So here's a problem I've had for the longest time and I just don't know how to surmount it.
When I'm trying to do some good exposition or I'm trying to get a character to learn details about the plot that are already known, the story immediately becomes dialogue heavy. It seems like every paragraph starts with a quotation and the paragraphs get shorter and shorter in lieu of dialogue. This is really obvious in my Neo I chapter in Cannons to Heaven. I figure a lot of it is because that chapter relies a lot on "I told you this story so I can tell you this one" type of exposition which can't be helped, HOWEVER, there have got to be ways around it.
As a method of trying to work through why I rely so much on dialogue for exposition, I wrote the Kent I chapter entirely in script format (it was sort of a "You like cigarettes? Here, go smoke a whole pack" kind of thing). And what I found was that it was really hard to do.
Another thing I was trying was the Downton Abbey approach to exposition. If you don't watch Downton (which, by the way, you're missing out because its really good), Downton can basically be summarized as "A series of conversations overheard by a third party." However, in order to inform characters of new information that watchers already know, Downton implies conversations between characters by either showing the start or end of them so the watcher understands that said character is now completely in the loop on the newest drama within the Crawley family.
This is definitely a great method to avoid retreading already gained ground and to prevent boring the reader. Despite that, I'm still looking for a way to do more exposition within the description than the dialogue. So, any ideas anyone?
Bookmarks