Exposition Exposed

I can’t explain why I have a problem writing exposition without sounding like a jerk, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.

There are two types of exposition: regular and meta. Regular exposition gives the reader information about the in-story universe: what year James T. Kirk was born, why the bad guy needs to steal a suitcase full of plutonium to take over the world, how magic works. Meta exposition gives the reader an idea of what the author expects him or her to know at this point in the story.

Regular exposition is actually relatively easy. You put the information on the page*. Meta exposition is a lot harder, and, I think, is often what makes readers throw away a book in frustration or exasperatedly roll their eyes. See, it’s not enough for readers to know what’s going on. Readers have to know they know.

Let me back up a bit and tell you a story about a treasure hunt I planned for my friends.

The theme was Sherlock Holmes, and I’d given each team a coat with eight clues hidden inside it. Each of these clues specified a spot on the team’s map. Once marked on the map, the spots made a giant letter “M” that was missing the ninth spot at the intersection of its two middle lines. This was where the teams had to go to win the game.

Many of the teams found the hunt frustrating, if still fun. In retrospect, there are a lot of things I’d do differently. But the thing that’s relevant for the purposes of this blog entry is this anecdote: the team that was by far the most frustrated called me about an hour before the hunt ended saying they couldn’t solve any of the clues, and since they were so far behind the competition by now, they just gave up. Of course, I was sorry, and I went to go talk to them. They showed me what they had so far: all eight of the clues solved, way ahead of all the other teams.

The trouble was, I hadn’t put anything into the hunt that let players know when they’d solved the clues. There were no indications along the way to say, “Good job! You’re on the right track!” Instead, you either found out you’d won when you got to the right endpoint… or you didn’t.

Once I told the team that they’d solved almost all the clues and pointed out that some of their own players had the right idea about what to do with them, they went on to win the game within the hour. But the fact that they almost quit when they were in the lead was my fault, not the theirs.

They knew the answers. They just didn’t know they knew the answers.

The same thing can happen in fiction. When I first started sharing my own work, I’d get critiques that puzzled me: “I don’t understand X, Y, or Z” or “All I get is A, B, C — I don’t understand why D.” But, I wanted to say, I wrote out X, Y, and Z in that paragraph here! Or, But… A, B, and C are all there is to know about D. You do understand D, you just don’t know it!

Failing at regular exposition is easy, and I’m not going to pretend it’s not: when I did problems in math class, I tended not to show my work, since it seemed so obvious to me that one step led to the next, and I know I have the same vice with fiction, too. But failing at meta exposition is even easier, and that’s what I did in those cases.

If I don’t make you stop and notice the information I’ve included, I’ve failed.

If I don’t make you feel like it’s okay not to know something that you don’t need to know yet, I’ve failed.

And if you don’t know that you know the explanations I’ve given you, I’ve failed, too.

Fixing meta exposition is tough because it’s not about denotative meaning: the literal meaning of each word that anyone with a dictionary can figure out. It’s about context and tone, the sum total of all the words on the page and in the story up until now. Regular exposition is more or less an objective affair — the information is either there or it’s not — but meta exposition is subjective, because every reader interprets words differently.

In addition, many genres have their own standards of meta exposition. An example: I read a lot of mysteries, and a lot of the time, throwaway phrases  of description will stand out to me as “AHA! A CLUE!!!” If the frayed tea-cosy isn’t a sign that just led the detective to the murderer, then how come the author interrupted the flow of the conversation to point it out? But I’ve noticed that friends who don’t enjoy mysteries don’t perceive the pop-up CLUE CLUE CLUE flags that beckon to my fellow mystery mavens and me. Cause and effect or effect and cause, who can say? The point is, we “clue” in (no pun intended) to the meta-expositional conventions of the genre we like, conventions that we picked up from reading a lot of it.

Plus, there’s the additional problem of not making exposition too obvious: everyone wants to pick up information about the story, but most readers dislike sections that read as obvious “info-dumps.” If the only thing a paragraph screams is “I AM HERE FOR EXPOSITORY PURPOSES!” you might as well have written a treatise, not a story.

So with all that to think about, fixing meta exposition can be a challenge. Even if one critique partner or reader tells you what would work for him or her, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work for everyone. I have awesome critique partners, and they’re usually great at coming up with closer-to-universal solutions, but you can never hit 100% of the readers 100% of the time.

* I know, easier said that done. But bear with me.