8 Exposition Examples to Help Craft Your Story

There are many types of exposition — in literature, film, and other media. Exposition introduces your reader to important and intriguing details of your story: who, what, why, where, and when, as well as key background information. Despite its reputation for setting up a story, exposition in writing can actually appear at any point in your novel. 

You could fill your story with direct, unambiguous exposition, or tease out details slowly for your reader. This will depend, in part, on your genre. Popular fiction tends to have faster pacing and exposition, whereas literary fiction may reveal plot or character more slowly. 

Here’s a brief summary of 8 exposition examples in fiction: 

Now, let’s look at these examples in more detail. 

Dialogue exposition: The Shining

Stephen King's classic horror novel The Shining shows how dialogue can be used to reveal a little about your characters and their immediate (or past/future) situation.

In the opening chapter of The Shining, the protagonist Jack Torrance is interviewed for the winter caretaker position at the creepy Overlook Hotel:

   Ullman had asked a question he hadn't caught. That was bad; Ullman was the type of man who would file such lapses away in a mental Rolodex for later consideration.
   "I'm sorry?"
   "I asked if your wife fully understands what you would be taking on here. And there's your son, of course." He glanced down at the application in front of him. 

   "Daniel. Your wife isn't a bit intimidated by the idea?"
   "Wendy is an extraordinary woman."
   "And your son is also extraordinary?"

 

King, The Shining (1977), p. 2.

Through character exposition via dialogue, we learn that:

• Jack Torrance is married and has a son.

• The position Jack's interviewing for may be intimidating or daunting in some untold way.

• Jack's wife is extraordinary.

• His son might be extraordinary, too.

If you use dialogue for exposition, keep to information that is relevant to your plot. By page two of The Shining, we already know King's setting is intimidating and have been introduced to the main characters — both key elements of the story ahead. 

If you’re gearing up for a lot of dialogue-driven exposition, make sure you have an interesting character delivering the message. Think Doc Brown from Back to the Future — his flamboyant and expressive delivery instantly elevates his speeches from dull scientific jargon to the exciting unknown (or known, depending on your scientific chops). 

History exposition: One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez blends personal and social history brilliantly in his novels. Cien años de soledad (translated as “One Hundred Years of Solitude”) begins with historical setting exposition and expository character details that bend time:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

 

Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), p. 3.

Marquez moves seamlessly from describing an intimate memory of the Colonel's father to describing their hometown, Macondo. We get a sense of its size and surroundings, as well as the promise of dramatic events in Colonel Buendia's future (but not yet why they come to pass). It's an excellent teaser.

Use your own characters' present, past, and/or future in exposition to flesh out their lives and create a vivid sense of time and place. If you’re struggling with distinguishing different time periods, try experimenting with subheadings for chapters — perhaps including the year or date that they are set. Doing this takes some of the guesswork out for your reader, allowing them to enjoy your story more easily.

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Setting exposition: Beloved

Beloved, Toni Morrison's devastating, Pulitzer-winning novel about the cruelties of slavery, opens with a great example of setting exposition. 

Morrison creates the haunted atmosphere of a home that holds a deeply traumatic history, using personification to show her setting's atmosphere:

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old - as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it.

 

Morrison, Beloved (1987), p. 2

The family home, like an embittered or raging person, is “spiteful.” Morrison's exposition example shows how experiences and memories attach themselves to a setting. Her description is rich with feeling and unsettling in its implications of a history of violence and loss.

Like Morrison, make your setting exposition characterful. Show the atmosphere of your setting, along with the memories, fears, or joys it holds for your characters. Do your characters want to stay there forever, or run away like Howard and Buglar?

Character exposition: Cat's Eye

Character exposition reveals important or interesting information about your characters. For example, you can use it to reveal your characters' flaws, loves, hates, passions, goals, and fears.

This is the groundwork for writing character development. Your reader first needs to know who your character is or was before they can understand how they have changed (or will change).

Margaret Atwood's novel Cat's Eye tells the story of an artist, Elaine Risley. Elaine returns to her childhood stomping grounds in Toronto at the start of the book, for a retrospective of her art. This leads her to remember her childhood (via flashbacks) and the complex friendship she had with another girl, Cordelia.

Atwood writes vivid flashback scenes that show her characters' natures. When the novel shifts from childhood flashbacks to the older Elaine, however, there is more exposition. Here, Atwood shows how Elaine feels about her life now, a little way into the story:

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don't feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I'm shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I'm shrinking, as if I'm filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.”

 

Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988), p. 13.

This exposition example works because the introspection of the older Elaine fills in the gaps. We have a sense that she's experienced a lot. Her more inward-looking, self-reflective voice contrasts with the bright, emotionally starker scenes from Elaine's childhood.

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Action exposition: A Court of Thorns and Roses

Leading with action — particularly an action that is intriguing or out of the ordinary — is another common approach to exposition.

Showing rather than telling can reveal much more than telling. You could say “Tom was an angry guy” or show Tom losing his temper completely in a specific situation. The latter shows much more specifically what pushes Tom's buttons.

Sarah J Maas's popular romantasy series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, begins with a specific action. The protagonist is hunting in a forest, perched in a tree:

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.
I'd been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless. The gusting wind blew thick flurries to sweep away my tracks, but buried along with them any signs of potential quarry.

 

Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), p. 4.

It's clear from the precise opening action that the protagonist is waiting for quarry to appear. The action is intriguing, as we don't know whether quarry will turn up, or why Feyre has to hunt in the first place (though the book's blurb gives us an idea).

Backstory exposition: The Great Gatsby

Backstory exposition is useful when you don’t want to overcrowd your writing with context right away. It’s also great for generating suspense — for example, if you begin your story right in the heart of the action (e.g., a murder) but don’t describe the events that led to it, you can keep the reader engaged with the promise of a big reveal.

It’s often more effective to weave backstory exposition throughout your novel — otherwise, you risk boring your reader with heaps of context. Reveal just enough to keep the plot moving, but not so much that your reader feels like they already know what will happen next.

F. Scott Fitzgerald does this in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is initially presented as an extremely wealthy (yet troubled) individual. It isn’t until chapter 6 that Mr Gatsby’s humble beginnings as a working class man are revealed. By delaying Gatsby’s backstory exposition until the second act, Fitzgerald prompts the reader to keep turning the pages.

At the beginning of chapter 6, we learn of Gatsby’s fabricated persona:

James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career — when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomee and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

 

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), p.118

After spending the first five chapters pondering the mystery of Jay Gatsby, this backstory exposition gives us the core information: despite his lavish lifestyle, Gatsby is actually from a working class background.

Theme exposition: Human Traces

A different way to find exposition for your story is to think about the themes associated with your story's main subjects. You can then mine these for images and ideas.

In the opening exposition of Sebastian Faulks' novel Human Traces, one of the two main characters, Jacques Rebière, listens to a howling gale outside.

The narration touches on the idea of what it is to be young, to be human, and to be these things in turbulent circumstances (symbolized here, as it often is, by the weather).

Jacques Rebière listened to the sounds from outside as he looked through the window of his bedroom; for a moment, a dim moon allowed him to see clouds foaming in the darkness. The weather reminded him, often, that it was not just he, at sixteen years old, who was young, but all mankind: a species that took infant steps on the drifts and faults of the earth.

 

Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (2005), p. 1.

Expository images may introduce significant themes that your story will explore further later on. The exposition here echoes the novel's later concerns of “madness and consciousness,” as Alexander Linklater puts it in a review for Prospect Magazine.

Unexpected circumstances exposition: Letters from a Lost Uncle

Good exposition tends to leave out the obvious and uneventful. Why is it considered a little clichéd for a character to wake up at the start of a story? Because if a character has been asleep, this naturally follows. You don’t need to explain it to the reader.

Now, if a character wakes up and some detail from their dream appears in their waking world, this is unexpected. If they wake up and it's just another ordinary day, consider starting the exposition where the ordinary is about to become the unusual instead.

Mervyn Peake's whimsical Letters from a Lost Uncle is a great example of unexpected exposition — words and illustration combine to create a sense of the extraordinary and the accidental.

On this page, the illustrations feature unusual blotches, as though the author has accidentally spilt ink. However, a note is included:

 “Sorry about the blotches but I’ve just cut my finger.”

 

Mervyn Peake, Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948)

By creating an unusual circumstance through illustration, Peake gives himself the opportunity to present exposition in an engaging way.

As well as the accompanying note, the bloodstains cover a few of the words in the letter itself — adding to the book’s sense of mystery and wonder.

Don’t worry if you can’t pick your favorite type of exposition — you don’t have to! In fact, many authors often combine different forms of exposition to add to the vibrancy and credibility of their writing. For example, in The Shining, Stephen King uses Jack Torrance’s initial interview to provide character, setting, and dialogue exposition all at once. 

If you’re ready to start trialing your story exposition, check out our writing software Reedsy Studio — a free tool with outlining and planning features for all your exposition-related ideas.