the scene is concerned, and all the necessary information should be conveyed in the discussion of that purpose.
The best example of this in my own work is the scene between James Taggart and Eddie Willers in the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, where Eddie is urging Taggart to do something about their Colorado branch line and Taggart is evading. If you read that scene, you will be surprised to see how much you are learning—under the guise of their argument—about the overall situation of Taggart Transcontinental.
An example of bad exposition is the kind of old-fashioned play which opens with two servants talking onstage: “ ‘The master is away.’ ‘The pearls are in the safe.’ ‘The mistress is entertaining a suspicious character on the veranda.’ ” Shortly thereafter, the pearls are stolen.
Devoting a line to explaining something is sometimes proper. An example is the exposition right after the names of the various intellectuals at the party at Rearden’s in Atlas Shrugged.
“Bertram Scudder stood slouched against the bar. His long, thin face looked as if it had shrunk inward, with the exception of his mouth and eyeballs, which were left to protrude as three soft globes. He was the editor of a magazine called The Future and he had written an article on Hank Rearden, entitled ‘The Octopus.’ ”
This is a proper use of exposition since it is done in the nature of a parenthesis, without stopping the action.
If you have a complex exposition to give, you will in the beginning be anxious to give it all at once. It will seem to you that you have to tell the reader everything or he will not understand you. Do not be fooled by this; the story will carry if you make just one point clear. A few sentences later, you divulge something else, and so on. Feed one bit of information at a time.
There are no rules about where to feed information or at what tempo; you have to gauge this by the general structure of your story. Some of the information conveyed in the scene between Eddie Willers and James Taggart I could have planted in advance, by having Eddie worry about the Colorado branch line, or stop outside Taggart’s office to discuss something with an underling. But since I could impart all the necessary information in the major scene, it was better to do so than to give the exposition special emphasis. Also, I had already planted enough ominous overtones to convey that something is going on which disturbs Eddie. I would have weakened the drama had I given the reader any inkling of the specifics until he sees them in action, in the form of a conflict.
The ingenuity you can exhibit in regard to exposition is unlimited. You can make an advantage out of a liability: instead of being burdened with your exposition, you can feed it at the points where it fits the narrative or the dialogue and makes the scene more dramatic.
But be careful to be objective. Do not rely on any knowledge which the reader does not yet have. You might deliberately make two characters talk for a while in a mysterious way until you clarify what they are talking about; that is legitimate. But watch for when you have held the mystery—or withheld the information—for too long. Instead of being intriguing, a scene that is bewildering for too long becomes boring.
Flashbacks
A flashback is a scene taken from the past. It is a dramatized exposition.
The story of Dagny and Francisco’s childhood in Atlas Shrugged is an example. Since their relationship in the novel is based on what happened in their childhood, I want the reader to know about this before he meets Francisco as a character. Had I merely summarized their childhood in a paragraph, that would have been exposition. But since I wanted to cover their childhood in detail, I literally had to go back into the past, and that is a flashback.
The only standard for when to use flashbacks is the importance of the information you want to convey. Incidental information you cover in narrative. If the information is important to the story, it is better to go into a detailed flashback.
But do not burden a story with unnecessary flashbacks. If in every other chapter you go into a flashback, you confuse the reader. Some writers have flashbacks within flashbacks: they start with a middle-aged person in the present, then show a flashback from his youth, during which they show a flashback from his