I’m writing this essay during our end-of-the-year reading period for 2021. Our First Line Readers and I are busy evaluating over 500 stories submitted by hopeful authors, many with little experience and some with a long list of credits to their name. 

One common problem, at least from our point of view, is excess exposition (and almost all exposition is excess). Exposition is the enemy. Exposition is why we sent your story back, even when we liked your engaging writing style, the cracker opening, your memorable characters, and your promising plot development.

So, let’s learn to recognize this pernicious despoiler of pencraft, in hopes of bringing those stories back to life.

True story. I was on a back road in Pennsylvania, somewhere between my hometown of Latrobe and the city of Altoona, when I watched the driver’s side windshield wiper snap off and go flying over the roof of the car. Even in a summer rain, this might have been a problem, but it was a bad winter and washer fluid was freezing to the windshield. The snow was tire chain deep and still coming down, and I was driving my old ’85 Chevy Sprint with a 1-liter engine. 

I was young, and I’d just started a new job. My boss was counting on me to get to a meeting, the path to which was penned out on a road atlas map, decades before GPS and cell phones. Whether I would make it on time had been in question since I drove into the leading edge of the storm. Now, thoughts of freezing to death miles from nowhere had begun to cross my mind. 

All I had was an ice scraper, a couple chocolate chip cookies from a convenience store, and the wrong jacket. I’d left the house in a hurry that morning, grabbing the windbreaker without gloves, scarf, and beanie in the pockets. As bad weather transitioned to blizzard conditions, my vocabulary degenerated to a single, oft repeated word.  “Shit…. shit…..shit.”

Do you want to know what happened? Sure, you do, because it just gets worse from there. But I think I’ll stop now and exposit a bit.

You see, that town I grew up in, Latrobe… it’s an interesting place. It’s where the banana split was invented. Honest, it is! Mr. Rogers was from Latrobe, and so was famed golfer Arnold Palmer. Every year, the Pittsburgh Steelers train at my alma mater, St. Vincent College, and Latrobe even has a claim on being the birthplace of professional football in 1897.

But for me, growing up, the unique history of the town held little meaning. I was exceedingly shy as a child, held back in school, and in retrospect may have been borderline autistic. Friends were few, far between, and hard to keep. Where sports are a natural socialization gateway for young kids, I couldn’t tell one end of the ball from the other (yeah, that bad), and more often than not I became the favorite goat by which others measured their childish wit and bullying behavior.

In one form or another, these difficulties followed me into young adulthood. In fact, I hadn’t learned to drive until a year or two before the blizzard. But then, without all these difficulties forcing me inward into my own worlds of the imagination, would I have found writing as an outlet of the imagination? 

Let me tell you about that first typing class I took in high school…

Now, except for my engaging way with words, you should have lost patience early on, after I left the action of the tale. Certainly, by the time I delved into my second or third story about failing typing class, encounters with large and scary dogs in my pre-teen years, and how pathologically incapable of I was of dealing with strangers, you should be given the “loving grandmother award” for still reading a single line, because even my Mom would now be complaining about an unnecessary retrospective of self-involved whining.

But isn’t this necessary? Isn’t it important to learn about the environment of my background, the influences that shaped me, and how the physical, experiential, and inner mental worlds unique to my experience affect the scenario in the opening?

No. 

We’ll just leave that there. It’s important enough to stand on its own.

I would argue the only things you need to tell the reader are those absolutely essential to their understanding of the story’s action or to experiencing the emotion of the story more intensely. 

And a simple way to do this is to take it all out! Then put back only that detail without which the story would be impossible to understand, which improves the immediate engagement of the reader, or heightens the emotional impact of the story.  Even so, don’t dump it all at the beginning. Sprinkle it with the care of adding a pungent spice. A little here.  A little there.

Same thing. Stopping the forward action of your story to tell me about the politics, economics, history, and religious proclivities of the world in which your characters find themselves is a deadly move.

As editorial readers, when we see paragraph after paragraph of exposition, explanation, background, and world building documentary, we are simply done with that story. We’re moving on.

If there is anything interesting about your world, it will come out in the unfolding action of the tale, and in how your protagonists interact with those elements in trying to solve the obstacles before them.

And whenever there are essential details that simply have to be “told” from an omniscient narrator’s point of view (because you’ve tried every other way of elegantly introducing them and failed), then do it quickly and concisely. Make it short and move on with the action.

See, that’s it! Keep the story going. Perhaps give it a little background color, but just a little at a time. If the story is long enough, your readers will come to know the characters over time, especially by the end of a novel. But don’t stop to exposit (especially at length). When it comes to exposition, just say no!

Are you still wondering about how my story ends? If so, I did a good job setting you up, because you’ve been sidetracked for quite a while now and you’re still itching for an ending. Next time, just don’t do the same to your readers or your friendly neighborhood editor. We don’t like being sidetracked for long.

As it turned out, the dogs weren’t too scary after I tossed each one a cookie. Instead, they got all happy and were bouncing around me like their new best friend. The people in the house took notice and came out to help. They let me use their phone so that I could tell my boss what was up, and they showed me how the rear windshield wiper could easily be removed and installed at the front of the car long enough to get me through the rest of the trip.

They also gave me good directions into the city and once the snowplow passed by, I was on my way.

It turns out Mr. Rogers may have known a thing or two more about people than I gave him credit for.

Is it true? Well, let’s just say it’s a mix of a couple personal anecdotes from my 20’s that work better when woven into one dramatic setting. Because another rule of storytelling is this:

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.