in my favorite and most like random spices.

4:35[SPEAKER_00]: My favorite interesting wordplay tricks and things that won't be noticed in the middle of like an action scene, but in a moment where you actually have time to think about the world, I can actually do really fun things with words and rhythm

4:51[SPEAKER_00]: in a fun way. [SPEAKER_01]: Speaking as someone who has recently leveled up a couple of times on his fried chicken game, the idea that I can't fry this chicken until I've brined this chicken. [SPEAKER_01]: That stays with me. [SPEAKER_01]: That's I cannot move on to the next bit. [SPEAKER_01]: This will not be good fried chicken until this is soaked in, until this is steeped, until the salt and the sugar and the spices have gotten in deep so that we can get to the next bit and it all works.

5:27[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and this is extending this metaphor until it breaks. [SPEAKER_02]: The reason that you're doing the brining is because it's serving a function and it is before the fast thing. [SPEAKER_02]: And that is one of the things that I think, you know, a failure mode when people are using exposition that they'll put it in the wrong spot where it's not serving a purpose. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not connecting to anything else. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not setting you up for what's coming next.

5:54[SPEAKER_00]: Some of it actually also has to do with order. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm now thinking about brining and frying way too much. [SPEAKER_01]: But like, if you've made myself hungry, I hope that I've done that to the rest. [SPEAKER_01]: Only fair that you're hungry too. [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm thinking like, if you went to somebody's like, you know, cook out. [SPEAKER_00]: And they were like, oh man, I forgot to Brian the chicken as I'm about to serve it to you. [SPEAKER_00]: Let me go do that right now. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to drop it back in. [SPEAKER_00]: You're like, wait, no, the time has passed. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like if you didn't Brian it already, please don't Brian it right now. [SPEAKER_02]: That's just going to be a soggy thing of sadness and cold and slimy.

6:26[SPEAKER_02]: That's going to be so bad. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so you want to let me tell you about, let me tell you about dry rub and syringes.

6:35[SPEAKER_00]: which is interesting, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

Using Exposition

6:53[SPEAKER_00]: Like luckily as a writer, you can actually go back and redo the recipe that we were working on. [SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of times people blame the Brian. [SPEAKER_00]: You blame the exposition. [SPEAKER_00]: You're like the Brian is bad. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, no, the time, the place that you did it was not the right place. [SPEAKER_00]: But all the spices and et cetera might be good. [SPEAKER_00]: It might just be that you need to pull back and do them at a time when it is the right time in the story to have them. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

7:20[SPEAKER_01]: recent recent movie. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, not recent when this airs. [SPEAKER_01]: Dave Boutista, Mila Jovevich, and it's sort of a fantasy sci-fi thing, and it begins with some voiceover narration, you know, I'm gonna tell you a story, and you're probably not gonna believe it, and there's a little bit of book ending, but there's a whole bunch of info dumping, and then [SPEAKER_01]: events start to happen and I realize you've told me things that the characters on screen are now telling me again just by acting and wearing costume and adopting these roles that chicken didn't need to be primed that I didn't need that information at all it was it was presented here and so you

8:16[SPEAKER_01]: the beginning of the story. [SPEAKER_01]: You slowed things way down right at the middle in a movie where the movie did this sort of movie where you really just want to kick it off with some action. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, there are also points where moving that piece of information earlier can really speed things up. [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I just read a book. [SPEAKER_02]: It's not out yet and I'm not sure it's going to be out by the time this airs. [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not going to mention it just in case. [SPEAKER_02]: But it had the line in it, like, everything is going along at a normal, normal pace, the character is dealing with things, everything is usual first person and we get this one line that's like, if I had known what he was going to mean to me later, I would never have gotten into that carriage.

9:04[SPEAKER_02]: and you're like, what? [SPEAKER_02]: And that's just, it's a very tiny piece of exposition. [SPEAKER_02]: Something bad is going to happen to this person late with this person later. [SPEAKER_02]: And it is, it reminds me of an aside in theater where the main character or one of the characters takes a moment to do a direct address to the audience. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's always to deliver something that is important. [SPEAKER_02]: It stops the action that's happening on stage when they do that aside. [SPEAKER_02]: But it does it to emphasize that moment.

9:36[SPEAKER_02]: And that, I think, is something that you can play with on the page. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's so cool. [SPEAKER_01]: Wow, she can ask a question when that happens. [SPEAKER_01]: does that accelerate the pace? [SPEAKER_01]: Or does that decelerate the pace? [SPEAKER_01]: Because for me, it accelerates the page turn. [SPEAKER_01]: I am now more hooked and I will actually engage myself to begin reading faster because you planted a hook and you're dragging me further into the story. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, so this is again, the tricky thing which is that pace intention are not the same thing.

10:11[SPEAKER_02]: You can have something that has a slower pace but is more tense and have something that is tense and like you can, yeah, there's this, they're not exactly the same thing although they overlap. [SPEAKER_02]: You're gonna, [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I was going to say one thing that I think people often struggle with is when to know when that aside. [SPEAKER_00]: When that piece of exposition is for the reader and when it is for you. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes that's because you have figured out something really cool in your research on the story, and you're like, wow, like I discovered all this cool stuff and I'm going to now like throw it in there because otherwise you will never know.

10:49[SPEAKER_00]: I complain about this a lot and probably should stop doing it in public,

10:55[SPEAKER_00]: which is market scenes which when done well are an amazing way to bring you through a lot of exposition about the world as a character goes from one market cart to the next. [SPEAKER_00]: I think for the failure mode of a market scene is that it feels like you came up with like 15 cultures in your fantasy world that you had to cut. [SPEAKER_00]: during your revisions and you were like dang it. [SPEAKER_00]: I really liked, you know, the Gleever Folgs, they were great and I mad my editor made me cut them.

11:26[SPEAKER_01]: So I will put them in the colorful tents and the good wagons. [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: They get this scene. [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: They'll be in the market. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll just stop and describe them. [SPEAKER_00]: They're not doing anything. [SPEAKER_00]: They're just there being observed. [SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like it slows things down, because you're like, why? [SPEAKER_00]: The Gleiber Fogs don't even have one of the stones of Rojisha. [SPEAKER_00]: They do not have Islam. [SPEAKER_00]: They do not. [SPEAKER_00]: And they're colorful wagons. [SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing but Brian.

11:51[SPEAKER_00]: What if what a sentence and some chicken. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to I'm just going to stop this exposition about these these people who do not exist and get to something important. [SPEAKER_02]: Boom. [SPEAKER_02]: Which is our break.

12:07[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back from the break. [SPEAKER_02]: Now, what else can we use exposition for besides making the readers wonder about random characters in the market? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, or how do we know that it's a moment, you know, when is it important to the story and when is it not? [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think one thing to think about when you're using, if you want to slow down, that's important. [SPEAKER_00]: But like you said Mary Robinette, it's important for the moment of the story.

12:37[SPEAKER_00]: It's important for the moment of the characters. [SPEAKER_00]: It exists within the life of that story where it is and not in the life of you, the writer. [SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes you end up having to cut those things later because you don't realize it. [SPEAKER_00]: But if it feels like it's slowing down too much, one thing to look at is, is every bit of this exposition need to be in this place, or is this a good moment for exposition, but I've done too much of it, or I've focused the reader in the wrong way. [SPEAKER_01]: If I want to, if I want to maintain high tension,

13:12[SPEAKER_01]: but slow the pace down. [SPEAKER_01]: I used this example last week, the three shakes chapter in Tom Clancy. [SPEAKER_01]: It's an excellent example of this because you are, they're very, very high-dension, huge questions about what happens next, and then we have a short chapter about physics, which is fantastically interesting, and it does not make anything better. [SPEAKER_01]: Everything you learn in that

13:40[SPEAKER_01]: sets up how bad things can actually get, and so the way the tool is applied is we have ratcheted up the tension while slowing the pace, which to me, and that's a great way to use the tool. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like you broaden the context. [SPEAKER_00]: Now you know more about how bad this thing is. [SPEAKER_00]: Like you now understand, you thought it was bad before, now you really know and now you're going to see it unfold. [SPEAKER_00]: And so you create that moment of your held breath becomes even deeper and more held.

14:14[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, one of the things that I look for, which I think is related to this is I look for places where I want to remove ambiguity or add emphasis and that's one of the things that Clancy does and that is like he adds emphasis to that there are other places where you know, like I don't know is it is it. [SPEAKER_02]: five gyms of Ruhieslow is a 12 gyms of Ruhieslow and there's some ambiguity there and so that's a place where you'd probably in a story you'd want to slow down a little bit and give that exposition but you don't want to do it in the middle of the the fight scene you want to make sure that we have that information before we get there.

14:51[SPEAKER_01]: the three-shakes chapter answers questions you didn't know you had and explain things in a way that yeah raises the tension makes matters worse. [SPEAKER_01]: You can also do the flip side of that by using exposition, you know, tensions high, using exposition to answer a couple of questions in ways that relieve the tension. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the exposition says this isn't actually going to be that bad.

15:19[SPEAKER_01]: Or it's going to be bad in a different way, or it's going to be bad, but it's going to be bad for somebody else. [SPEAKER_01]: And yes, again, you've thrown the brakes down. [SPEAKER_01]: You've mashed the brakes, you've slowed us down, but you've relieved the tension in doing so. [SPEAKER_01]: And there are good arguments for both for, you know, ratcheting the tension up and ratcheting it down while slowing the pace. [SPEAKER_02]: We've been talking a lot about placement of this, but I want to talk about even the we've got other episodes where we talk about how to actually do exposition.

15:53[SPEAKER_02]: I want to talk about one of the other tools of it as it relates to pace, which is the emotional response. [SPEAKER_02]: So, you've got a piece of information, you need to get it to the reader, this is the right place to put it, but it's still boring somehow and it still slows down sometimes. [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that you can do is have the character have this emotional response to it, which then causes the exposition itself to take on this additional weight so that the exposition actually causes things to cause shifts the pace.

16:24[SPEAKER_02]: It's no longer dull, it doesn't call attention to itself as in, [SPEAKER_02]: I have information, it causes you to be like, oh, this is important, and you sort of lean into it a little bit more. [SPEAKER_00]: I love that because I often think of distance as something that really affects pace. [SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of times, I often think of filtering words as something that can slow pace down. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's when you say, like, so-and-so, looked at such and such as opposed to just having them look at it directly, or, you know,

16:57[SPEAKER_00]: Susie thought I can't believe it's not butter as opposed to just like having her have that thought within the context of the scene. [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason that it's called filtering is it because it reminds you that you're sort of reading a story. [SPEAKER_00]: It gives you more layers between the action on the page and you the reader. [SPEAKER_00]: And what I think is interesting about that is it creates the distance slows it down. [SPEAKER_00]: And similarly, sometimes exposition can feel slow because it becomes more distance from character emotion.

17:27[SPEAKER_00]: If you stop like from the like, I'm desperately trying to do x to [SPEAKER_00]: you know before the bomb goes off like when they're still trying to figure it out then you slow down and actually explain the entire history of nuclear efficient not just what's going to happen in the moment but like it was originally like and here they 25 theories it's an interesting paper but we get so distant from the moment that we're in that it feels like it slows down and so if you want to keep the pace the closer you get

18:01[SPEAKER_01]: It's very important to recognize that the three-shakes chapter is told in a third-person omniscient.

18:08[SPEAKER_01]: There is no point to view character who can see these things. [SPEAKER_01]: The chapter could have been written as a discussion between a physics professor and a student talking in intellectual terms in hypothetical terms about some sort of an explosion that could have happened and then we could [SPEAKER_01]: the student reacting emotionally to the horror of, you know, wow, nuclear weapons, even worse than I thought they were. [SPEAKER_01]: In Andy Wears, the Martian, there is a lot, a lot of science, exposition, stuff, and it is in first person, and it is our main character explaining things to us,

18:54[SPEAKER_01]: by way of telling us why things got so bad for him or how he solved this problem. [SPEAKER_01]: And so his reaction to it, his voice tells us how we should feel about that exposition. [SPEAKER_01]: And so when you are doing exposition, yeah, you can have the omniscient, maybe kind of dry, you can have it delivered as part of a conversation, you can have it delivered

19:23[SPEAKER_01]: who is actively having emotions at you as they're describing it and all of those, all of those are aspects to how hard you are mashing on the break or the throttle with the pacing.

Conclusion and Homework

19:40[SPEAKER_02]: And with that, I think we should probably mash on the break right now and go to our homework. [SPEAKER_02]: Howard, I think you have our homework. [SPEAKER_01]: I do. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to lean into the food. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm so sorry. [SPEAKER_01]: I want you to look up a very complicated recipe and then in your best expository prose explain the cooking of this as if it is

20:18[SPEAKER_01]: Do it in a way that makes the reader angry.

20:25[SPEAKER_02]: This has been writing excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: Now go right.

20:32[SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_02]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Aaron Roberts and Howard Taylor. [SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. [SPEAKER_02]: For more information, visit writingexuses.com.