![]() It looks random and meaningless, doesn’t it? It would take a fair amount of brain energy to force even a few of those 16 letters into your memory.īut if you group the letters as MD PHD RSVP CEO and IHOP, you now have five chunks, each containing meaning-effectively five recognizable “words.” The amount of brain energy it took you to absorb that string dropped dramatically.Īnd if you can package those five chunks into a coherent story, you create a single larger chunk that occupies only one memory slot, leaving the other three or four open for other stories. This is a severe mental limitation, but we work around it with a process called “chunking.”Ĭhunking is when we group ideas so that together they occupy only one of the four or five available memory slots in our brain. Steven Pinker, in The Sense of Style, tells us that human working memory can hold only four or five items at a time. To understand why exposition is a such a challenge in fiction, let’s have a little brain science. You’re going to need a more convincing reason than “it’s boring” before you’re ready to remove it. After all, you’ve found a way to put your visions and inventions on the page, often in carefully-crafted prose. They just vaguely imply that exposition is somehow against the rules because it’s “boring.”Īs explanations go, that’s pretty weak. Trouble is, the “Show Don’t Tell” evangelists never explain why we have to hide our exposition. So which is it? Is exposition necessary? Or is it so undesirable that it needs to be disguised? McKee goes on to extol the famous writers’ axiom “Show, don’t tell,” and he devotes an entire chapter to the craft of disguising exposition. “Exposition means facts-the information about setting, biography, and characterization that the audience needs to know to follow and comprehend the events of the story.” -Robert McKee, Story (p. The word comes from the Latin language, and its literal meaning is ‘a showing forth.’ Exposition is crucial to any story, for without it nothing makes sense.” - Literary “Exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters, or other elements of a work to the audience or readers. At the end, we’ll be a big step closer to writing novels that glide along on story-rails with the least possible friction. We’ll see why we can’t get rid of it altogether, and we’ll learn how brain science can help us understand when to use it and why. In this article we’ll consider what exposition is. How can the reader enter the world he’s built-a world complete with non-human characters, its own social structures, and a long history-unless the narrator explains some of it? Simply deleting every explanation isn’t a sound editorial strategy. Get rid of it.”īut this client is writing a story with an epic fantasy setting. So my gut reaction to the client’s question was, “None of the above. There’s a tendency among many writers, myself included, to explain too much, and I’ve become ruthless about weeding out as much exposition as possible. The other day an editing client asked, “How should I handle exposition?” Is it better, he wondered, to put it in dialogue? In the character’s thoughts? Or just have the narrator tell it? “What you need to know in order to write a story is not what I need to know in order to read it.” Ralph Hale ![]()
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