The Exposition Waltz

So I've been a good boy this week, diligently spending at least two hours a night on the rewrite of my supernatural thriller.

I've reimagined the backstory a bit, and really done a lot of work on the main character, whose emotional journey is a lot more developed, and hopefully helps drive the story more.

My problem is that this is one of those tales with real exposition issues. Because I'm jumping into the story late, there is a lot of backstory to work in along the way.

If this was a four-hour miniseries, I could spend the first hour on what happens to my main character in her childhood and as a young woman; here, the tale begins with all of these events at least five years in the past.

So it's a constant waltz, trying to figure out what to reveal when, and how best to do it. I'm trying not to have flashbacks, because it's a device that I don't think will work well in the context of my story, so pretty much everything has to slide out via dialogue or visual moments along the way.

It's tricky, trying to parcel it out, and make it feel natural. The trick is to make it come out of the story, building so much interest into the "rules" of the supernatural element of my tale and what might have happened to my main character in the past, that the characters would naturally ask each other questions or feel the need to explain things, and that the audience will happily devour each dollop of information because they want the answers too.

So at times, to make sure I have it all in there, I'll overwrite. I'll purposely give my main character long, dense, clunky speeches about what happened, but not actually leave them in any scene. Instead, I'll carve pieces off the speeches and spin it into a piece of dialogue here, a silent moment there.

Once I get this pass down, I'm going to do an exposition pass, just jotting down what information we learn in each scene, and how we learn it. I'm going to make sure everything is there, and that I haven't established the same thing in four different scenes.

I'm going to ponder whether the exposition is something we really should learn earlier, or if it serves the story to hold it off a little later. And I'm going to think about better ways to bring across the exposition, or if certain bits needed at all; there's a lot of things the audience can be trusted to put together on their own.

It's a constant dance, one that (bad metaphor alert) I've been a wallflower with too much in the past.

But it's just one of those things that needs to be done.