Info Dump Land and other Exposition Pitfalls

So we did exposition as backstory in Episode 186 and Episode 166. We looked at origin stories in Episode 170 and what you need to know when the story begins and core wounds and how they impact the character’s decision making. Episode 122 was the last time we focused on it and it’s been four years so we’re gonna look at all that again.Let’s start with some exposition questions:Who was Obiwan Kenobi before he was a Jedi?Does it matter?The key to exposition is always including what matters and leaving out what doesn’t. We don’t need every aching day of Ferris Bueller’s high school existence – in fact, we never even see him attend school (fueling the conspiracy theory that Ferris doesn’t actually exist and the whole movie is just Cameron’s fever dream). But everyone at school talks about him, so we know there must be days when he walks the halls.Exposition is the stuff that happens before the story begins and the art of exposition is getting that information in the book or story, to the reader, so that what’s happening now makes sense without overloading them with the entire history of Shannara.There are several ways to deliver exposition according to literaryterms.net:Backstory or prologue — the dreaded fact dump that precedes a storyInner monologue or flashback — where the character remembers or thinks about something that happened in the past and therefore gives us that prior knowledge we needDialogue — where one character tells another about something that happened before the story so we (the reader) get that information, too.Read more on the blog