43 - Effective Exposition - trusting your audience

It’s a bug bear isn’t it? Exposition. I mean, in one sense we’re told to show and not tell but we also need our visitants to understand your worldbuilding, to feel like they can anticipate outcomes so they’re not caught flat footed (or we don’t fail to catch them flat footed when we need to). How do you go about telling your visitant about the world you’re creating? Seth and Marcos uncover some really powerful tools that will help you up your game with exposition, promote clarity and help your visitant settle in. So pop on the ear amplifiers of your choice and dive into another fantastic episode of the WorldCraft Club Podcast.

Links and Sundry

• Shaun of the Dead Doesn’t Know There’s Zombies – This provides world context for the story and highlights the sense of alienation that are present in so many zombie movies (even the funny ones).
• John Wick – The boogey man scene – This is straight exposition but it’s done with such dramatic flare that you’ve gotta love it sometimes its the difference between labeling details and making those details significant through the telling. Warning swears abound!
• The Way That Matrix Scene Played Out – This, my friends, is a lore dump.
• The Way That Matrix Scene Should’ve Played Out – I think we can all agree the architect was miscast in the original. ‘Ere go open you’re yapper one more time!’
• The Wise Mentor Trope – Rip Torn as Patches O’Houlihan was really the best example of a wise mentor trope. We know exactly what role he’s supposed to serve and he does it with a wrench in hand.
• One of Terry Pratchett’s Infamous Footnotes – The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

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