DAY 2: TALKING TOO DANG MUCH

28 straight days of writing tools and tips and

Hello! I’m going to spend a hot second here telling you all again a bit about exposition.

But before we start, once again, exposition is just a literary device that according to Masterclass:

“is meant to relay background information about a main character, setting, event or other element of the narrative. Exposition comes from the Latin word expositionem, which literally means “showing forth.’”

And in a story, exposition often bores the reader or breaks up the forward motion of the plot.

So why does that suck?

There’s a thing called working memory. Most of our brains can only keep four or five things inside our memory at one time.

That’s not super good. JUST FOUR OR FIVE THINGS! Our poor brains, right?

So, our brains adapted because our brains are awesome and they do this cool thing called “chunking.”

As Anne Hawley, writing for Story Grid explains,

“Chunking is when we group ideas so that together they occupy only one of the four or five available memory slots in our brain.”

Or the APA Dictionary of Psychology says chunking is

“the process by which the mind divides large pieces of information into smaller units (chunks) that are easier to retain in short-term memory … one item in memory can stand for multiple other items”.

Hawley cites Steven Pinker who wrote The Sense of Style and gives this example:

M D P H D R S V P C E O I H O P

If we don’t chunk those sixteen letters together, we would have a much harder time remembering them.

But we can chunk them like this:

M D

P H D

R S V P

C E O

I H O P

And voila! You think about the doctor and the Ph.D. who rsvp’d to the CEO of IHOP.

Amazing, right?

So, exposition inserted into our stories as an info dump? It keeps us from chunking. It makes our brain work harder and that can take our brains out of the story.

Here: This page is all exposition.

Now imagine if I plopped that in the middle of a scene like this:

You are startled (not just by my cursor) by the jumping on the stairs. Wait, your brain might wonder, what stairs? Then it hitches for a second and remembers (with the help of that second line) that she is being chased by zombie hamsters. All that exposition slowed the pace of the story and distracted you, right?

SPOILER ALERT: Be kind to readers’ brains. Most of them don’t want to be taken out of the story, but immersed in it.