Dialogue & Exposition

Exposition is an essential part of good dialogue. It is a necessary component in how the story — not the plot — of a movie is communicated. It helps the audience understand where characters came from prior to the movie starting and how the past will affect how that character moves through the story from scene to scene.

Dress up naked exposition

While exposition is not a part of the dramatic action of your story, it does explain to the audience why events matter. As an explanatory tool, it doesn’t advance the story. It advances the audiences’ understanding of the story. At times, information is absolutely necessary to give the proper context to events. It’s the writer’s job to find ways to insert this otherwise inert information into a story in ways that disguise it’s real purpose.

For the audience to process this information without being pulled out of the story, the exposition must be cloaked as something else so that it does not appear as a naked ploy by the writer to tell the audience information that wouldn’t come out of a character’s mouth.

One of the great screenwriters, Ernest Lehman, put it like this:

“One of the tricks is to have the exposition conveyed in a scene of conflict, so that a character is forced to say things you want the audience to know. For example, if he is defending himself…