New Materials

Writing Excuses 21.27: The Expository Throttle

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-27-the-expository-throttle

Key Points: Using exposition to speed up or slow down a scene. Scene-sequel format. Marinating moments. Asides in theater. Pace and tension. Market scenes. Look for places to remove ambiguity or add emphasis. Emotional response.

[Season 21, Episode 27]

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[Mary Robinette] This 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/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 27]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Expository Throttle

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And as you know, this podcast is called Writing Excuses. Writing Excuses is a fast-paced... Okay. So...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Maid and butler exposition.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. 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. 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. I'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. If 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?

[Howard] I... 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. 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 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. because 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, 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.

[Erin] I almost... sometimes I think of it as, like, marination moments in the, like, sense of marinating meat. So it's like you've thrown a lot of spices and juices at your reader. Hopefully not actually. And then, like, this is the moment where I... and it's my... actually 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 and 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 word play 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.

[Howard] 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. That stays with me. That's... I cannot move on to the next bit. I... this will not be good fried chicken until these... until this has 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.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and this is extending this metaphor until it breaks. The 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... 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.

[Erin] 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...

[Howard] I've made myself hungry. I hope that I've done that to the rest...

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's only fair that you're hungry too.

[Erin] But I'm thinking, like, if you went to somebody's, like, 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."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, if you didn't brine it already, please don't brine it right now.

[Mary Robinette] It's just going to be a soggy thing of sadness and cold and slimy. That's going to be so bad.

[Erin] Yeah. So, you...

[Howard] Let me tell you about dry rub and syringes...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Which is interesting.

[Mary Robinette] No, don't. Don't... actually don't.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Don't tell me.

[Erin] But I think, like, a lot of that is sometimes when it feels like 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 that... the place that you did it was not the right place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But all the spices, etc. 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 happen.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There was a recent movie... well, not recent when this airs. Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich, and it's sort of a fantasy sci-fi thing and it begins with some voice over narration. I'm gonna tell you a story and you're probably not going to believe it. And 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. You slowed things way down right at the middle, in a movie where... the movie... this sort of movie where you really just want to kick it off with some action.

[Mary Robinette] 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. 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." 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 late... with 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. And 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.

[Howard] 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. I'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.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so 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...

[Erin] 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] 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.

[Mary Robinette] There's others?

[Erin] 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. 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 during your revisions and you were like, "Dang it, I really liked the Gleber folks. They were great and I'm mad my editor made me cut them." So, I will put them in...

[Howard] Oh, the colorful tents and the good wagons.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Howard] So, they get this scene.

[Erin] 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?

[Howard] The Gleber folks don't even have one of the stones of Rohisha.

[Erin] They do not...

[Howard] Rohisla.

[Erin] They do not in their colorful wagons. There's nothing but brine. What a sentence.

[Howard] And some chicken.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to stop this exposition about these people who do not exist and get to something important.

[Erin] Boom.

[Mary Robinette] Which is our break.

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[Mary Robinette] Have you ever had that moment where you learned something again that you already knew and had just sort of forgotten? So, I talk all the time about how much I learn about writing from narration and how much I learn about narration from writing because writing developed to convey the spoken language. And the other day I was struck by something that Lavar Burton said that just made me unpack everything all over again. He said that the power that storytelling was about consciously creating a moment of community and my mind just went oh yes that is what I am doing whether I am narrating or whether I'm writing, I'm trying to create this moment of community, and then he went on to talk about how often on reading rainbow he would narrow his audience down to just one person. In his case it was Ward his son and that it made the task more manageable. And I do that when I'm writing, that I'll think about one person that I'm writing this story for. It was one of those moments. That's why I keep turning back to Master Class because I find these nuggets that often are things that unpack something that I maybe knew. This one came from Lavar Burton's The Power of Storytelling and it was really amazing. But there's this whole library of moments like that. There's instructors from everywhere, with often people who define their fields, not just experts, but often the best in their world. They have like 200 plus classes across 13 categories like business or writing or cooking, creativity, wellness, and more, with plans that start at only $10 a month. I love this and it works for me. I will listen sometimes in audio mode when I'm cleaning the house. You could do it when in a commute or turn your workout into a classroom. You can download lessons for offline access. And it actually works. Apparently, three in four members feel inspired every time they watch, and 83% have implied something they've learned to their real lives. It's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. And it's something that helps me. I love learning. I love being pushed and challenged and offered new ideas, even if it's something that I knew but had just forgotten. So, MasterClass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. So head on over to masterclass.com/excuses to see the latest offer and maybe listen to Lavar Barton.

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[Mary Robinette] Welcome back from the break. Now, what else can we use exposition for besides making the readers wonder about random characters in the market?

[Erin] Yeah. Or how do we know that it's a moment?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] 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. It'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, does 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?

[Howard] 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. This is an excellent example of this, because you are... there's 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, which to me... that's a great way to use the tool.

[Erin] 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.

[Mary Robinette] 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. There are other places where 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.

[Howard] 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. You 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've mashed the brakes, you've slowed us down, but you've relieved the tension in doing so. And there are good arguments for both, for ratcheting the tension up and ratcheting it down while slowing the pace.

[Mary Robinette] We'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, 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. It'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.

[Erin] 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...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Or 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] 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 distance from character emotion. If you stop, like, from the, like, I'm desperately trying to do X to 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.

[Howard] It'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, wow, nuclear weapons are even worse than I thought they were. In Andy Weir's The Martian, there is 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. 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 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.

[Mary Robinette] And with that, I think we should probably mash on the brake right now and go to our homework. Howard, I think you have our homework.

[Howard] I do. I'm gonna lean into the food. I'm so sorry. 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 happening. The exposition of the making of this food and do it in a way that makes the reader angry.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.