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An Exhibition of Exposition



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).

Star Liner

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