Instead of looking on screenwriting exposition with dread as a mechanical chore, explode the guru 'rules' and discover how to use its wonderfully creative possibilities for helping to make your screenplay original and intriguing.

Like every other element of your work, exposition is determined by the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.This may sound like some kind of empty platitude. But writing a screenplay isn't a question of compartmentalizing the elements. Structure, Character, Emotional Plot, Surface Plot, Dialogue, Visual Grammar, Subtext, Exposition - they cannot be shaped and developed in isolation.

The So-Called 'Rules' of
Screenwriting Exposition

Which is why so much scriptwriting advice can be limited and often unhelpful. How you approach exposition depends almost entirely on what kind of story you are writing.

The manuals are fond of telling you what screenwriting exposition is.
It is, they say, 'Simply the facts of the story'. The information you need to convey to your audience about the story. It acts as 'background' information. Then they tell you that you musn't overload the audience with the facts. You avoid this by observing certain rules.

Okay. Let's get these out of the way now.

"Don't make your first scenes laden with dialogue explaining the who why what and when.

Instead, release your exposition in a controlled drip-feed. Give the audience only what it needs at that moment in the story.

Give the information by creating an argument between two characters in which they will be able to 'deliver' the info in a 'natural' way.

Try to avoid flashbacks, voiceovers and montage to convey the information.

Don't write dialogue where one character tells another what they already know.

Hold back information to keep the audience wanting to know the answers that you have set up in their minds."


Some of this advice, such as information overload, and only let your audience know what it needs to, is sound. It's just that as with so many of the scriptwriting formulas, it doesn't allow for a screenwriter to let the creative process develop organically.

But it's also a question of interpreting the terminology. The guidance on screenwriting exposition focuses a good deal on getting 'the facts' across to the audience. When exposition is really to do with everything involved in cinematic storytelling.

And there seems to be a much too narrow understanding of the ways in which exposition can be given to the audience.

Johnny Depp and Sarah Jessica Parker
in Ed Wood.
Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.
Director: Tim Burton. Touchstone Pictures.


You'll find that most of the advice is about dialogue exposition. But this is such a limited and limiting view of screenwriting exposition.

Screenwriters will be thinking about exposition without realizing it because it is an integral part of the thinking/daydreaming/playing around with the creative source of the story.

This is so obvious, it's astonishing that so many manuals treat exposition as some kind of mechanism that you have to impose on the script.

In its Broadest Sense
Screenwriting Exposition
is How you Communicate
The Story to an Audience

Blue Velvet.
Screenwriter/Director: David Lynch.
De Laurentiis Entertainment.

When you start to imagine the world you are about to create, you will conjure images, words, sounds, atmosphere, setting, weather, environment, the passage of time, which will all form a palpable sense of the world your characters inhabit as you think about the themes and characters of your story.
All these things will ultimately be felt by the audience. And through them, the story's meaning emerges.

Non-Dialogue Exposition

Imparting 'information' is not just a matter of getting the audience to understand 'what's going on'. If they need to know about a character's backstory, there are all kinds of ways a screenwriter can achieve this.

One powerful way is through non-dialogue exposition

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Screenwriter: Paul Schrader. Director: Martin Scorcese.
De Bill/Phillips. Columbia Pictures.

Screenwriting exposition can involve:

Visual Grammar

Sound

Sound Effects

Lyrics

Using Time Dramatically

Flashback

Flashforward

Intercutting Dissolves

Montage

Split Screen

POV

Natural Environment

Location

Clothes/Makeup

Body Language

Many scriptwriting instructors talk about exposition in terms of 'plot dumping', a term which itself is highly revealing of the kind of interpretation they put on this aspect of scriptwriting, suggesting as it does a kind of mechanical chore that has to be dealt with.

Many call it a screenwriting 'tool', whereas it should be viewed as a script element, and one that can offer terrific creative opportunities in your scriptwriting. Screenwriting exposition is a real challenge, it must be said. But the very act of trying to discover interesting ways to reveal character and story can impact on every other aspect of the script.

Conversely, when you're creating your screenplay and thinking about how the narrative thread is to be woven, for example, you will discover ways of conveying exposition.

Screenwriting exposition should be all of a piece with the ongoing creative process of writing the script, not thought about once you've got the screenplay into some shape.

A New Definition of Exposition?

We certainly need to redefine the role of screenwriting exposition as something more than a tool for conveying facts and information. Revealing aspects of the story should be a process, not a mechanism. And it requires us to ask some much broader questions first about the kind of story we're telling, how we're going to tell it, and what affect on the audience to we want it to have.

What kind of world do you want to create? If it's an unconventional context, one that is not recognizable to the audience, what do they need to know in order to understand the story?

How is the story going to be threaded? Is it best being very tightly structured, or suit a more fluid narrative flow?

Do you want to experiment with structure? If you want a looping narrative, a reverse, or other kind of unconventional structure, this is going to affect every element of your exposition. It will mean working out more carefully what your audience will and will not know at different points of the narrative. Playing tricks with structure requires every other element of the script to keep a terrifically strong hold on the audience's engagement.

How soon - or how late - do you want the audience to find out about what's happening now, in the present, or in the past or in the future? How soon do you want them to know about the main character's backstory? Do you want them to know at all?

Franka Potente in Run, Lola, Run.
Screenwriter/Director: Tom Tykwer.
X-Filme. Creative Pool. Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Arte.

Pace will affect exposition too. Do you want to fold the audience into the character's story by revealing the plot in slow degrees?

Will your story need some kind of flashback elements?

Is your main character the movie's 'narrator' - the subjective point of view? If so, are they meant to be an unreliable 'narrator' - where the audience understands that their version of events is not necessarily 'true'? How much does the audience need to be inside the character's head? Is voiceover the best way to achieve this?

Does your story involve a lot of dramatic irony - moments where the audience knows something the character doesn't, or where one character knows something another character doesn't? All this will effect how you write exposition.

Is it a critical part of the story-telling to keep the audience in suspense for a good while? When will be the moment of'revelation'? The risk might be that keeping them guessing goes on too long if they're getting meaninglessly confused.

Exposition - Learn To Love It

The most important thing to remember when screenwriting exposition is that if you've created a compelling and original story that surprises the audience, keeps them emotionally engaged with your character's emotional plot, which in turn, drives the surface plot, you have almost certainly been able to communicate everything you want them to understand and feel.

Trusting your storytelling instincts, trying out different ways to communicate meaning to the audience, and discovering what works and what doesn't work, is a far more fruitful exercise than starting out with a set of exposition rules at your elbow.

Think about the movies illustrated on this page. Consider the different ways in which each of these films conveys exposition. Visual images, Voiceover, opening narration, clothes, interior atmosphere, time alterations, sound effects and so on.

There are so many inventive and imaginative ways of externalizing meaning - don't let the manuals dictate what you should and shouldn't do, before you give your imagination the chance to come up with fresh and intriguing ways to do it.

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Look out for Screenwriting Exposition
Part Two: Voiceover -
On This Site Soon.

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