Understanding Exposition

welcome to the sixth video in this series covering the fundamentals of screenwriting and storytelling if you'd like to watch the rest of the videos you can find them linked in the description or on the end screen of this video one of the most overlooked elements of writing well is understanding the function of exposition and how to implement it into a story exposition especially in films can be a tricky task and it's something that even seasoned professionals can fail to do correctly today i'll be breaking down what exposition is and how it works in a narrative

and in the next video i'll be looking at how to specifically add exposition to a screenplay let's begin exposition is the information about setting biography and characterization that the audience needs to know to follow and comprehend the events of a story exposition can be time and place it can be a hidden secret that's suddenly revealed no i am your father it can be a quick history lesson yeah the ark of the covenant the chest the hebrews used to carry around the ten commandments do you guys ever go to sunday school and so much more exposition

is a fundamental part of a dramatic narrative of any size from a short story to a 1 000 page book so once you understand what exposition is and its function how do you correctly add it to a story there are three broad concepts you need to remember number one show don't tell number two attack with exposition and number 3 right exposition right time if you've read a screenwriting book or sat in a screenwriting class before you've definitely heard this phrase already show don't tell what this phrase means is that it is much more interesting and

engaging for an audience to see the actions and events take place rather than to hear about them through narration or character explanation this is important especially when learning about a character too many films tell us who a character is rather than showing us who a character is and this is a problem for two reasons one because it's boring to just be told information and two because we don't feel who the character is when we actually watch a character and we see who they are by their actions we have a more emotional understanding of who they

are rather than just absorbing straight information in sicario we don't know what matt's beliefs are on how to handle the cartel until we see him fighting on the highway in mexico this shows us that matt doesn't care about the rule of law and will take down the cartel by any means necessary in indiana jones and the raiders of the lost ark we could simply be told that indiana jones is a great adventurer and meet him in this scene professor of archaeology expert on the occult and how does one say it obtainer of rare antiquities instead

we begin the film seeing indian action finding and taking an idol from an ancient temple this is much more engaging than just hearing about who he is an example of telling rather than showing is found here in suicide squad when we meet katana we get a flashback of her killing bad guys on a street and then she just tells the audience her backstory is here this is immediately followed by more bad telling exposition where we're simply told facts about her i would advise not getting killed by her her sword traps the souls of its victims

another bad example of telling rather than showing is the iconic star wars title crawl you don't get more telling over showing than this moment but more on that in the next video it's not that you can't tell your audience certain things like what year it is or what state we're in but if you want your audience to feel a piece of exposition you must do it in a way where you show it rather than tell it it's about the emotion we don't feel anything when you tell us a character is a great fighter we need

to see them in action so that we can feel how strong they are if it seems like there's no emotion behind your exposition it's likely that you're telling rather than showing if you find yourself writing dialogue where a character is describing another character stop this can work to build suspense or drama but generally we should encounter and learn about your story's characters by their words and actions if you find your character standing around talking about other events that don't move the current scene forward stop let us learn important information by seeing it or when it

clearly affects the main characters the second concept is to attack with exposition a great method to give the audience important information without slowing down the story is to use information as a weapon rather than telling the audience the facts about the world use the exposition to attack characters in some way maybe they learn a dark secret maybe they realize that the world is not what it seems or maybe they find out they've been lied to when you can use exposition to attack characters it no longer becomes boring a great example of using exposition to attack

a character can be found in the beginning of aliens ripley wakes up in an unknown ship and is told an important piece of exposition what do you mean how long was i out there 57 years what not only does this line clue the audience in that the story is taking place decades after the first film this information also comes as a complete shock to ripley it turns her world upside down and furthers her immediate conflict exposition should further the immediate conflict as much as possible learning of a new problem or finding out information that changes

the character situation is the best way to integrate exposition into a story another example of good exposition is in inception when it is revealed that anyone who dies in the dream will die in real life don't do that don't do that he's in agony i'm waking him up it won't wake him up what do you mean it won't work it won't wake him we die in a dream we wake up not from this but you have lisa david to wake up that way right so what happens when we die i drop in the limbo are

you serious limbo so now we're trapped in fish's mind battling his own private army and if we get killed we'll be lost in limbo till our brains turn to scrambled egg the characters are all attacked by this truth they now realize they aren't safe and can actually die this is a rule of the story world and it's an important thing for the audience to understand because it gives stakes to the story and consequences to failure we get to learn this truth along with the characters which makes the exposition engaging and adds to the immediate story

conflict but for an example of this done poorly we can return to inception in the paris cafe scene cobb explains the nature of dreaming to ariadne there is no conflict in this scene the information doesn't attack ariadne or change the current state of conflict we're simply learning how this world works it's only at the end of this long sequence in the paris dream that ariadne finds out about maul cobb's wife and only then is she attacked by this new information but for most of the sequence we're simply being told facts sometimes this is simply unavoidable

but as the writer it's your job to find ways to hide these clunky chunks of information as much as possible the martian is a film absolutely packed with constant exposition and the book is even denser i gotta figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a planet where nothing grows luckily i'm the botanist the thing is that this exposition is constantly tied to the emotion of the film solving these problems and talking through them is the lifeblood of this film because the drama and emotion are there everything rests on mark

watney and the nasa team being able to solve these problems and figure out how to get mark home or he will die and so it isn't boring for us to listen to mark describe his problems and try to fix them because we are invested in his ability to solve these complex issues this is how you can use the concept of attack with exposition to get through these complex chunks of information and some films like the matrix have a massive problem it's a sci-fi story that needs a lot of exposition very quickly for the audience to

understand what's happening and what the characters want so how do the writers give us his information without putting the audience to sleep they use the attack with exposition concept and attack neo's view of the world while he gets new information when neo goes down the rabbit hole morpheus spends a large chunk of time explaining the matrix agents the resistance the war between the humans and machines and more this only works because this information literally changes the world as neo knows it rather than simply explaining to us what the matrix is through text in the beginning

of the film we learn about it as the main character learns about it and we learn about it when the information changes the trajectory of the character neo's entire life will never be the same after learning this information and this creates drama what will neo do how will neo respond to what he has learned will he be able to take on this new responsibility let me out remember when i talked about creating points of no return in the how to create story conflict video you can attack with exposition to create points of no return luke

can never go back after learning darth vader is his father and neo can never go back after he learns about the matrix as much as you possibly can make your exposition push the conflict forward some exposition will simply not be able to be attached to any conflict but you should always be thinking about how you can attach your exposition to the current conflict one of the most difficult parts of adding exposition to a story is finding the right moment to tell the audience a new piece of exposition there's a difficult balance to be found between

telling the audience too much too quickly which results in the audience getting bored and not telling the audience enough which results in confusion and the audience gets bored in story robert mckee writes give the story goer too little exposition and he will disengage in confusion on the other hand big helpings of static exposition choke interest the reader puts down the book the audience shifts in their seats wishing they had bought more popcorn skilled writers give only the minimal exposition necessary to maintain the flow of curiosity and empathy robert mckee writes like all else exposition must

have a progressive pattern least important facts come early most important later and critical facts last this follows the idea of progressive complications like i talked about in the video on how to create story conflict bigger secrets are revealed and more important exposition is learned the farther end of the story the character goes a great way to use exposition to turn a story is by revealing an important secret at the right time robert mckee writes in almost every story told comedy or drama the most important expositional facts are secrets dark truth that the characters hide from

the world even from themselves to actually create a compelling reveal the audience shouldn't think they are missing any information then they become surprised by the fact that they believed they had all of the facts when they did not when luke fights darth vader we know exactly what's going on we aren't confused at all luke is fighting his enemy as he tries to save his friends this scene would work even if darth vader wasn't luke's father but when vader reveals this truth i am the father it shatters luke's world and creates a massive surprise for the

audience just like in spider-man homecoming spoilers ahead when peter goes to pick up liz for the dance he realizes her father is his current nemesis this immediately creates a new dramatic situation and gives us a crucial piece of exposition what will peter do with this new information this is an effective use of backstory backstory is the important events and facts that take place before a story begins use backstory as ammunition to attack your characters at the right moments backstory shouldn't exist simply as a list of facts about your characters backstory should exist to challenge the

characters in different ways as they go through the story in front of them now i want to talk about one final idea that plagues new writers exposition and ambiguity telling your audience what's going on is almost always better than ambiguity one thing new writers do is completely avoid exposition altogether because they've heard exposition slows a story down i see this in a lot of short films and also in a lot of sci-fi films the writer doesn't give enough information for the story to actually be engaging so it actually encouraged new writers to overwrite your exposition

at first force yourself to know your story when writers underwrite exposition it means they can hide behind ambiguity so that they don't have to have a strong understanding of their own narrative so let me break it down between what your audience needs to know versus what your audience doesn't need to know your audience needs to have a clear understanding of what's going on on the surface so your audience should have an understanding of who the protagonist is and their clear want if the audience doesn't know what a character wants they'll be confused and will disengage

from your story if the audience doesn't know who any of the characters are at all it will be hard to build an empathetic connection with those characters the audience doesn't need to know the big secrets they don't need to know every detail of what's in store for your protagonist they don't need to know the true underlying needs of your protagonist but they must have a working understanding of what's happening to keep moving forward i read many scripts from students in the practical screenwriting course and a lot of times new writers will use ambiguity and lack

of exposition to hide the fact that they don't actually know what they're doing in their story wind river withholds a lot of exposition for a long time we know our main characters and we know what they're looking for but we don't know who killed natalie or how it happened to explain it like this cory and jane are searching for the killer of a native american woman named natalie her boyfriend is also missing and they're trying to figure out what happened but we don't need to know who killed natalie or who was involved these things can

be slowly revealed throughout the story but we must have a clear understanding of what the characters want and what they are trying to do a good example of a film falling into the trap of being too ambiguous is annihilation annihilation fails not in the beginning of the story but in the end the film spends its time opening up all these questions that it has zero answers to making the film visually interesting but philosophically and structurally bland a film doesn't have to answer every single question but it needs to have an answer to the philosophical conflict

that it's dealing with or it will fall flat ambiguity especially in an ending rarely makes for a strong story i'd encourage less experienced writers to focus on having a clear narrative and then taking on more ambiguous ideas much later as you grow your skill set these are the fundamentals of exposition these ideas work in all sorts of mediums not just screenplays and they are necessary to storytelling show don't tell attack with exposition and write exposition right time and if you're a new writer don't be afraid to overwrite exposition be aware of what's going on in

your story know what your characters want know what is stopping them don't hide behind an ambiguous story learn how to create a strong narrative and use exposition to your advantage rather than to your disadvantage now that i've given you an understanding of how exposition works in narrative in the next video i'm going to take a look at how exposition works specifically in screenplays so be sure to check out the other videos in this series by clicking the playlist now and if you like this video leave a like and subscribe for more videos just like this

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