Exposition and Dialogue

[Lord Celebi]

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?

[FedoraChar]

Well, I hope I can be of a little help here ^^' You write a completely different genre than I do, and one that I haven't really looked into a lot. And I'm still struggling to figure out what advice you're looking for.

I think maybe what you might want to try is more showing and less telling--maybe you could use flashbacks to demonstrate something that's happened, and cut back showing that the character learned this "So and so nodded as they took in the story" or something like that.

When you say, "some details that are already known", are they known to the reader? Or are the character and the audience learning these details at the same time?

[Lord Celebi]

I think maybe what you might want to try is more showing and less telling--maybe you could use flashbacks to demonstrate something that's happened, and cut back showing that the character learned this "So and so nodded as they took in the story" or something like that.

Yeah, that's basically what it comes down to. More showing, less telling.

More flashbacks? I've been experimenting with those a bit, I'll have to use more and see what happens.

When you say, "some details that are already known", are they known to the reader? Or are the character and the audience learning these details at the same time?

The former. It's definitely a symptom of having six different characters in six different locales, so each character has imperfect information as opposed to the reader, who is limited omniscient (as far as what's been revealed in the story). However, the characters have to learn these details by interacting with other characters.