The Vegetable Model of Exposition
Exposit like you eat. And skip the salad.
Exposition is like vegetables.
I hate vegetables.
Yes, I know. “But vejtiblez r gud 4 u!” I hear someone saying. They have essential vitamins, minerals, and ruffage! Every child has been taught the importance of their consumption for basic health.
All true. And also, almost every child also hates them and would rather eat basically anything else.
Likewise, I hate exposition.
By exposition, I mean information that is essential to understanding and appreciating a story. Every writer has been taught the importance of exposition, yet every writer wrestles with it because few readers actually want to read exposition. When writing a samurai tale, an author would be very lucky to have a readership that cares to sit and learn about the denominations of currency in 14th century Japan, even if such a familiarity is necessary to properly digest a story they care about. I’m not saying readers who like some exposition don’t exist – they certainly do – but I am saying most readers who come to a certain book to read about samurai fights are probably going to care much more about katana duels than coins. Every reader might need to understand coins to grasp the nuance and impact of this story, but for most readers, that knowledge will be a means to an end, a necessary evil. I know plenty of readers (including yours truly on occasion) who have bounced out of otherwise good novels because of the learning curve that story demanded. Translation: exposition.
This is worsened by the ol’ “show don’t tell” policy of writing. How, exactly, does one explain the nuances of Japanese coinage through “show” alone when every character in the world is already intimately familiar with the mechanics of their coins?
There’s tons of advice out there on how to pull this off, but in this essay I’d like to step back and take a look at exposition from a wider lens. Using vegetables. There’s more than one way to deliver exposition, just like there’s more than one way to consume vegetables. Toward that end, here is my model of exposition types, explained through vegetable consumption:
The Vegetable Consumption Spectrum
Vegetable ingestion can be placed on a spectrum, and here I’ll refer to my own journey with these yucky chloroplastic packets, my special distaste for them, and how I have negotiated that. Refer to the figure below:
Note that I’ve arranged the servings based on how altered they are from their original state. On the far left, the vegetables have been prepared in such a way that they’re wholly undetectable. On the far right, no such pretense has been made at all. Let’s look at all three.
“Cooked Veggies” – Hidden Exposition
On the far left is “Cooked Veggies,” above a picture of a plate of brownies.
Note the quotation marks.
Now, brownies are a delicious dessert item; a natural enemy of vegetables. That said, I have this cool aunt who manages to load them with nutrition! She sweetens them with honey, uses the purest flour with flecks of cinnamon, and then sneaks volumes of spinach and sweet potatoes into the blender with the mix. What comes out the other end tastes like a brownie but miraculously stores leafy greens somewhere in its scrumptious matrix!
Cooked Veggies Exposition is exposition that’s so well integrated into the story that you don’t even know you’re ingesting it. Your attention never leaves the story. The information is shared organically through allusion or context clues.
That said, Cooked Veggies is also the hardest to pull off and most likely to fail. If I find an unprocessed pocket of spinach in my brownie, I will turn into a toddler. If a reader misses the cues, they’re unlikely to go back and find them again. They might simply be lost to the story, or have to pick up the threads slowly later. In the worst case, they’ll assume you never provided sufficient answers.
Many Cooked Veggies guides recommend utilizing a Watson character (as in Dr John Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories) who, like the reader, is ignorant to many of the story’s events, so the reader can naturally learn alongside said character. For example, The Great Gatsby’s narrator Nick is a stranger to the ritzy New York scene, so we can vicariously ride along with his initiation into the upper class’ decadent societal ways. It could be argued that Watson devices stray toward the Cooked Veggies side of the spectrum since they are still action events that we can expect to occur within the context of a story, so the reader receives the exposition organically.
Cooked Veggies are great, but contrary to popular advice they’re not the only way to exposit. Moving to the right across the spectrum, the techniques get more blunt.
Salads – Pls Don’t.
In the middle are salads, and this is the only category that I will say is flat-out bad and to be avoided.
I’m sure there are readers out there who have wonderful salad recipes and will take umbrage with my words, but I stand by my values: salads are poorly conceived, unsightly attempts to mitigate the natural inedibility of vegetables. You may adorn your glorified pile of leaves with oils or vinegar, craisins or cordyceps, truffles or confetti, but you will not find Ian anywhere near it or its Bohemian bamboo serving tongs — I’ll be over in the carnivores’ line, serving myself a third portion of meat. It’s not personal, it’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that your salad is putting on pretenses that it is not at its bottom a heap of lawn clippings, and I refuse to dignify its delusions of being otherwise. I know when I’m biting into a chocolate chip or whatever versus spinach, and I know the former is only present to make the latter more palatable. I can’t call it unscrupulous, for that somehow feels like an endorsement. It’s infantilizing. I won’t abide it. I shan’t. I can’t.
Therefore, Salad Exposition is exposition that occurs within the story, but is still obviously exposition delivery.
You know the tells for Salad Exposition. A character says one of the following, and you know you’re about to chew cud:
“As you already know…”
“In case I need to remind you…”
“You mean to tell me…”
In Brandon Sanderson’s writing class, he calls this “Maid & Butler Talk,” in reference to a certain era of stage plays where at the opening a nameless maid and butler would take center stage and deliver all the exposition necessary for what was to come next:
Butler: It’s eight o’clock, and time to tidy up the manor! As you know, Master Walsingham will be home within the hour, and will wish to dine with Lady Walsingham, as he always does.
Maid: Yes, though I hope she returns in time from the horseback riding she enjoys each afternoon!
Butler: Quite right! As you know, the Lady has been staying out later each day, and we have both overheard the gardener say she was spotted departing from Mister Potterson’s estate, which, as you know, is on the adjoining land!
Like a salad, it’s dry and insufferably unintegrated. The characters are dishing out information they both obviously already know and would never naturally say to one another. The audience will never even see these two characters again after this scene, because they exist only as a lazy information-delivery vehicle. It’s clearly contrived only for the audience’s benefit.
In book form, Maid & Butler Talk might look like this: a fantasy orphan protagonist is waltzing through his home village when he passes by two nameless adults talking about the strange news coming out of the south of a roving army and looming darkness… but who could believe such talk? After all, our village of Watercress has stood between the Dells of Arugula and The Balsamic Peaks for two-thousand years… since the time of King Radicchio and the Mesclun Wars (all facts we random NPC villagers have known since approximately birth)! We’ll surely be safe, and besides, who has time to worry about all that when this week is The Romaine Festival! It’s only held once a year, and nothing bad ever happens there! I even heard our king – ahem, our Caesar – is sending a magical envoy this time… it’s only a rumor, but I heard from Dandelion – the village immediately downriver as you and I both know – that our Caesar is following recent prophecies from the Church of Amaranth, and is searching for a new Warrior Judge! We haven’t had one of those since the Kale Era five-hundred years ago which coincidentally corresponded precisely with the last invasion from the non-European-derived enemy led by the legendary Sultan Saladin! [gasp]
Salad Exposition. Please do not. It’s only the most perfunctory and transparent effort to hide its components or what it’s doing, and your audience can see right through it.
‘Hwy Doth We Salad, Tho?
That said, I don’t think anyone sets out to write Salad Exposition. Usually it happens because “cooking in” the exposition is too difficult or too costly in the form of word count.
Let’s look at this principle in the context of a sci fi story: a captain and lead engineer are walking through their ship’s hangar on a lunar base discussing their approaching mission. What the reader needs to know here is when they’re launching. How can the author organically communicate that?
Maybe the captain calls for the installation of specialized weaponry but gets rebuffed:
“But our mission is less than two weeks away,’ replied the engineer, “we need more time!”
Eh, this is passable, but I smell salad. Even if the engineer is merely sharing the launch date for emphasis, both characters already know.
Let’s nudge it toward Cooked Veggies:
“It can’t be done,” said the engineer.
“It will have to be,” the captain answered.
“If launch is eleven days out, then it can’t be done.”
“How long do you need?”
“A month.”
“And what if we don’t have a month?”
“Then at least two weeks.”
“Done. And I want the launch vehicle looked over again. I don’t like the way the shocks felt on our last impact.”
This is much more natural, and much more Cooked Veggies because it showcases the dynamic between the captain and engineer.
Notably though, it also requires far more words. Cooked Veggies often do.
We writers don’t always have the luxury to spend extra words, especially in short stories. Fortunately, there’s a third, highly efficient option.
Unfortunately, writers seldom use it anymore, although they should.
Raw Veggies – Just Say It
On the far right of our spectrum is Raw Veggies. I might hate vegetables, but the good news is that, by nutritionists' recommendations, an adult doesn’t actually need all that many veggies to remain healthy! Rather than try and hide them or obscure their naturally repugnant flavor, sometimes the most painless path is to take my daily prescription and eat it as-is without adornment or conceit.
Raw Veggies Exposition is exposition that plainly tells the facts. It’s often delivered in an omniscient style. Non-diegetically, if you will.1
This might immediately seem… wrong. A writer should show, but this is nothing but telling! It’s like a textbook! So boring!
It is indeed blunt information delivery. But it’s also one of the most efficient ways of handling exposition. And sometimes, I argue, it’s the best way to handle exposition.
Consider the following quotation from Leon Uris’ The Haj. Uris describes a sumptuous Arab wedding feast the protagonist’s father is throwing which is quickly devolving into gluttony and excess. Then he gives us this paragraph:
It is said there were four ways of eating [in this society]. With one finger to indicate disgust; with two fingers as a show of pride; with three fingers as an indication of normalcy; and with four fingers to show voraciousness. This was strictly a four-finger affair.
What an excellent visual bundled into a concrete cultural detail! But look at the bluntness with which it’s delivered. Uris doesn’t employ a Watson to receive a cultural lecture, nor does he put the reader over the shoulder of the partygoers to watch them tally up their fingers. He could have – at the cost of at least several hundred words and the risk of making the reader spit bitter green cud or not apprehend the nuance. But instead he opts for the most sensible and efficient recourse: he just flipping says it. He lays the raw veggies out and says, Here. Eat this. It’ll be good for you, I promise.
Forty-four words.
This is also a common technique in science fiction, when a complex concept has to be explained quickly.
The next example involves a spoiler for Michael Crichton’s Congo, so if you’d rather skip it then jump down to where it says end spoiler in caps:
At the story’s finale when the characters are fleeing the volcanic eruption, Crichton describes the spectacular event of lightning erupting out of the ash plume and into the sky. This is a wild enough phenomenon that he pauses a moment to explain the physics and volcanology with Raw Veggies.
Some would argue this Raw Veggies Exposition interrupted the action. Perhaps it did, but understanding it certainly added to the shock-and-awe value of the scene. Realistically, how else could he have delivered it?
Should Crichton have had the fleeing characters whirl around and Watson the exposition with, “Egads! How is this phenomenon possible?!” so another character can explain the physics while they’re running? Would that work?
Let me answer that by asking this: is this The Magic School Bus?
Then no.
Or maybe Crichton could have had a knowledgeable character witness the lightning, and then he could have described that character thinking about said physics, sort of exposition-by-proxy.
Unlikely. I think Crichton’s intuition is correct that in the moment those eminent scientists and seasoned adventurers were probably instead thinking AAAAAHH!!
Well then, what if we tucked the exposition elsewhere? Maybe our heroes could discuss it once they’re in safety. But that would mean the reader wouldn’t understand what was happening until after the fact, so it would have stretched credulity in the moment. They could have discussed it before the event, but I suspect that would have been far too obvious of a Chekhov’s Gun for when those same characters later find themselves standing on the slopes of a disturbed volcano with reckless volumes of dynamite.
No, Raw Veggies was the most sensible and elegant solution.
END SPOILER FOR CONGO
Raw Veggies, Broad Narrative Distance
Here some readers might detect synergies with another concept I’ve presented called Narrative Distance (I said Narrative Distance, not Narrative Voice). I won’t repeat the whole thing – you can read it here – but in brief, Narrative Distance is the proximity of the narration to the action or events. A near or tight distance would have the reader cleave to the given character’s subjective experience (“I stepped in the threshold and my breath stuck: blood on the floor, a familiar body lying in a welter…”) versus a far or broad distance where events are described from afar temporally, emotionally, or subjectively (“I was seventeen when I found my sister murdered.”). I argue that one of written media’s greatest advantages is the ability to “zoom” from one narrative distance to another, moving fluidly from near to far, tight to broad.
The Raw Veggies example from The Haj is a great case study for this. The provided excerpt is told at a broad distance, but is sandwiched between tighter sections. In the midst of concrete details about the feast (near/tight distance), we suddenly get Raw Veggies (broad/far). Likewise, Crichton takes a momentary break from the tightness of fleeing a volcano, almost like hitting a pause button, and explains the phenomenon of plume lightning even as we’re screaming to find out what happens to the characters. The concepts of Raw Veggies and broad narrative distance go hand-in-hand.
Most contemporary advice will say that Raw Veggies Exposition is bad writing, full stop; but that’s just not true. First of all, Raw Veggies is drastically preferable to transparently perfunctory Salads. Secondly, it’s far and beyond the most efficient in terms of word count. And even stylistically, it’s sometimes just the best option.
A bit of concrete advice: for my own writing, if I find I’m struggling to organically exposit something, I’ll often see what happens if I just… state it. Plainly. Raw Veggies. Sometimes, it turns out that Raw Veggies was what I needed all along! And if that doesn’t work, the exercise of making my exposition plain and explicit often helps me figure out what exactly is the necessary thing I’m trying to convey and what’s stopping me from doing so, which helps me find a better way to package it. Sometimes Raw Veggies leads to Cooked.
Qualifiers and Conclusion
It’s probably worth noting here again that most of the tools and concepts I present are more for writers than they are for readers and analysts. As much fun as a spicy criticism can be, the goal is to help facilitate more resonant stories, not vivisect existing ones. These categories get harder to pin down when it comes to other forms of media like film, for example. Is the text crawl at the beginning of Star Wars Raw, or Salad? There are probably some seriously strong opinions on that out there, and the answer kind of loops back to the Narrative Distance tool which is the domain of print rather than visual media. The goal is not to take the veggie model and use it as a yardstick to choose what stories are “good” or “bad.” The goal is to take our in-progress stories, analyze what may or may not be working and why, and find ways to improve them.
Now, if anyone needs me, I’ll be anywhere except the salad bar.
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Diegetic is a term describing cinematic music that is happening “in the scene,” as in the characters can hear it too. The Tatooine cantina music is diegetic. The Imperial March theme is non-diegetic. Likewise, Cooked Veggies and Salad Exposition are both “diegetic,” meaning the characters could pick it up, too. Raw Veggies in non-diegetic.
Hmmm, we're going to have to disagree about salads, as a thing to eat, but absolutely agree as a mode of exposition.
I'm putting this in DREAD