In a recent post on her blog, Roz Morris suggests a few rules for writing dialogue that contains exposition. Writers are generally warned away from using dialogue this way, but when it’s done well, the writer can disguise the exposition as natural sounding conversation. “Storytelling involves a lot of information-giving,” Morris says. “Somehow, we have to tell readers what they need to know about the world, the characters and back story. And sometimes dialogue can do it perfectly well, without spoiling the authenticity of the scene.”
She suggests a few rules of the road, including:
- Dialogue is not for you. It’s for the characters. When you write dialogue, your characters should always be foremost in your mind. “You want to create the illusion that they are acting from their own purposes,” Morris says. If you need to convey information in dialogue, find a character who needs it and give the explainer a reason for sharing it. Don’t have characters discussing information they both already know, unless there is a very good reason. Heist films almost always have a scene where the characters review their scheme. If your characters sound like that when discussing common events, you should rearrange you information.
- You, the author, can explain things to the reader; the characters can’t. The writer can convey information in narrative – a character’s age, appearance, some brief backstory – in a way they can’t in dialogue. However, you can slip the information into your narrative between pieces of dialogue. Something said by one character may trigger a memory in another, which you can add as narrative in between bits of dialogue.
- Make the characters react to each other. A good test for expositional dialogue is how the characters react to each other, Morris says. If your characters already know the information being bandied back and forth, they aren’t likely to react. In contrast, new information or context will provoke a response. “Do they learn something, change each other’s minds, watch a satisfying reaction of shock, become closer, become less trusting?” Morris asks. “All of this can be used to make an expositional passage feel real and natural.”
