How to Handle Exposition in Epic Fantasy

Epic fantasy is probably the form of fiction that requires the most exposition. These tend to be not just about a main character, although there may be one, but about the fate of entire worlds and peoples.

Add to that the fact that a new culture, sometimes many of them, must be built and explained, and the world, and often the basic physics, are different, and that must be explained as well....

There's a LOT of exposition that needs to happen.

Exposition is hard, because it carries twin risks. It risks boring the reader by giving him a homework he must complete before he can understand the story. And it risks breaking immersion, because things must be explained to the reader that the characters already know.

The trick with exposition is to hide it by carefully choosing HOW and just importantly WHEN to explain.

There are many tricks for hiding exposition, but often less attention is paid to TIMING exposition. Inexperienced authors are sometimes anxious about making sure the reader understands everything, and so they try to explain everything the reader might need to know, back to the beginning of time, before allowing things to happen.

The trick is, you don't need to do that. The reader doesn't need to know everything. He just needs to know enough not to be confused. So long as he can understand basically what is going on, you can, and absolutely should, delay explaining many pieces of relevant background information until a later time.

Readers are comfortable with mysteries so long as there is a clear boundary around the unknown bits, and there is some sort of implicit promise to explain later.

Consider the beginning sentence of Stephen King's "The Gunslinger":

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

Who is the gunslinger? Who is the man in black? What desert? Why is one chasing the other?

You don't get those answers for quite some time, some of them not even in the first book. That's okay. You're watching a pursuit, the pursuit is interesting, and the unknowns in the story only add to the anticipation.

Now, it is in the nature of Stephen King to begin with tantalizing and exciting questions, and then proceed to very disappointing and anticlimactic answers, but that is the downfall of the "discovery writer" and it's beside the point here.

The point is that an epic fantasy need not start with a history lesson, a geography treatise, a culture class, and an introduction to the theory of magic. All these things can be dribbled out at a rate that keeps pace with the story.

My rule of exposition is to use just enough to make the next sentence of the story not confusing, and then add any tiny additional bits that you can find to spark curiosity without yet satisfying it.

Then keep that up throughout the whole story. Exposition isn't something to grit your teeth and wade through at the beginning so the plot can happen later.

It's an ingredient, a particular flavor that must be leavened through and mixed in thoroughly.

I have three more novels to go to finish the story of Marcus, Miranda, and Leela, and how they change the tale of the human race, but after that, maybe I'd like to try some epic fantasy and see if I can make it fast-paced from start to finish.

Original Post