There are many clever ways to work in open exposition and information dumps. Gormless characters are fabulous for this. Think Neo in The Matrix being introduced to the real world of the red pill. Harry Potter raised by muggles being introduced to the magical world. Or John Cusack’s slack-jawed John Kelso the reporter character in the movie version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s a sort of “As you should know but don’t, Bob…” But it doesn’t always work to have a character who doesn’t know what’s going on and stands in for the audience.
I was thinking of this the other day while reading Kate Elliot’s Furious Heaven (the sequel to Unconquerable Sun). Two moments of info dumping stood out to me.
The first was having Sun (the main character) get both lectured to and grilled by her mother, Queen Marshal Eirene, in a didactic manner. Sun is not the gormless character – she already knows the info her mother is imparting. The act is actually back of a power conflict between the two of them. And the book explicitly discusses this (and how annoyed Sun is by her mother). The scene allowed for open exposition in a plausible, natural manner.
In another part of the book, we are told that before every assembly in the Phene empire, there is a ritual of depicting a four minute history lesson. This passes as a propagandistic engendering of patriotism and fits the autocratic nature of the society, but is really just another tool for open exposition.
So those got me thinking of all the ways that authors come up with for open exposition. My least favorite came back to me: Hazel from Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series who suffered from “blackouts” (flashbacks of repressed past experiences) to accomplish open exposition, only to have her conveniently cured as soon as they were no longer needed.
What interesting ways have you seen open exposition accomplished? How have you gone about it?
Ramblings 