Struggling With Exposition

15 years of a relationship - 30 minutes of dialogue?

Is this another plug for my new short film Honey, out now here, yes, it is, BUT WAIT! I’m talking about some more interesting things, too. I’m hoping.

If you’ve already seen Honey, I appreciate you so much. I won’t get into the intricacies of what it’s like to have your work well-received as I’ve done that before, but I will say thank you! again, as I mean it from the bottom of my heart.

If you’ve already seen Honey (if you haven’t - what are you waiting for? also, Honey spoilers ahead!), you know the film is about this newly married couple, Ron and Madeline. It’s about these people’s baggage, and about the loss of love, and a big part of the film is about how Ron and Maddy are two people who do love each other, but are not each other’s soulmates. They are not perfect for each other, and have done a lot of bad to each other, but still very much love one another, as relationships are often complicated like that.

When writing the film, I didn’t find any of this particularly difficult to establish — I know relationships like that, so I didn’t really struggle too much to develop Ron and Maddy’s feelings for each other. What I did struggle with - a lot - is establishing the past. Establishing such complicated, long history, and this history was a very important detail, as it reflects on these people’s present a lot.

First of all, I have to say the easiest thing to write is two strangers. My short Jack & Michelle was not a difficult piece to develop - when two people don’t know each other, they ask each other questions, and so the questions that the audience has are answered, too. The audience is curious about the characters, but the characters are curious about the characters, too, and so it’s pretty straight-forward.

When two people do know each other very well, it’s very difficult, because they wouldn’t ask each other that many questions. They are content with each other. They know these things. And in the case with Ron and Maddy, any things they don’t know, they maybe don’t even care about, either. That was my main issue - how do you provide exposition for characters that have very little exposition to provide to each other?

(Another small issue I personally had was that I don’t really know what it’s like to be married and to have more or less fallen out of love, like Ron and Maddy have. So developing a relationship like that - a long relationship, such that holds so much joy, but also so much pain, proved really difficult to explore - and required extensive research.)

So, enough jibber-jabber, I’ll get to the point. How do it? Did I just wing it or did I find a system?

I found a system. It’s actually really simple, and my life changed after found this hack.

Never underestimate the viewer. Do not spoon-feed people information. People are smart.

Yes, this is no news flash, but hear me out.

What this means to me is - if I know the history of these characters, and if that’s established through the dialogue and the acting, then the audience are very likely to understand the history and the dynamics of the characters, too. Basically what I learned is, you need less direct exposition than you think - I didn’t need to say that Maddy and Ron have had issues because the way they speak to each other already implies that.

If you start a story at a certain point and you know everything that came before that point, the audience is very likely to get that too, as your story does reference the past. Even if it doesn’t actively reference the past, it still definitely does — action and reaction, cause and effect, these are things so engrained in us that we understand them almost at a subconscious level.

When I wrote the first draft of Honey, there was a third character in the beginning of that script that told Ron and Maddy they have died, they are not each other’s soulmate, and that they have 30 minutes to say goodbye to each other. I then decided that character was 100% not necessary - we can start the film from when they already know these things, and the way they address these things will make these things clear. Hopefully, it does. We don’t need to hear someone say to Ron and Maddy they are not each other’s soulmates because when Maddy asks Ron Why do you think you’re not my soulmate?, that already implies they know this information, and we get that’s indirect exposition to us, too. We don’t need to hear they have died to understand they are dead, as there are many instances where they reflect on that, just as two dead souls really would.

Anyway, hopefully all that makes sense. In short — the viewer is smarter than I think, and sometimes you don’t need direct exposition in order to make the viewer understand something.

And I need to say this before I wrap this up — I still struggle with exposition a lot, as most writers do, and this is no magical fix. I have absolutely not mastered the craft of exposition, believe me that! This is just a tool I’ve found very useful, but of course it’s not a fix-all solution.

Lastly, I’m linking an incredible video on some of the best exposition ever written for film (read Sorkin’s scripts!). This dialogue does have a lot of direct information thrown at the viewer too, and the way it’s structured is beyond masterful. Give it a watch, it teaches a lot.

(And watch Honey.)