Summary, Exposition, and Narrative
Facts and information! All books need them in order for the reader to understand the story. But deciding how to deliver them is often the difference between a book that’s a slog and a book where the pages turn themselves. Whether fiction or non-fiction, and with works for any age of reader, the writer’s ability to relay information in a way that feels natural, not forced, is one of the keys of delivering a well-crafted work.
When I discuss this with writers (whether as a professor teaching writing or as an editor), I try to break it down into two simple rules. The first rule is one almost all writers have heard before: Show, Don’t Tell. If you’re unfamiliar, this means it is better to describe a piece of information rather than state it factually. For example, “He clenched his jaw and felt his hands tighten into fists” is more evocative than “He felt angry.” The reader feels more involved in the story, more connected to the character, when information is shown.
The second rule isn’t nearly so pithy or straightforward: Be attentive to your balance of summary, exposition, and narrative. To understand this, let’s use an example that came to me while listening to the book Slow Horses by Mick Herron. In the book, British intelligence agents who have demonstrated they aren’t ready for the big time are left to whither at Slough House, doing administrative tasks and generally feeling humiliated. One of the ways their humiliation is underscored is the fact that they can’t get anyone out to their office to perform maintenance tasks. This is a perfect example of showing how unimportant and neglected they are, rather than telling us. And it also provides a great way to differentiate between summary, exposition, and narrative.
Summary involves basic statement of fact. In our maintenance example, we could state the fact for the reader. “The agents at Slough House were so unimportant that their requests for basic maintenance, like fixing a dripping faucet, were usually ignored.” This sentence provides the fact (the agents are unimportant) and an example (the dripping faucet doesn’t get fixed) succinctly and without flourish. This workman prose is often needed when telling a story. The reader needs to know the information, but the information isn’t so vital that sharing it in a different way would substantially improve the story. We don’t need to hold anything back.
Exposition involves covering the facts but in more extensive detail. In our example, exposition would go into reasons why maintenance requests are ignored, perhaps relate multiple past examples and their consequences, and give the reader (as my dictionary defines) “the background to the main conflict.” Sometimes exposition can take the form of a mini history lesson, something many history books do when introducing a new character. We go all the way back to when that character was born, how they grew up, and the major beats that led them to this moment of the story. Summary almost always fits in naturally with a story—even if the information could have been conveyed more artfully. Exposition, on the other hand, runs the risk of taking the reader out of the narrative and then jarring the reader again when they rejoin the story’s thread. One way to address this is to use…
Exposition through dialogue, in which the characters themselves relay the same factual information. Let’s imagine it with two agents, Sid and River.
“They’ve denied my request to fix that leaky faucet again,” River groused.
“Oh no!” Sid sympathized. “You’ve submitted that request three times now! It’s like they are trying to make us feel neglected out here.”
“We’re always the least important people in the whole operation. It’s like they want us to quit or something.”
“Are you going to submit it again?” Sid asked.
“What’s the point?” River said. “I remember Lamb saying the door to the file room got stuck once, and he ended up having to cut it in half after waiting six months to get a joiner out here. I think it’s always been that way for agents here, probably going back to when this office was established 40 years ago. The more they ignore us, the easier it is for them to pretend that us substandard agents aren’t still around.”
This relays the same information but, ostensibly, within the flow of the story because the characters are speaking. But, if your ear is tuned to what I’m trying to express in the above, this whole conversation rings false. This is not the way two people would speak to each other about an issue like this. The dialogue is written to make sure the reader feels included, rather than to reflect natural conversational flow between two people who share the same knowledge (knowledge the reader doesn’t have).
This is one reason writers often include “reader proxies,” characters who are new to a world and thus can explore and learn alongside the reader. The Harry Potter series is a perfect example of this. Harry is not from the wizarding world, just like us muggle (wizard term for non-magical people) readers. So when Harry asks a question about how something works, it feels natural, and the reader gets to learn too. The reader forms a tighter bond with Harry because we are all learning about this new world together. Harry’s two best friends, Ron and Hermione, help us too. Ron is from a wizarding family, so he knows practical matters about how the world works, and Hermione loves reading and history and is determined to learn everything she can to make up for her muggle upbringing. Harry asks the questions, and Ron and Hermione supply the answers, all in a way that feels like it is integrated into the storytelling. And this style of exposition gets us closest to…
Narrative, or elegantly incorporating background information into the storytelling itself through details and realistic dialogue between the characters who inhabit the story. Here’s an attempt at this using the scene from River and Sid from above.
The letter was stamped denied, and River tossed it on the desk in disgust. He could hear the faucet dripping in the bath. Three weeks of drips must be enough to fill half a swimming pool by now.
“What?” Sid asked, after River kicked his desk leg and toppled his pencil cup.
“They don’t want to fix a bloody thing around here.”
“And that’s worth a bruised toe?”
“I should take a saw to the damned thing,” River said.
“Great,” Sid said. “We can be stuck here with half a faucet just like we have half a file room door.”
It’s doesn’t cover all the same info as above, but we don’t need this particular section to do all that work. In general, we never want to overburden a scene so much that it has to convey all the relevant information. More can be spooled out over time, naturally, all with the aim of keeping the reader involved in the story. From the few lines above, the reader learns that the agents feel futile and frustrated and that something happened to a door that involved it getting cut in half. Hopefully this piques the reader’s interest, encouraging them to read on and to read deeply, looking for additional pieces of info that will help understand the dynamics of the world these characters inhabit.
But how to balance summary, exposition, and narrative? This is the challenge of the writer (and editor). There are no easy answers, and I look forward to exploring this topic more in future posts.
Is this kind of balance of information sharing something you take note of in your work? Or in works that you read? Are there other terms you use to describe similar ideas? Can you think of any examples of particularly elegant narrative, or especially clunky exposition? Share your thoughts in the comments!