In the Shadow of the Info Bomb

There are many difficult things to do in writing. Starting a story in the right place and the right way is one. Venture into writer’s groups on the internet and you’ll run into reams of well-meaning advice on ‘hooks’ and ‘the importance of first lines’ and so on.

Ending the story well is another. Endings are harder than beginnings, in my opinion. You can start in many different places but your story probably only has one truly appropriate and satisfying ending. Plenty of stories have good, rewarding endings that are worth the hours you spent to get to them, but not all. I’m looking at you, Book of Elsewhere. Plenty of guidelines and pointers exist to help the writer out. Endings are manageable.

I think there is one specific area of writing which is very, very hard to get right, and when you do, nobody will even know you did it. Exposition, or placing essential information in the story to provide context for character or world-building (don’t call it lore, for crying out loud. It’s world-building. Be told). Obviously, there are good ways to do it, there are bad ways to do it, and there are brave ways to do it.

Let’s start with an example. The Fellowship Of The Ring. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that the second chapter is long and awkward to read and is, essentially, a history lesson. I’d define it as an exposition bomb. Tolkein had done his world-building and needed to dispense it all to the reader and so he has Gandalf literally sit Frodo down and reveal the entire history of the One Ring and how it came to be in Bilbo’s possession. It is a long chapter and worthy of inclusion. The story can proceed and the reader is fully informed. It’s still an exposition bomb, but it is necessary and so it gets a pass from me.

When Peter Jackson came to adapt the novel, this chapter would no doubt have proved a problem. It’s been an absolute age since I watched the extras on the Fellowship DVD but Jackson, Walsh and Boyens found a cinematic way to avoid having Gandalf spend half-an-hour dispensing history to Frodo. Their solution, a prologue which spanned years of history and momentous events, set up all the relevant history in a visually stunning and thrilling four minutes. Four minutes and that’s all the dedicated exposition you’re going to get. And then they topped it with Gandalf versus the Balrog for The Two Towers. Nice.

This technique, the newsreel prologue, is only really applicable to cinema. Citizen Kane does it and it has become a very commonplace modern technique, although maybe now is approaching cliché. I watched Atlas recently and it had a terrible newsreel prologue. Not surprising, really, as the Atlas screenplay is stuffed with garbage and still got produced. Whatever. It’s not something you can easily do in a novel, although...I’ll get onto LA Confidential in a minute.

The brave way to do exposition is to not do it all all and to trust in your reader to glean the context from the story as a whole and use their native wit to build a coherent picture of the missing information. John Brunner did this in Stand On Zanzibar.

For readers, Stand On Zanzibar begins as an exercise of alienation and patience. Nothing is explained. Nothing makes sense. The structure is nothing if not unorthodox. Rather than telling the story in the standard way, or with multiple points of view within the narrative, Brunner turns the story outwards and has four different kinds of chapter. There’s Context, excerpts from documents to develop background. This Happening World showcases bits and pieces from the contemporary media of the setting. Tracking with Close-ups features vignettes of minor characters who may or may not become relevant later. The bulk of the story happens in Continuity, where the narrative unfolds.

None of this is what I would consider exposition in the sense of the author’s narrative voice dumping, ahem, lore on the reader, nor by having two characters yapping on to teach the reader about the world. Initially it makes Stand On Zanzibar very hard to get into. Come the end of the novel, the setting is incredibly detailed and wonderfully layered and textured. However, Brunner’s approach is not one suited to novels in general. He makes it work, but I don’t believe I could, and nor do I think most modern readers would want to battle through it.

On to the wrong way. My exemplars for bad exposition are LA Confidential, a book I greatly admire, and Slow Horses, one which I thought was merely decent.

James Ellroy uses a technique for characterization and world-building which I feel compelled to borrow. It’s not a prologue – it’s much too long to be a prologue. Before any of the main events in the story begin, Ellroy gives us a few chapters as a self-contained story where we meet the main characters and have them interact in a way which shows off their nature and flaws. LA Confidential features Ed Exley, an ambitious, opportunistic coward; Jack Vincennes, a sleazy money-grubbing cop with a dirty secret or two; and Bud White, a thug with a heart of gold.

Here’s the thing – he shows Exley being ambitious and opportunistic but he doesn’t show him being cowardly in his daily life. He tells us about how Exley was a coward in WWII. And while he does show us Vincennes being casually corrupt, he also dumps his secrets on us like a bomb, rather than having us uncover them later – but I guess it saved time. The same happens with White, but as his past is much simpler, we get more of White being a thug and thrashing abusive husbands, and less of the sad childhood, and his chapter grates less as a result.

Again, although I dislike backstory being heaped on the reader like that, I’m giving Ellroy a pass too. Each character is thoroughly set up by the end of their chapter and their flaws – cowardice and ambition, secrecy and vice, brainless thuggery – are played on and overcome and paid off in full. Everything we learn about the three main characters is relevant to how the story plays out. It’s jarring but it works. Bad, but excusable bad.

Ellroy, though, he does use media excerpts as drop-ins between chapters to fill in the gaps in the narrative and flesh out certain details. None of it is strictly necessary, but hey, texture, world-building, and a lot of exposition is avoided.

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, in my opinion, doesn’t get away with it. He also drops an early exposition bomb on the reader and I hated it while I was reading it. It goes off over the course of one chapter and features, in detail, the peccadilloes of all the minor characters at Slough House, a dumping ground for disgraced MI5 agents who can’t be fired.

I can see why this approach might work, and it can be effective. The problem is that Herron doesn’t make his minor characters interesting enough to bog down the opening for. None of them were sympathetic enough nor authoritative enough for me to care that they’d screwed their own careers up. What makes it worse is that very little of what Herron tells us about these people impinges on the story as it develops. They don’t matter. Nothing they do matters. Not even when they do something seemingly worthwhile. The reader spends pages and pages being told about how some people fucked up and, well, they’re fuck-ups. That’s the point. No resolution for you!

 So, here’s my breadcrumb for exposition – if you aren’t going to drop the exposition bomb, then make it relevant to the situation and the characters. It has to be both. Bad exposition has characters telling each other stuff they already know so the reader can know, or has the author leave a thousand words of ancient history or tech lying around like a freshly laid turd. I believe it is best to give the reader the correct dose of relevant information only when it is needed to explain something. Trust the reader to get onside. It’s better to add a droplet of information later than drown the narrative early on.