How to Write Great Exposition for Your Book, Part 2

In my last post, I explained how to write great explicit and implicit exposition for your book. This time, I’m going to explain how to write non-exposition and a great way to combine all three forms of exposition together.
 
(If you’d like to view these two combined posts in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​3. Non-Exposition
 
One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is Diana Wynne Jones’s Dogsbody. Fabulous book. It begins with the Dog Star, Sirius, on trial with some unnamed judges accusing him of something to do with the Zoi, and with Sirius being outraged and feeling this is very unjust, and he’s sentenced and condemned to Earth. . . . How are stars alive? Why do they have this judicial system, and what’s it about? What’s the Zoi? What’s going on? . . . We know what’s going on. We’re all familiar with the judicial setup and we’re familiar with the feelings of confusion and betrayal and injustice. We are given enough to care and to follow along without the narrative being halted with a whole bunch of explanation.
 
To take us back to our earlier example, from non-exposition: “I want to be a werewolf,” said Jimmy. “No, you don’t,” said the old werewolf. “You’re right,” said Jimmy; “I don’t want to, but I have to.”
 
We’re not told that being a werewolf is painful. Now, savvy readers of the genre may know that in many cases, werewolf transformation is described as being painful, and so those readers might think, “Ah, he’s referring to the fact that it’s painful.” But regardless of the reader, it’s clear that being a werewolf is something that no one in their right mind would actually want. We know there’s something awful about it, but we’re not sure exactly what, so when the time comes for Jimmy to have his first transformation, we’re worried about him and we experience it at the same time as he does, with him, feeling his pain with him, instead of going, “Well, yep, that went exactly how I thought it would.”
 
There’s a time and a place for explaining to the reader what’s going to happen, and maybe I’ll talk about that in a future post on building tension, but for the most part, a scene like that first transformation will be a lot more impactful if the reader doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen ahead of time.
 
I do want to give one more tip about writing non-exposition before I go on. The best way to write non-exposition is to assume that the information that you would think to exposit is already known to the reader. Let’s take the example of—say you’re writing in English, perhaps for a primarily American audience, and you want to exposit for some reason that the American currency is the dollar. So Jimmy goes into the grocery store and buys a bag of apples for five dollars. “Dollars are the American currency. When you break it up into smaller than dollars, it’s called cents”—why are you telling the reader this? They already know. Don’t tell the reader things they already know! Or that they can easily figure out.
 
Jimmy, in the made-up country of Alferia, went into the grocery store and bought a bag of apples for five glugibots. What’s a glugibot? Bet you know the answer to that—it’s the currency. We don’t need to be told. The reader isn’t stupid. Trust them; they’ll trust you.
 
Summary
 
There we have it—our three major types of exposition: Explicit, where you tell the reader straight-out. Implicit, where you disguise what you’re telling the reader. And non-exposition, where you assume that the reader is following along.
 
How are they all used together? Generally speaking, for any one piece of exposition, you want to build a mountain shape—in which the low edges at each side are non-exposition, the rising slopes are implicit, and the peak is a single pinnacle of explicit exposition.
 
Harry Potter does this very well. Let’s go with the first Harry Potter book—minimal spoilers—stop reading now if you don’t want to know that Harry is a wizard. [Hides grin behind hand in video.]

​So let’s say that we want to discuss, to exposit, that Harry is a wizard and all that that means. The exposition about this starts at the very beginning of the book. We see wizards and we see how they act, and we see what sort of clothes they wear. We don’t know yet that wizards is what they are, but it will all become clear. So we see people who we later learn are wizards, we see weird stuff happening, all these letters start to appear, and it’s clear that the Dursleys know something about it and they’re frightened and angry. Finally they run away to a shack on the sea, and Harry doesn’t know what’s going on. Or rather, he doesn’t know why it’s going on. We’re following what’s going on—his confusion. But it’s all non-exposition, until . . . Hagrid arrives. And then we move into implicit exposition.

Through dialogue, mainly Hagrid arguing with the Dursleys and being surprised that Harry doesn’t already know a lot of this, we start to learn a bit more about what’s actually going on. We don’t bring it together, we don’t fully understand it, until the one line, the one famous line of explicit exposition, which is: “You’re a wizard, Harry.” [The pinnacle of the mountain.]

​After this, we go back into implicit exposition—more arguing with the Dursleys—and then right back into non-exposition, as we continue following Harry around. Very little is explained to Harry at this point—we don’t even know Voldemort’s name, we certainly don’t know he’s after Harry, we don’t know Harry’s famous, we don’t know what kind of magic wizards and witches can do—although we have a couple of hints. Not a lot is explained, but enough is explained, and then we can go on to, again, learn things through following Harry.
 
Whenever there’s a major reveal like this, and sometimes you can do it in a shorter way, not over the first third of the book, I recommend using the mountain, or maybe a concentric circle pattern, where on both sides the vast majority is non-exposition, and you have a page on each side of implicit, and in the middle a single line—or at the very most, two lines—of explicit exposition.
 
 
I hope you found this informative or helpful. If you have any thoughts of your own to add about what makes great exposition, leave them in the comments section below!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

​Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; The Midnight Files, a serialized, action-packed dark fantasy on Kindle Vella; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.