Game of Thrones is a superb
television series based on a superb set of books by George R.R. Martin.
Contrary to popular perception, only the first book in the series is called “Game
of Thrones.” The series as a whole is called “The Song of Ice and Fire.”
Television and novels are two very different media, and so they have to tell
their stories in different ways. The pacing is different. And with TV you have
to be concerned about budget. I remember an interview with George R.R. Martin
where he said he had written an episode for the TV version that showed all the bannermen
of the Starks being called, each receiving a raven (call to arms) and getting
their houses together and riding off to support the Starks. He said the
producers came to him and told him that if they shot that scene as written, would
use up all the money in the budget for the year.
One of the things that both media
have to wrestle with is exposition: telling information the audience needs to
know. It is backstory, or things that happened off screen which are important
to understand the plot. These are also called info dumps. Think of the
narration in the movie Dune. The narrator explains about the navigators and the spice and
the planet Dune and the family houses. It was
not the most elegant info dump, just having someone tell the audience what they
needed to know. It was necessary because without these facts, the movie-going
audience would have no idea what was going on (except for the people who read
the book, and if you are a movie producer, you definitely want more people to
buy tickets than just the ones who read the book). Exposition is a problem for
writers or screen writers, because it interrupts the flow and tends to be boring.
There are absolutely no readers who skip ahead in the novel so they can get to
the exposition part.
Some people do get more creative
about exposition rather than just having someone explain stuff to you. It is
best if you can do it in a way that does not call attention to itself. An
expert writer can blend it into the action so that the reader will not even
realize that he has been info dumped upon. The show-runners of “Game of
Thrones” came up with a novel way of disgorging exposition to the audience. I
guess they decided that if the audience had something interesting to look at
while the show was dumping information on them, it might be more palatable. So
one character could be giving us a monologue telling us backstory while two
naked girls are having sex in the background. There is a term that came to be
associated with this type of info dump, it is called “sexposition”. I don’t
think this term existed before “Game of Thrones”. Let me be clear that this is
a phenomenon of the television series. It is not to be found in George R. R.
Martin’s books. He certainly has sex in his books, but he does not use this
technique to info dump.
One has to wonder if “sexposition” is
really a viable way to pass on critical information to the audience. I mean,
who’s paying attention to the words? If what is being said is really that
important, maybe you should not be distracting the viewers from the information
that is being shared.
If you are a writer, the first
question you should ask yourself is: does the audience really need to know
this? If so, it is good to come up with creative ways to pass on information to
the audience. Just make sure that you are not too clever for your own good.
Blend the information in. Don’t distract from it. And the old maxim for writers
applies: show, don’t tell.
(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an
ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online
sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out
soon).
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