WHAT IS EXPOSITION? (The Least We Need to Know)

Quill with ink well

“Heaven help us! The duchess ran off with the chauffeur, and the rebels are in the suburbs!”

Now that’s exposition. It’s fast, and it’s provoking. It’s at least all you need to know before deciding whether you’re curious enough to stay tuned.

I’m old enough to remember the good old days when movie theatres just kept playing the feature all day, and people came in and sat down any old time, staying until they got to the part where “This is where we came in”, before walking out, leaving their empty bags of popcorn.

Of course, if that’s the way you went to the movies, you kinda missed what the story was about. Maybe that didn’t matter for some folks, but no question it ultimately interfered with your ability to get the most out of the movie. It would be like opening a book and starting in the middle. (That works with Proust.)

“Cut to the chase” is slang for shorten the exposition; let’s get to the action!

Exposition is where we learn what the stakes are in the story. Who’s on first? Who’s at bat? How many outs? In baseball, before the game starts, nobody’s on first, and the bases are empty. That’s exposition as well, in a way. We know what’s gonna unfold; we’re just waiting til the end of the national anthem to see if anyone’s gonna get on base, let alone get home safe.

Not so different from The Odyssey. Will Odysseus reach home? He’s gotta lotta bases to round and a lotta things could go wrong along his way.

Baseball, as Bart Giamatti (Baseball Commissioner, also President of Yale), pointed out, is a kind of story. In order to go home, first you have to leave home. In simple terms, that’s all the exposition you need to understand baseball.

Exposition is what does the reader or audience need to know to understand the stakes. (And make you wanna keep reading or watching.)

Example: a boy comes home from college to find that his father has died and his mother has remarried – wait for it – his uncle! The kid (heir to the throne, as it happens), has barely time to digest this upheaval before the ghost of his father explains that he was murdered by the aforementioned uncle, who coveted his throne and his queen.

The ghost – (is it a real ghost? Good question) – now orders the kid to avenge his murder by killing his uncle - now the king.

There you have exposition. The audience has been told all they need to know in order to understand the issues and the stakes. Will Hamlet obey the ghost and kill the king? If that question hooks you, you stick around to see if Hamlet will or won’t carry out his dead father’s command.

It is now the job of the playwright or storyteller to raise as much suspense as possible as to the outcome. When the question is answered one way or the other, we can all go home. If the question is answered in a satisfactory manner, we go home satisfied.

But that’s not exposition. We don’t really like exposition. We are impatient with exposition. How soon can we get underway? Cut to the chase! ie. Get ON with it.

In Romeo and Juliet, a narrator short-circuits the whole expository process, in effect saying, “Lemme bring you up to speed here. There’s two feuding families in old Verona and wouldn’t you know it, their two ill-fated children fall in love.”

That’s all you need to know. What’s gonna happen to those star-crossed lovers? Buy the popcorn and find out.

A young man signs up to go on a whaling voyage. Once at sea, he learns that on a previous cruise, the captain had his leg chewed off by a whale and now thinks of nothing but taking revenge on the beast that maimed him, at the expense of his responsibilities and his sanity. That is one large fish hook. Question: Is anyone gonna survive this cruise? No SPOILERS!

I bet you can now think of other examples of exposition, the what-do-we-need-to-know in order to understand the stakes and why we wanna stay tuned.

A wicked queen is daily assured by her mirror she is fairest in the land; until one day, the mirror says her step-daughter is better looking. Take it from there…

Once you figure out the exposition - the set-up, in crude terms - your story is up and running.

Snow White is pretty simple; sometimes you require no more info.

Take a look at this one: The people of Thebes have been ravaged by a killer sphinx, unless someone can solve its riddle. When a stranger succeeds, they install him as king, begging him in the process to solve the murder of their previous monarch, who was slain during a chariot fender-bender at a nearby crossroads. Having solved the riddle of the Sphinx, the new king confidently insists he can solve the murder of his predecessor. But Oedipus has his own baggage: it was foretold he was doomed to murder his father and marry his mother, but that destiny, he claims, he left behind when he fled his parents in another kingdom.

So… will Oedipus learn who killed his predecessor? There’s the hook, all you need to know. Along the way, it goes without saying, folks warn Oedipus not to stick his nose into the old king’s death, but he insists on solving the case.

But that part isn’t exposition, either. Who killed the old king? is the exposition we’re on about here. It’s also an example of a “this better be good story” – and, as it happens, it has a wow Agatha Christie killer finish.

The retiring marshal in an old west town, just married, learns that the gang he sent to prison years ago is returning on the noon train to kill him. You with me? You bet you are…

One of the big challenges of exposition is how fast you can get it out of the way. The audience or reader is impatient to get going. How quickly can you tell us what are the stakes?

Sometimes in a play, subsidiary characters are relegated to giving us the info. The curtain rises, and the maid and butler are dusting furniture while they discuss: the mistress hasn’t been the same since the master was arrested for murder, etc.

Does exposition always have to come at the beginning? Turns out it doesn’t. Turns out you can start the action right in the middle – in medias res, in Latin. Two people on a cliff are fighting to the death! Now that we have your undivided attention, we can leisurely backtrack and explain what they’re fighting about.

How about the start of Double Indemnity, where an insurance salesman, bleeding to death from a gunshot, is talking into a tape recorder. His situation has got our full attention; now we’re all ears to hear how the guy got into this mess.

Sometimes the hook and exposition are practically the same thing.

In Richard III, the exposition is really complicated, but Shakespeare’s genius lets the villain of the piece – not some anonymous “narrator” - kick off the action. Richard confronts us with his humpback, his withered arm and gimpy leg, getting our horrified attention before explaining that because of peace he’s now out of a job. Everyone but him is having fun and getting laid. Richard’s unlikely to find anyone who could love him. “So I’ll occupy my unemployment by murdering my way to the crown,” he muses. And now that you know Richard’s dilemma, you’re gonna stick around and watch him do it, aren’t you? Cheering him on. Richard’s exposition has managed to make you a co-conspirator.

In other words, there are lots of ways you can get through exposition.

I’m betting you can come up with still more.