Telling It Like It Is...with Whistles and Bells

Writing exposition into a scene is tricky and often difficult. You can’t just have your characters blurt out info. It will make for a dull, heavy scene. Something else must be going on at the same time. One idea would be to have two characters in a state of conflict, with the tension created masking the exposition. Another is to have some physical action in play, either in the background or directly between the characters.

I learned this many years ago when I watched the film “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In one key scene, Indiana Jones has just finished up teaching a university class on archaeology. The students file out. In comes his boss, Dr. Marcus Brody, with two guys in suits. Brody introduces them as FBI agents interested in the Lost Ark for reasons of national security (when have we heard that phrase before?). What they want to know is does Indiana have any idea of where the Ark is.

And of course he does. At this point he has to fill them in (and us) on archaeological stuff crucial to the quest, most of it technical in nature. If Indy just spouted these things out, it would have stunted the flow of the movie and brought it to a grinding halt.

But director Steven Spielberg is too tricky for that. So he plays it like this: there is a blackboard in the lecture hall. Indiana picks up chalk, and as he starts telling the FBI agents important info, he rapidly draws rough pictures of what he is talking about, all the while hitting the blackboard hard with the chalk, like audio exclamation points.

Rather than play the rest of the scene out in the same manner, Spielberg adds a new distraction to the mix. He has Dr. Marcus pick up chalk, too, and now both he and Indiana are drawing things when they speak, almost like they are in competition. Going one step further, Spielberg uses the excitement Indiana and Dr. Marcus are feeling to color the way their dialogue comes out. Both start either finishing off the other’s sentences, or talking right over them. The frenetic quality of this type of dialogue gives the scene an electricity, bringing it alive in a way simple exposition could never do.

The audience doesn’t really assimilate all the exposition, of course, but the pictures and words on the chalkboard have been planted in our minds and will resonate later when they come into play durinig the course of the action.

In writing four books in my mystery series, I had numerous times when I used a variation of this technique in key exposition scenes.

In one instance,  a young boxer has some important info to give my private investigator. I obviously didn’t want him to just tell it in simple dialogue, so I built on something that had happened earlier in the book. In that earlier scene, my PI conned the boxer into making a five dollar bet which he lost. The boxer felt stung, and the desire to get even is left there festering.

So when the boxer has this important info, he tells the PI he won’t let him have it unless he gives him a chance to win back his five bucks. The boxer, who happens to be a master pool player, makes the PI pull his car over at a pool hall. They take a table, and the con slowly unfolds.

The PI says he doesn’t want to play because he’s rusty. The boxer keeps pestering him until he reluctantly agrees. The scene then turns into an amusing con job by the PI with a great reversal of fortune. And while the pool game is going on, the boxer gives up his information (not to mention another five dollars).

That scene is one of my favorites in the series. It’s funny and filled with twists and turns and amusing interaction between three of my main characters, further building chemistry.

While exposition is an important part of a story, it must evolve organically from what has happened before. Action or conflict shouldn't just be arbitrarily inserted into a scene. In the case of my pool hall con job, the earlier con by the PI left the boxer with motivation to want to win his money back. So the new scene flowed naturally out of the other.

I’m fond of saying that most of what transpires in my novels comes to me from Visions in the Void, which is true to an extent. Artists of all types experience sudden inspiration without having a clue as to where it came from. That being said, a writer is not just a channel for ideas from another dimension. We think, we calculate and we consciously set up things. I guess it’s a marriage: the writer’s intellect working with the Void to produce a good book.