How To Deliver Exposition Through Dialogue

Summary of "Dialogue" by Robert McKee

📚 Dialogue is a must-read for fiction writers.

🕒 Save time by reading my comprehensive summary.

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My summary is broken into four posts:

Part 1: Dialogue is action

Part 2: Understanding the silent language

Part 3: How to deliver exposition through dialogue

Part 4: How to write character-specific dialogue

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Here is Part 3:

Exposition - The fictional facts of setting, history, and character that readers need to absorb at some point so they can follow the story.

The goal is to find a balance when delivering exposition.

If you don’t provide enough exposition, the reader may not care about the story.

But if you slow the story down too much to provide exposition, the reader might get bored.

To maintain interest, good writers reveal exposition only as needed.

Some facts need to be stressed and repeated in more than one scene to guarantee the reader remembers them. Other facts may only need a single mention.

The goal is to have expostion in dialogue go unnoticed.

Readers are slow to forgive a list of facts shoehorned into dialogue for no reason intrinsic to the characters or the scene.

Robert McKee provides two techniques for revealing exposition without readers noticing:

1. Narrative Drive

2. Exposition as ammunition

1. Narrative Drive:

Instead of pausing the story, slip small pieces of exposition into dialogue to make your readers curious.

Every small piece of information makes them want to learn more.

This will compel them to read further for answers, propeling narrative drive.

2. Exposition As Ammunition:

At pivotal moments in the story, have characters use what they know (and what the audience needs to know) as ammunition in their struggles to get what they want.

These revelations will deliver the pleasure of discovery to the reader as the expositional fact quickly vanishes into the background.

The most famous pieces of exposition in film history was revealed this way:

“I am your father” - Darth Vader

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Continue reading my Dialogue summary:

Part 1: Dialogue is action

Part 2: Understanding the silent language

Part 3: How to deliver exposition through dialogue

Part 4: How to write character-specific dialogue

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