It used to be pretty obvious in hard-core SF stories where some scientist, the radical cutting edge type or the more fatherly accepted authority, would show some group of dignitaries, inquisitive visitors or willing or unwilling participants the theory and process and how it will change the world. It used to be a common staple or trope in cheesier B-grade SF movies or novels.
The most recent example I can think of where the author actually got away with it was Michael Chricton in Jurassic Park. The first third covers how dinosaurs were the cause of accidents and attacks, the consultants come to the island, and then, more for the audience than the actual consultants, the middle third of the book is chapter after chapter of naked exposition. They are led, room by room, by one or more of the scientists involved. It stops the pacing cold, but it kind of works because the premise is so radical and interesting that we are desperate to believe it is possible, so we put up with it. In the movie, we get an animated worm, Mr. DNA, who explains it because Steven Spielberg realized he couldn't let the explanation kill the pace of his film. Now, I'm not saying that naked exposition should EVER be used. The only reason I can even think of is if you have the arrogant villain scientist or authority who has to brag about how smart he is only so it buys enough time for the heroes to escape or defeat this arrogant villain. Not that such a trope has ever been used before!
So the next best approach is dialogic exposition. It is a slightly less naked approach that has been used in short stories, books, and movies for a long time. Essentially, two or more people are talking about a recent event, trying to understand what has happened or why. Very common in Whodunnit (or whydunnit) mysteries or imaginative literature. Sometimes, one or more claim to be witnesses. That is where narrative exposition gets interesting. Whereas, in naked exposition, you have little chance to question the veracity of the authority figure, in narrative exposition, we can question the veracity and motives of the speakers. They could be lying outright, saying something with tons of self-serving bias both by what he says and what he doesn't, or a limited perspective that speculates on what happened or why. It is this quality of the unreliable narrator that makes this approach interesting. This is because, not only are the event important but at least as important is what it reveals about the narrator and those with whom he is interacting. One of the clearest examples of this is in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. If you've been so unfortunate as to have not seen this seminal film, it is about a group of people stuck together during a rainstorm discussing a recent tragedy, each with their own perspective and suppositions about what happened and why in regards to a rape and death. We get a sense, but only a sense, of the most reliable version by the final storyteller, but we've learned a lot about the conflicting narrators and the town by the time the film finishes.
The next better approach is the visual exposition. There are all kinds of variation in this approach. This is very common in film, where a "picture is worth a thousand words." It used to be very common in films to see a pan (moving across) shot of a series of photographs and/or paintings, often presented in chronological order (sepia tones helped emphasize this), you get a sense of the history of a family without even a word being spoken. It can become more active with movement / manipulation of objects by a character. A good example of this was in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, where you see a woman as she opens up and examines a set of objects from a shoebox., giving us a sense of who she is before we ever see her. More modern films use this approach in more dynamic shots. For example, in the brilliant film The Player, there is a long moving pan shot of a film studio as we hear bits of conversation showing the world and culture of the movie studio before being introduced to the main character.
Another common dual form is flashbacks and thoughts. I think of these as a single device because they both take place in a character's head. If you are using a close point of view, you are limited to only the main character, whereas, in omniscient point of view, the author can take advantage of the thoughts and memories of multiple people. The veracity of the characters is based on a mix of their actual experiences and perspectives. It is very commonly used in novels but rarely used in movies and TV unless a (voice) narrator is used. Woody Allen films use this frequently for the sake of ironic humor. The only real difference between flashback and thoughts is the former is visual memories / perspective, whereas thoughts are merely internal dialogue.
To me, the best approach incorporates dialogic, flashbacks and visual exposition such that the reader / audience is interacting with other characters while bits and pieces of exposition come out naturally through their surrounding objects, setting, and dialogue. In short, narration should ultimately be shown, not told or, at the very least, show and tell.
So, on to my recent challenge with exposition and my approach to it.
My good friend Bill read through the first part of my novel Sojourners (The Run) and, as we discussed his perspective, I realized that he did not catch some of the backstory I intended merely from bits and pieces of dialogue. I didn't want to bog down my story pacing with long paragraphs of naked exposition. I needed to find a way to show, not tell without falling into an obvious trope.
Fortunately, I found a narrative device I was already using. The first part of my novel is mostly a journey story, where two characters from different cultures are forced together to accomplish a mission by traveling together. Along the way, I had them stop at a museum to view an ancient alien artifact they saw from the air. Before, I spent only a few sparse sentences describing a few of the items there until they got to the artifacts themselves. But I realized that someone from a very different culture coming into a museum full of visually stimulating items that she had no previous experience with would naturally be curious. I saw this as an opportunity to allow her, during a lull in the action, to ask her traveling companion a few questions about something she found visually intriguing.
Below is what I added. Please let me know what you think:
He found Nabiya down the hall and to the right in the Keeper section of the museum. She was pointing at the Human Domestication section.
“What is this?” she asked, turning to him. “I don’t understand.”
“Ugh,” Michael said, scratching his scalp,” this isn’t easy to explain. Did you ever hear about our home planet, Earth?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” Michael nodded, realizing her other Brown slave husbands had probably given her at least a partial debrief. “So you know our ancestors were taken from there by the Keepers about three hundred years ago, right?”
“Yes,” she said and pointed again. “But I don’t understand this…”
He saw she was pointing at the recreated section of the Keeper “Barn”.
“So, the Keepers didn’t consider humans – Browns, to be sentient. At least not until the Coup,” Michael said.
“How did they look upon Browns?”
“As animals to be trained or domesticated,” he said. “So they dispersed humans to ‘farms’ were they did surgeries or experiments on them…”
“Such as…?”
“Many men and women were castrated or sterilized. Others were lobotomized – parts of their brain were severed or cut out completely.”
She nodded and her head motioned for him to continue.
“Others they would add technology to, whether limbs or brain implants or they would transplant parts off and attach them to machines… They also did genetic experiment. Do you know much about genetics?”
“Yes,” she said, irritably. “We are not stupid or ignorant. They changed the genetic makeup of your human ancestors so they or their offspring would be permanently altered for their own purposes.”
He nodded.
“So, the overall effect was… unpleasant.” He bent down and flipped open a box that was part of the display. Inside were several foldout glasses. “They don’t show the animations like they do in the other sections because it can be disturbing.”
She grabbed the glasses and looked at them cautiously.
“It won’t try to hurt or program me, will it?”” she asked.
“No, it just projects the image in your eyes,” he said. “We don’t have to watch it if you don’t want.”
“Show me.” She handed him another pair. “You too.”
They put them on and pressed the Play button, starting off the personalized holographic animation. The sounds played behind their ears from the mini-speakers. Michael had no idea how she would react, since she had seen and caused her own pain and bloodshed. He hated the sounds of the screaming, moaning, and suffering worse than the actual images. A docent told him they were recorded by the Keepers and given back as the fleets were launched from Keeper space. The Keepers must have thought it would be nice postcard to take back home to Earth. He glanced between the gruesome scenes and her reaction.
After about a minute, she took them off. Thank God, he thought, glad his stomach contents were empty.
She looked at the exhibit, at him, around the museum, then back at him.
“This explains much,” she said with a gravity and sadness he’d not heard from her before.
“What?” he asked.
“They helped make you the monsters you became,” she said, tossing the glasses away with disgust.Notice that tried to make Michael a slightly reluctant narrator and also used the visual mechanism, but very modestly because I wanted to reader to try to imagine the horrors the two characters were watching. I also used Nabiya's reaction to tell us more about who she was and the compassion that she, as a bloody enemy, was still capable of.
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