The Perfectly Balanced Story

When you tell someone a story in person, you probably know the person you’re talking to. You will at least have a rough idea of how familiar they are with the people and places you’re referring to. And if you misjudge, they can always ask you questions.

In fiction, it’s much harder to know exactly how much information a reader needs or wants. And even if you did, it would be impossible to provide since you’ll have more than one reader, and each will have different requirements.

You can’t get the balance right, because there is no way to please everyone.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get it wrong. You may not be able to please all the people all the time, but you can certainly piss them all off.

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Good Story Requires Incomplete Exposition

Exposition is where you explain things to the reader in the text. It’s a necessary part of storytelling to help the reader understand what’s going on in a story, especially when it comes to stuff the reader won’t automatically know. The MC might work for a government department and the reader needs to know what the department does, so you have to find a way to get that info to them. When handled badly it can read very clunky.

But there is also another expositional technique that gives the reader information in a very high impact and emotional manner. This is where you reveal something that the reader is able to convert into an understanding of the situation without you having to explain it.

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Exposition Ninja

You have information you need the reader to have. Problem is the characters already know, or aren’t interested, or have no idea. Just putting the information (backstory, exposition, general background details) into the text, while simple and effective, is clunky. So how do you go about imparting this info without being obvious about it?

You may not want to put information in a certain scene, you may choose not to, but you should be able to if you have to. Everyone says exposition should be invisible, integrated into the narrative, delivered without being noticed, but nobody tells you how to do it. So how do you do it?

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