Make Exposition Change Something

In the second scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda has just watched a ship break up in a storm. Her father says he has arranged things so that no one aboard is hurt, and that now she must know more. She answers that he has often begun to tell her who she is and stopped, “Concluding ‘Stay: not yet.’” Prospero says: “The hour’s now come.” What follows covers twelve years: a duke who gave his government to his brother, the brother’s treachery, a midnight coup and a voyage in a rotten, unrigged boat. Shakespeare won’t let it lie still. Prospero keeps stopping to check whether his daughter is listening: “Dost thou attend me?” “Thou attend’st not.” “I pray thee, mark me.” “Dost thou hear?” Miranda answers that his tale would cure deafness.

Then the passage turns. Miranda asks why her father raised the storm. His reply is that fortune has brought his enemies to the island, that his prospects now depend on “a most auspicious star,” and that if he does not court it now his fortunes will ever after droop. He says “Here cease more questions,” and Miranda, at his word, sleeps. Once Ariel has reported on the storm, Prospero asks the spirit what time of day it is, hears that it is past midday, and says that the time between now and six must be spent “most preciously.” Miranda and the audience now know what the storm was for, a clock is running, and the audience is looking for a confrontation with the people the storm delivered.

Scene and summary carry the reader through events. Exposition stops to explain, and it earns the stop when the background answers a live dramatic question, something the reader is currently afraid of, hoping for, or puzzled by, and leaves that question changed. Prospero’s account of the past is long, it is exposition by any definition, and it is probably one of the livelier stretches of the play.

Plenty of exposition is information delivered because it exists: the prologue of history, the chapter of the world’s rules before anyone needs them, the paragraph of encyclopedia inside a scene. It answers questions the reader has not asked, so it reads as delay, and some of it is written to reassure the author that the reader has everything. Prospero’s speech is information too, and long, and it arrives at the moment the audience most wants it.

You can put the test to a single paragraph of your own. What does the reader believe or fear before it, and what after? If nothing differs, the paragraph can wait or go. An essay about a bridge failure may need the history of the steel specification, but readers will accept it only once they need to ask why the steel cracked, so the history goes right after that question.

Moby-Dick pushes against all of this. In chapter 32, “Cetology,” Melville halts the voyage to classify the whales as folios, octavos, and duodecimos. He tells the reader the matter is “almost indispensable” to understanding what follows, calls the whole undertaking the classification of “the constituents of a chaos,” and ends by declaring the system left unfinished, like a cathedral with the crane still standing on the tower. A reader may skim the chapter or treasure it, and the book risks both. Where it works, it may be because the whale becomes a creature that resists being held in any system. That is one reading, and the chapter remains a gamble.

Practice. Take a draft with background in it, fiction or nonfiction, and fifty minutes. Highlight every passage that explains something not happening right now. In the margin beside each, write the live question it answers, in the reader’s words: Why does she distrust him? Why is this road closed? If you cannot write one, move the passage to a separate file (Practice 13). If you can, move the passage to just after the question is raised and before the answer matters, and add one sentence showing what the information changes for a character: a new fear, a decision, a deadline. Then count the passages that could name no live question.