21.27: The Expository Throttle

Maid and butler exposition

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writing excuses. Season 21, episode 27.

0:19This is Writing Excuses, the expository throttle. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And as you know, this podcast is called Writing Excuses. Writing Excuses is a fast-paced... Okay, so... Maid and butler exposition. So we know about exposition, and usually when we are talking about exposition,

0:49we 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. 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. So, I love exposition, weirdly, and I feel like exposition comes in a lot of different forms.

1:23I'm going to give you the definition of it, and then we'll talk about how to use it for this speeding up or slowing down thing. So, exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters, etc. to the audience or readers. Its literal meaning is a showing forth. 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.

1:59If you want to speed things up, you can skip that. Do you all ever use exposition in kind of a conscious way to slow things down or speed things up? Okay, I use exposition a lot in the course of 20 years of schlock mercenary. And in many cases, I used it—I had to use it in order to tell a part of the story. But in order to deploy it in a way that—I want people to feel rewarded for it.

2:36I would also use it to tell a joke. And in later books, I got better at this. And the exposition would tell a joke 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 there's another joke for them. Did I use it for pacing? Accidentally, yes.

3:06Because it necessarily slows things down or forces you into—if you're talking about scene-sequel format, where scene is where things happen and sequel is where we process. Exposition often functions well in the sequel 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 scene.

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

3:56Sometimes I think of it as like marination moments in the sense of marinating meat. So, it's like you've thrown a lot of spices and juices at your reader. Hopefully not, you know, actually. And then, like, this is the moment where I—and this might actually be often my favorite points, which is where you kind of stop for a moment and let it all sink in. And I find the way it slows the pace down, but it's also, because the pace is slower

4:27and because the reader is spending a little more attention on it, a time to throw in my favorite most, like, random spices, 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 and focus on a page. In a fun way. Speaking as someone who has recently leveled up a couple of times on his fried chicken game,

4:59the idea that I can't fry this chicken until I've brined this chicken, that stays with me. That's—I cannot move on to the next bit. 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. Well, and this is—extending this metaphor until it breaks.

5:31The reason that you're doing the brining is because it's serving a function and it is before the fast thing. 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. It's not connecting to anything else. It's not setting you up for what's coming next. Some of that actually also has to do with order. I'm now thinking about brining and frying way too much. But, like, if you— I've made myself hungry. I hope that I've done that to the rest.

6:03Only fair that you're hungry, too. But I'm thinking, like, if you went to somebody's, like, you know, cookout, and they were like, oh, man, I forgot to brine the chicken as I'm about to serve it to you. Let me go do that right now. I'm going to drop it back in. You're like, wait, no, the time has passed. Like, if you didn't brine it already, please don't brine it right now. That's just going to be a soggy thing of sadness and cold and slimy. That's going to be so bad. Yeah. Let me tell you about dry rub and syringes.

6:35Which is interesting. No, don't. Don't. Actually, don't. Don't tell me about that. But I think, like, a lot of that is sometimes when it feels like, you know, this is the— I have accidentally created soggy sadness, you think, as you write. Oh, no. And you don't have any syringes handy. Like, luckily, as a writer, you can actually go back and redo the recipe that you were working on. And a lot of times people blame the brine. You blame the exposition. You're like, the brine is bad. It's like, no, the time, the place that you did it was not the right place.

7:09Yeah. But all the spices, et cetera, might be good. 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 that time. There was a recent movie—well, not recent when this airs—Dave Bautista, Mila Jovovich. And it's sort of a fantasy sci-fi thing, and it begins with some voiceover narration. You know, I'm going to tell you a story, and you're probably not going to believe it.

7:41And there's a little bit of bookending, but there's a whole bunch of info dumping. And then 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 brined. That I didn't need that information at all. It was presented here, and so you unnecessarily delayed the beginning of the story.

8:17You slowed things way down right at the middle in a movie where—this sort of movie where you really just want to kick it off with some action. Yeah. And at the same time, there are also points where moving that piece of information earlier can really speed things up. Like, I just read a book. It's not out yet. And I'm not sure it's going to be out by the time this airs, so I'm not going to mention it just in case. But it had the line in it, like, everything is going along at a normal pace.

8:50A 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. And you're like, what? And that's just—it's a very tiny piece of exposition. Something bad is going to happen to this person later. 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.

9:25And it's always to deliver something that is important. It stops the action that's happening on stage when they do that aside. But it does it to emphasize that moment. And that, I think, is something that you can play with on the page. And it's so cool. Well, I was just going to ask a question. When that happens, does that accelerate the pace or does that decelerate the pace? Because for me, it accelerates the page turn.

9:55I'm now more hooked and I will actually engage myself to begin reading faster. Because you've planted a hook and you're dragging me further into the story. Well, so this is—this is, again, the tricky thing, which is that pace and tension are not the same thing. 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. You were going to— Well, I was going to say, like, one thing that I think people often struggle with is when to know when that aside, when that piece of exposition is for the reader and when it is for you.

10:35Yes. 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'll never know. I complain about this a lot and probably should stop doing it in public, but not today. Risotto? 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.

11:09I 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 during your revisions and you were like, dang it, I really liked, you know, the Gleiberfolgs. They were great and I'm mad my editor made me cut them. So I will put them— They have the colorful tents and the good wagons. Exactly. So they get this scene. Exactly. They'll be in the market and I'll just stop and describe them. They're not doing anything. They're just there being observed and it feels like it slows things down because you're like, why—

11:41The Gleiberfolgs don't even have one of the stones of Rohesha. They do not have one. Roheshla. They do not. In their colorful wagons, there's nothing but brine. What a sentence. And some chicken. I'm just going to stop this exposition about these people who do not exist and get to something important. Boom. Which is our break.

12:06I love fried chicken and I thought I was pretty good at making it, but sometimes it just didn't come out right. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. The solution was a thermometer. It sounds obvious, I know, but starting the frying at the correct temperature is not the secret. The secret is understanding how the oil changes temperature when the chicken goes into it and how long it takes to come back up. The more chicken, the more shocked the oil is and the longer it'll take to reheat. And you can't really see that without a thermometer. And even then, you can't really use the thermometer's numbers until you know what they mean.

12:40Thomas Keller explained all that to me in Cooking Techniques 2, Meats, Stocks, and Sauces, Episode 5, exclusively available on Masterclass. There were a dozen different things in there I didn't know but needed to, but the big one was what the numbers mean and why they're so important to the home chef. See, in a commercial kitchen, the massive fryer pots don't get shocked much, and there are fancy computer controls keeping the oil in the right temperature range. At home, well, you have to ride your little fryer with a steady hand and a weather eye on the thermometer.

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Placement and narrative tension

17:32Welcome back from the break. Now, what else can we use exposition for besides making the readers wonder about random characters in the market? Yeah. Or how do we know that it's a moment? Right. You know, when is it important to the story and when is it not? And so I think one thing to think about when you're using, if you want to slow down, that's important. But like you said, Mary Robinette, it's important for the moment of the story.

18:05It's important for the moment of the characters. It exists within the life of that story where it is and not in the life of you, the writer. And sometimes you end up having to cut those things later because you don't realize it. 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 focused the reader in the wrong way? If I want to, if I want to maintain high tension, but slow the pace down, I used this example last week, the Three Shakes chapter in Tom Clancy.

18:49This is an excellent example of this because you are, they're very, very high tension, 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. Everything you learn in that chapter 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,

19:21which to me, that's a great way to use the tool. It's like you broaden the context. Now you know more about how bad this thing is. Like you now understand, you thought it was bad before, now you really know. And now you're going to see it unfold. And so you create that moment of your held breath becomes even deeper and more held. 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 in that is like he adds emphasis to that.

19:55There are other places where, you know, it's like, I don't know, is it five gems of Rohisla? Is it 12 gems of Rohisla? 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 fight scene. You want to make sure that we have that information before we get there. The Three Shakes chapter answers questions you didn't know you had and explains things in a way that, yeah, raises the tension, makes matters worse.

20:31You can also do the flip side of that by using exposition, you know, tension's high, using exposition to answer a couple of questions in ways that relieve the tension. You know, the exposition says this isn't actually going to be that bad, 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. And yes, again, you've thrown the brakes down, you know, you've mashed the brakes, you've slowed us down, but you've relieved the tension in doing so.

21:02And there are good arguments for both, for, you know, ratcheting the tension up and ratcheting it down while slowing the pace.

Emotional response and distance

21:10We've been talking a lot about placement of this, but I want to talk about, even though we've got other episodes where we talk about, like, how to actually do exposition, I want to talk about one of the other tools of it as it relates to pace, which is the emotional response. So when 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. 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, shifts the pace.

21:52It's no longer dull. It doesn't call attention to itself as in like, I have information. It causes you to be like, oh, this is important. And you sort of lean into it a little bit more. I love that because I often think of distance as something that really affects pace. So a lot of times I often think of filtering words as something that can slow pace down. 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.

22:24Or, you know, 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. And the reason that it's called filtering is because it reminds you that you're sort of reading a story. It gives you more layers between the action on the page and you, the reader. And what I think is interesting about that is it creates the distance, slows it down. And similarly, sometimes exposition can feel slow because it becomes more distanced from character emotion.

22:55If you stop like from the like, I'm desperately trying to do X to, 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 fission. Not just what's going to happen in the moment, but like, it was originally like, and here are the 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, I think a lot of times the faster that pace feels.

23:30It's very important to recognize that the Three Shakes chapter is told in third person omniscient. There is no point of view character who can see these things. 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 have had the student reacting emotionally to the horror of, you know, wow, nuclear weapons are even worse than I thought they were.

24:05In Andy Weir's 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 by way of telling us why things got so bad for him or how he solved this problem. And so his reaction to it, his voice tells us how we should feel about that exposition.

24:39And 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 from a first person narrator who is actively having the 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 brake or the throttle with the pacing. And with that, I think we should probably mash on the brake right now and go to our homework.

Writing homework and credits

25:16Howard, I think you have our homework. I do. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to lean into the food. I'm so sorry. I want you to look up a very complicated recipe and then in, in your best expository prose, explain the cooking of this as if it is happening. The exposition of the making of this food and do it in a way that makes the reader angry.

25:54This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

26:00Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.