Handling the Exposition of a Story

What Is Exposition?

The Exposition of a Story is information which, although not a part of the story you are writing, is nevertheless necessary to explain the events.

The most common form of exposition is backstory - or the story of a character's past - although exposition is actually wider than that.

Imagine you are writing a novel set in an advertising agency. The exposition would be all those facts you include that explain how ad agencies work. The facts serve no dramatic purpose, but they are important to add authenticity and understanding and a sense of place to the novel.

I'll repeat this because it's important: The exposition of a story is information which, although not a part of the story you are writing, is nevertheless necessary to explain the events.

Or imagine you are writing a science fiction novel set on an entirely new planet. The exposition here would involve describing the planet's geography, its inhabitants, its language and customs, and so on.

But like I said, exposition is most commonly understood to mean to the principal character's past (or their backstory). Backstory fits into the definition of exposition I gave above because events from a character's past are not a part of the story being told in the here and now but nevertheless have a bearing on it.

So if a novel is about a woman battling cancer, for example, the fact that she was abused as a child isn't part of the cancer story but will nevertheless have a strong effect on the woman's character.

We are all a product of our pasts, and it is no different for a central character in a novel. They, too, have a history that has made them the person they are at the start of the novel. Which means that if the reader is to get to know the character fully, and understand the events of the novel fully, they need to know about this history.

They need to know where the character has come from, what their childhood was like, why their marriage failed - anything, in fact, which helps to explain what they are doing here now, what they want, and why they want it.

With the basic definitions out of the way, it is time to look at how to handle the exposition of a story...