alternative techniques for conveying story background information (2024)

If your readers/listeners/viewers need background information to understand your story, there are lots of ways to give it to them: characters speaking exposition, environmental clues, overly-detailed maps, omniscient narrator references, sequels, etc. I'm looking for radical approaches: interactive quiz before the story; infographics; author-to-reader messages; reader selection -- these are me brainstorming, but has anyone tried nontraditional approaches in this vein?

posted by amtho to Grab Bag (37 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite

A few classic examples from films (which you have almost certainly seen) are the city council meeting in Chinatown (which streamlines the complex backstory about water shortages into a literal lecture, lasting just over two minutes, then breaks it up with a farmer interrupting with his sheep to yell "You steal water form the valley!" the result is clear as day) and the animated "Mr. DNA" sequence from Jurassic Park, which turns the film's science exposition into the tour audio for the park.

Lots of good examples in this earlier Ask, too.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:13 AM on May 6 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: These are great, and inspiring so far.

I am also interested in techniques that break the fourth wall and interact with the reader outside the world of the story.
posted by amtho at 11:29 AM on May 6

The "Who is Rachel Chu?" texting scene in Crazy Rich Asians (movie version) conveyed a lot: social dynamics, class/status, locations, emotions, family relationships, plot points, etc.
posted by cocoagirl at 11:31 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

Also from the world of RPG writing: all my games tend to have some kind of background document as a preamble to the character sheet. This is structured so that the information is presented from the most general to the most specific, with more specific information likely to be presented with more bias tailored to a particular faction or character. That part is less relevant to more linear media, where you probably want to present multiple viewpoints to the person consuming the story all at the same time (perhaps through a device like the newspaper or quotations from my previous comment).

I recommend against including an extensive separate background section in the preamble of a prose book -- I've come across these a few times, and found them poorly done and offputting pretty much every time.
posted by confluency at 11:36 AM on May 6

One of my favorite kinds of exposition is unreliable narrator exposition. In Badlands, for example, Sissy Spacek's character, 15 year-old Holly narrates the film as though she is telling a story from a pulp romance, when--it becomes clear--she and her partner Kit are psychopaths on a killing spree. So she is giving you background and "insight" but the background is skewed and the insight is all wrong, though in a way that enhances the film.

Editor Billy Weber talks about how Truffaut's The Wild Child inspired this in a Criterion Collection interview.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:44 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

It doesn't work for every story, but my favorite device is when a fictional book is told as if it's a true story, with footnotes/editor's notes to provide (in world) historic context or expositional clarity as if it's entirely real. It makes the story immersive.

I also like the epistolary approach. A short letter or diary entry can open each chapter, or could be spread throughout with the conceit that they're "found documents" or whatever.
posted by phunniemee at 12:04 PM on May 6 [6 favorites]

It doesn't work for every story, but my favorite device is when a fictional book is told as if it's a true story, with footnotes/editor's notes to provide (in world) historic context or expositional clarity as if it's entirely real. It makes the story immersive.

George Saunders' novel Lincoln in the Bardo does this, recounting a story about ghosts in a cemetery on the evening of President Lincoln's son Willie's passing, with extensive footnotes and citations, both real and fictional.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:12 PM on May 6

The second Knights of the Old Republic computer RPG used the player options in dialogue to deliver exposition.

Not the standard "ask about something so an NPC so will give you info", but the PC choice. So the Battle of Kashykk would come up in dialogue, and when it was your turn to talk you'd pick from several options, one of which was Oh yes I remember the Battle of Kashykk, I was on the wing of the rebel army when we routed the Tandorans and we freed many Wookiee slaves that day it's too bad there are so many still enslaved elsewhere.

You wouldn't pick the "exposition dump" option often because who talks like that? It was there to get the player up to speed on Kashykk and Wookiee slavery if they didn't remember 10,000 years of lore in the Star Wars universe. (Which I don't, no need to explain there was no such battle.)

cRPGs of the time tended to still be giving PCs amnesia or making sure you were a fish out of water so you could constantly ask basic information. This approach felt quite innovative, and made playing an experienced veteran with a lot of history (the backstory for the PC) feel quite natural.
posted by mark k at 12:37 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Jon Bois (previously on MeFi) makes a lot of narrative videos that use visuals of charts and maps to increase the sheer amount of information he can give the reader. 17776 and its sequel 20020 are multimedia science fiction pieces that use animated maps and charts, fictional sports trading cards, interviews, chat transcripts, and more to aid exposition.

The opening of the 2007 action movie The Kingdom uses old news reports, a voiceover, and animated infographics to do a bunch of exposition about the history of oil and politics in the Middle East.

I've seen (I think on the BBC's website) at least one news story delivered partly in a sort of FAQ style, with questions as headers for sections that were collapsed by default and that windowshaded open when the reader selected them. Maybe on that site I've also seen options like "read this story in: 10 words / 100 words / 500 words / 1500 words" to let the reader choose how much depth they wanted.

"Meet Your Mayor" by THE CITY (an online newspaper covering New York City) offered "a short series of questions — one might even call it a quiz — that will match you with candidates who align with you on a particular issue".

Julia Evans has made interactive in-browser text puzzles to help people learn how to debug computer networking issues as well as comics-style zines to educate programmers about fiddly bits of programming and computer systems, and has written about "How I write useful programming comics".
posted by brainwane at 1:01 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

Commercials inside Starship Troopers appealing directly to the audience and asking them to click what is effectively a pop up.

Would you like to know more?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:00 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I also enjoy when movies set themselves up for exposition and then sidestep it anyway.

In Escape from Alcatraz, another prisoner asks Frank (Clint Eastwood) "What was your childhood like?"

His reply: "Short."

And honestly... that works. That does the job.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:02 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I think the general assumption is that readers/viewers/players hate exposition when they're beginning the work and actively avoid it; and then can't get enough of it once they find a work or world they love.

For books, the classic example is the prologue and appendices in Lord of the Rings.

The French comic series The Cyann Cycle has, as its third volume, an encyclopedic overview of the worldbuilding (worlds-building, since it's sf). Of course popular media properties like Star Trek have all sorts of extra stuff you can buy, from engineering diagrams to language textbooks.

My own conworld is in fact almost entirely worldbuilding... I find I'm good at that rather than at writing novels. What can you put in? Well, anything: in-world stories, in-world scientific articles, book reviews, religious texts, subway maps, a culinary tour. A friend is producing actual music for the world.

Video games are often innovative in this way. Like, I kind of recoil at your idea of taking a quiz... but that's exactly what you do in the tutorial for Fallout 3. Bethesda and Arkham games, and the Dishonored series, are full of environmental storytelling, and lore dumps (text, cutscenes, recordings) that you can enjoy or skip. Fallout 3 and 4 also features interactive re-creations of the pre-war world, which are much more immersive than reading about it or finding reminders of it.
posted by zompist at 4:10 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

In the video game Warframe, there are these scattered tablets with test questions (from a spaceship that the main characters were previously on and theoretically taught these things as children). You get to choose an answer and it will tell you if you’re correct.

We have a number of basic world-building questions such as:

1. What event concluded the Eighteenth Radiation War?
A. The destruction of the Arctic Hive Cluster (correct)
B. The assassination of Marcellus Ambrosius Lephantis

2. What is the core thesis of The Palimpsest of Spacetime?
A. Events can be rewritten; traces of the original persist (correct)
B. Everything that exists could, at any point, be erased

Then, things become increasingly more revealing of the underlying society and culture…

5. What should public architecture celebrate?
A. Our understanding of geometry and physics
B. The proven superiority of tiered society (correct)

13. What will be the primary challenge of colonising Tau?
A. Remaining industrious in the midst of abundance (correct)
B. Unknown native hazards of the environment

Then it starts getting… interesting…

14. By what right do the Orokin govern?
A. Through intrinsic superiority
B. This is a Forbidden Question (correct)

25. What invaded the Galleria?

A. There is no such place
B. Nothing you need to worry your head over (correct)

And then…

26. What was the ultimate fate of Albrecht Entrati?
A. He is entombed on Lua
B. That's the question, isn't it, kiddo? (correct)

27. How many fingers are found upon one's hand?
A. Five
B. Where are my fingerbones, kiddo? (correct)

28. Did you forget, kiddo?
A. You owe me. (correct)
B. ERROR – RESPONSE NOT FOUND

29. You wouldn't welch on a deal, would you?
A. *CORRUPT FILE DETECTED*
B. I saved them. All of them. Never said I'd save you. (correct)

30. What is 'the Wall'?
A. The barrier between rational reality and the Void
B. The Wall of Bone in whiKU NOMA ELU RA KAH, MARA LOHK? (correct)

You can see the full list of Zariman tablets here. In the game, they’re in various random places around the world—so you can come across them in any order, so there’s no actual defined reading order (though the site above that I pulled the text from puts them in a sensible one). The game has an established existential horror entity known as The Man in the Wall who regularly refers to the protagonist as “kiddo” and is presumably at some point speaking through these tablets, but even then it serves a world-building purpose.
posted by brook horse at 4:21 PM on May 6 [5 favorites]

Homestuck is FULL of these. The Epilogues start off with a mock AO3 page where the massive list of tags & content warnings actually give you context on the story.

Mark Dunn's Ibid is a story mostly entirely written in footnotes.
posted by creatrixtiara at 4:31 PM on May 6

Response by poster: This is gold:

readers/viewers/players hate exposition when they're beginning the work and actively avoid it; and then can't get enough of it once they find a work or world they love

If you're gonna infodump, engage first.
posted by amtho at 4:39 PM on May 6 [3 favorites]

I've recently been revisiting the TV series Person of Interest, which I enjoyed when it was on the air.

It has a rather complex mythology, but I've always been impressed with how effectively the opening sequence conveys the key concepts in less than a minute, thru a combination of voiceover and visuals.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:52 PM on May 6

The first thing that came to mind for me is the interactive storytelling game Duskwood - there are heaps out there, though I thought this one was done pretty well.

Because the premise is that you are a stranger to this group of friends, they fill you in on background as part of the story, and do things like take you on a walking tour of their small town, send you photos and have video chats with you etc. It's set up as a mystery you are investigating, so everything is a potential clue. Having the backstory be part of the story itself is I think part of why it works so well, and the different types of media involvement also lends interest and realism.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:26 PM on May 6

For books, the description of it on the back cover. This is very, very simple and probably not radical but I can't think of a more effective way to frame the book or provide one or two crucial pieces of information. I don't think that authors very often have control over that text though, and that always strikes me as such a missed opportunity.

I'm watching Alps right now, an early Yorgos Lanthimos film, and it would be a very different experience if I had not read the introduction and synopsis MUBI provided.
posted by spindle at 7:08 PM on May 6

I've always thought this sequence from Lexx, running from about 6:20-8:00, was kind of a weird little masterpiece of exposition. We start with a view of a planet that has big, sinister, gray grids where the oceans should be, then we go down to a dystopian cityscape that makes Metropolis look homey. Cut to the show's anti-hero, Stanley Tweedle, waking up in a coffin-like pod to a propaganda video he's clearly been subjected to a thousand times before. It starts with a tinny anthem and then an eerily calm voice tells us about a parallel universe, a dark zone of chaos and evil, that exists all around us. Only our dear leader, His Shadow, protects us. The video shows a pair of white, claw-like hands holding the two universes, and the footage looks crackly and old. Every detail of Stanley's sleeping pod is grim and oppressive, from his thin fishnet blanket to the shadows of people passing by three feet from his head. When the propaganda video ends a hideous face with pixel-y cartoon eyes and a human mouth appears on the screen, warning Stanley that he has hundreds of demerits already and he'll get more if he's late for work again. Stanley blearily climbs out of his pod and we see that it's just one of many, he basically lives in a drawer inside a giant filing cabinet. In less than two minutes we know a whole lot about this blighted world and the frightened, sleazy little man who lives in it. The show made some bad stumbles during its run, but that sequence should be taught in film classes.

Alan Moore pulled a neat trick in Watchmen, with the last few pages of each chapter given over to excerpts of media from the book's world. We saw pages from an old superhero's autobiography, a rant from a right-wing tabloid, a police report about one of the superheroes who'd been captured, etc. I haven't kept up with superhero comics, but it sounds like they're still ripping off Moore with this "datapages" stuff.

The people who write video games are incredibly lucky when it comes to exposition, because they can just have the player find scattered notes that tell you everything you need to know. "Dr. Prescott's experiments have gotten out of control! He's created a chimpanzee-piranha hybrid that feeds on spinal fluid, and it's gotten loose! It's breaking down my door, right now! Darling, tell the children that I lo -- " I can't think of any other medium where the writer has that kind of luxury. Of course the player is free to ignore that stuff, and then write angry reviews about how the game's story makes no sense!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:15 AM on May 7 [1 favorite]

RPG sourcebooks often include short short stories set in the game world.

A useful thing that sometimes happens organically is that someone writes a bunch of short stories first, and then starts writing novels set in the same universe. The short stories can serve as useful introductions to the novel setting, even though they're not built into the novels for this purpose. For example, I always tell people to read The Battle of Candle Arc before starting on Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit and the rest of the novel trilogy, because it will make a lot more sense (and the story doesn't spoil any plot points).
posted by confluency at 2:28 AM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Does the old CD-ROM video game Myst have anything to offer here? (I confess my memory of it is uselessly vague.)

Kind of. Myst has a "story" that takes place during the game itself, but it's fairly minimal and cryptic, essentially just a single choice that the player is asked to make. Almost all of the backstory that you need to understand the implications of that choice is presented through in-game journals, and to some extent through environmental storytelling.

That kind of in-game backstory presentation could probably have been called "radical" back when Myst was first released, but it's pretty commonplace in modern games.

As another video game example, Disco Elysium has "voices in your head" corresponding to various skills and personality traits. Some of those traits correspond to knowledge/understanding/intuition about the world in which you find yourself. So the more points you spend on those skills, the more context and backstory you get.
posted by teraflop at 3:39 AM on May 7 [1 favorite]

couple video game things I think I'm remembering right:
in red dead redemption 2, your character will write and draw in his journal when you sleep in game. any new animals or plants you saw, some landscapes, sometimes deep cowboy thoughts or updates on the story.

in cyberpunk 2077 there are often radios playing - when you steal a car or are in someone's apartment or shop there's a decent chance the radio DJ does a news story or some flavour text about the world. the world in this game is quite good at telling you about itself.
posted by euphoria066 at 8:28 AM on May 7

This part in The Wolf of Wall Street always stuck out to me as some very efficient exposition. Leo begins with a description of what an IPO is and you expect him to do a kind of a Big Short or Vox-type explainer about the financial shenanigans they were involved in but then he just bails out and says:

Look, I know you're not following what I'm saying anyway, right? That's okay, that doesn't matter. The real question is this: was all this legal? Absolutely f*ckin' not. But we were making more money than we knew what to do with.

Instead of explaining the mechanics and details of a Thing and relying on the audience to draw the desired conclusions/inferences, you can sometimes just tell the audience directly the key conclusions that you wanted them to get out of the exposition. This specific kind of 4th-wall-breaking, glib/arch/semi-comedic presentation might not work in all contexts but it may be worth considering as a more general technique.
posted by mhum at 3:27 PM on May 7

There is a published physical book available based on an in-universe book from the Mr. Robot tv show.

I don't think it would make any sense at all without watching the show.
posted by yohko at 7:04 PM on May 7

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