How to Fix Exposition that Feels Heavy
How to write exposition and how to fix exposition that feels heavy are questions every writer wrestles with. Even the most experienced writers struggle with heavy exposition. While promoting Avatar: Fire and Ash, James Cameron relayed a story about how he was struggling to explain everything that happens during the time jump between the first and second Avatar. He comes across the WGA magazine with a big headline about exposition and buys it. Lo and behold, when he opens up to the article, the article about exposition is using James Cameron’s Terminator as its main reference.
Exposition–a literary device used to convey necessary information to the audience–is not a dirty word. It’s an essential tool in any writer’s toolkit. The trick is not in how to avoid exposition, but how to include it in scenes that engage instead of simply explain. Heavy-handed exposition fails this litmus test and can be distracting or overwhelming to the audience. Heavy exposition is not a terminal note for any screenplay–writers just have to be creative with it.
Show vs. Tell
“Show Don’t Tell” is a core mantra of writing advice because a lot of emerging writers use ‘telling’ as a crutch. The phrase then became quite ubiquitous as a form of overcorrection to eliminate this crutch. Showing is dramatising the conveyance of information in lieu of direct dialogue. Which, contrasting to telling, is often more intentional in how it is used. Essentially, the floor for telling is much lower than showing, so many writers will settle for less intentional exposition to be done with it and move on. But telling, just like exposition, is a necessary instrument in storytelling, and often unavoidable.
Jurassic Park had to tell the audience how dinosaurs were brought back to life in the first place, so they used an animation sequence that in-universe was designed to lure in investors for the park. This is one of the keys for telling–to make sure the characters have a reason to actually be conveying this information to the audience. For instance, why would one scientist be telling another how the macguffin works if they are both intimately familiar with the technology already? This is why many stories utilize the new character who gets brought up to speed alongside the audience as the group explains to the newbie how things work around here. Mentors training students has the same effect.
Another technique is what Save the Cat writer Blake Snyder refers to as The Pope in the Pool. If something interesting is happening while the explanatory dialogue is being given, the audience will absorb the information while focusing on the spectacle, bizarre, or novel things happening in frame, such as how peculiar it would be to watch a Pope do laps in a swimming pool. The Big Short tells the audience about shorting stocks via Margot Robbie in a hot tub breaking the fourth wall. Former SNL writer and performer Al Franken put this technique to use in real life when running for the US senate. He drew a map of the United States from memory while explaining his platform to potential voters. The novelty of drawing the map by memory was enough of a curiosity to hold people’s attention while he talked about why people should vote for him.
Show vs Tell screenwriting is all about when and how to submerge your exposition into the background. These techniques are ways writers bury telling exposition. Showing, by its nature, is burying exposition into the visuals, in the characters’ behaviors, and into the subtext. The audience then infers the information based on what they just witnessed. Say you have a pompous character rebuking another character in an interview. The interviewer could bluntly say that the interviewee is beneath them and not worth their time. Or they could check the time on their expensive watch and adjust their fancy diploma while talking aspirationally about the type of people that succeed in this business. All of the interviewer's actions show that he doesn’t take the interviewee seriously without directly stating it.
Burying Exposition in Conflict
The same principle that makes the Pope in the Pool work for audiences also applies to hiding exposition within conflict. The audience is paying attention to the conflict on the surface while still absorbing and inferring the exposition. Placing the exposition within conflict effectually maintains the pace of the story and keeps the scenes active. Information becomes the byproduct of conflict instead of being the entire point of the scene. Having a scene solely dedicated to being an exposition dump can very easily kill the pacing, so learning how to avoid exposition dumps is key.
Exposition works best when characters want different things. During arguments, characters are rarely using clear communication. Even if the argument is on-the-nose dialogue, as many arguments are finally when characters use direct language, the thoughts are still messy and incomplete fractions of arguments.The argument becomes a series of verbal missiles flying past each other. Characters arguing reveal information about their wants and desires while pushing the character relationships forward. Similar to arguments, power shifts in scenes and slow dripping clues to secrets are powerful situations to feed information. Instead of revealing all of the necessary information early, dropping tiny crumbs of information begets the audience to demand the answer, so even if the answer is bluntly told, the audience will be satisfied that the secret is revealed. Is the exposition answering a question that the audience even has, and if they don’t ask it, is the information even necessary?
The Social Network opens with Mark Zuckerberg on a date in a pub that quickly goes off the rails. The dialogue reveals the setting of Harvard undergrad, the status and hierarchy within the school via the fraternities, Zuckerberg’s desire to be a part of them, and his flaw being his incredible ego. All of this information is pushed onto us in the opening scene but the audience is so engrossed in the argument and eventual breakup that the conflict distracts from the info dump. Everything that follows in the film is present in this scene culminating in the closing image of Zuckerberg sending the woman that broke up with him in the first scene a friend request. He longs for the belonging he wanted since the beginning of the movie, but chased a phantom of it the entire runtime of the film and was left empty-handed.
Interviews, meetings, appointments, negotiations, and various other confrontations all help subsume exposition into the scene while also moving the story forward at the same time. Ultimately, it’s all about puzzling out how to convey the information within scenes that are moving the story or pushing the characters forward.
Common Exposition Mistakes
Let’s dig in to several of the most common exposition mistakes in screenwriting and why they can weaken any script:
Exposition Dumps
Settling for a one-time deluge of information is enticing to get the necessary information out of the way, but it also brings the story to a screeching halt for a PSA announcement. If a lot of exposition is necessary, you can fix the exposition by hiding it using the aforementioned Pope in the Pool technique or simply add a layer of tension to the scene. In Indiana Jones, Indy is being told necessary information about the next steps in his quest, but he is on the cusp of eating a date that the audience knows is poisoned throughout the entire scene. He goes to eat it multiple times and gets sidetracked via the conversation. The audience is thick with anticipation about Indy being poisoned while also learning all the necessary details to come in the following acts.
Characters Telling Each Other What They Already Know
The characters are living in the world and have always lived in the world of the story. Resorting to dialogue exposition where all the characters in the scene already know all the information is clunky and can take the audience out of the scene. We want the audience to ask questions and want the answers to them. We don’t want the audience asking, “Why are they telling each other that?”
Over-Explaining Backstory
A common screenwriting mistake is over-explaining every little detail. It’s great to have developed a fully fleshed out world and characters with a fully fleshed out history, but keep only the information that the story needs in that moment. In Star Wars, Ben Kenobi tells Luke, “I fought with your father in the clone wars.” One line that establishes Kenobi’s connection to Luke as well as offers a glimpse at a grander history that this world lives in.
Dialogue that Exists Only to Inform the Audience
This type of explanatory dialogue can quickly suspend the audience’s disbelief in the story as they realize the characters are speaking solely to the audience’s benefit and not the stories. This is where the aforementioned drip-feeding can come into play. Make sure it's information that the audience wants or needs to know, and if they do need to know badly enough, they’ll be happy to finally get the payoff of information.
Stilted Narration
Narration, like exposition, gets a bad rap. But narration isn’t bad, just often misused. When narration works in films, it enhances the themes, tones, or subjectivity of the material. Narration fails most often when it is simply vocalizing what we are seeing already visually. Think about whether the material of your story is enhanced by narration. Emotional narration can enhance a story about an unreliable narrator or a character whose perspective to the world around them clashes with what we would expect from such a character. Informative narration is utilized when there is information that needs to be conveyed to the audience that can’t naturally be dramatized or hidden. Is the narration intentional to the enhancement of the story, or is it being used simply because no other option worked (or was thought of).
Heavy exposition is jarring to the audience because it’s like a novelist changing their prose, even someone that doesn’t know about the craft of writing will feel the switch. Exposition in screenwriting can be challenging, but don’t let it stifle you–its not the enemy. Poorly delivered exposition is. And that is why the revision process exists. Rewriting will help you reframe scenes and see different sections in different lights. If a piece of exposition just can’t fit cleanly. Put it down and work on a different piece of the story. Come back to it in a week or so. The space could allow a new idea to blossom. After all, constraints often lead to our most creative outputs. See the apparent constraint as an opportunity to enhance the story by replacing the explanation with drama.
