Screenwriting: The Craft and The Career by Philip Shelley is a new book which is packed with guidance on on everything needed to be a successful screenwriter. The book includes advice on technical elements such as generating compelling story ideas, creating engaging characters, crafting memorable dialogue and presenting your script on the page effectively, as well as insider tips on building and sustaining a career in the industry.
We’re excited to share this fantastic extract with you which provides some great tips on dealing with exposition in your screenplay. Scroll down for an exclusive London Playwrights discount on the book!
Five top tips to nail exposition in your screenplay
How you handle exposition – or conveying information about the story to your audience – is one of the thorniest aspects of screenwriting. Revelation of necessary exposition needs to be seamlessly woven into the story. It should never feel like the action of the story is on hold while the writer catches us up.
Here are five things to bear in mind when handling exposition in your screenplay.
1. Try to disguise or dramatise exposition
Have your cake and eat it – scenes can exist primarily for what is compelling in the moment of immediacy between the characters, but also give us exposition.
The long dinner scene at the beginning of Little Miss Sunshine (2006, screenplay by Michael Arndt) is a great example of this. It’s a long, largely static dialogue scene, packed with exposition for the audience, but all brilliantly disguised and dramatised through the prism of beautifully written character relationships. The specificity of these dynamics – the tension between brothers-in-law Frank and Rich, grandfather Edwin’s misplaced pride in his granddaughter Olive’s dance routine – enables the characters to trade information that is helpful to the audience in a way that feels motivated, believable.
2. Reveal exposition through action rather than dialogue
Try to reveal story exposition through what characters do rather than what they say – or when what they do is in direct contradiction to what they have said. Cinematic images often tell the story with greater emotional clarity and power than dialogue.
The opening non-dialogue sequence to The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009, screenplay by J Blakeson) does this superbly. We learn so much about the story, and the relationship between the two central characters, through their actions and behaviour. One man helping the other to tie his tie is a strangely revealing moment of both relative status and intimacy. The way the two go about a shopping trip, which poses unsettling questions about the intended use of what they’re buying (rope, a saw, a bed)… all of this sets up the chilling abduction that concludes the sequence.
3. Evoke an emotional response through objects
Our lives are characterised by the possessions with which we surround ourselves. You can use these objects and possessions – a wedding ring, a hidden bottle of gin, banknotes under the mattress – to tell your characters’ stories. Using props can be hugely effective in making the audience engage with your characters – and in advancing the story.
Wilson the volleyball from the movie Cast Away (2000, screenplay by William Broyles Jr.) is one of the best-known and most successful instances of this. This inanimate piece of plastic becomes a key character in the movie. It is a device to enable protagonist Chuck Noland to have someone (here, something) to talk to – but it’s more than a device, because this use feels psychologically true. We can all empathise with a man feeling so isolated that he has to resort to ‘humanising’ and talking to a volleyball. When he loses the volleyball at sea, calling, ‘Wilson! Wilson!’ as it floats off into the distance, is a properly tear-jerking moment – that’s good writing!
4. Who knows what, when?
One of the most important questions in how you use and dramatise exposition concerns the relationship between characters and information. How much do your characters know about each other, and about the substance of the story in which they’re existing? What does each character know and what don’t they know? And what happens when one character thinks they know something about another – but is wrong?
Also key is the audience’s relationship to the story. At any given point, how much information are you giving the audience? And crucially, how much information are you giving your audience in comparison to the information you’re giving your characters? Do we know more or less than the characters in the scene? Are we having to work out what is going on, to catch up with where the characters are up to? Or do we find things out at the same time as the characters find them out?
A simple example, to illustrate: a scene from a thriller or crime drama in which our hero is entering a dark, derelict building looking for a shooter or baddy whom she has reason to suspect is hiding inside this building. Do you show the audience that this armed baddy is inside the building, waiting for our hero? Or do we only reveal this shooter to the audience at the same moment as our hero sees them? Or do we show that our hero knows where the shooter is (a set of footprints through the dust…)?
These are three different ways to play this scene, and of course there are very many more – but all are altered by the information we give (or don’t give) the audience and the characters going into this scene. There are a multiplicity of choices in the creation of every single scene, all influenced by the context of these moments in your story: the tone, style and narrative conventions.
5. Be wary of familiar tropes, and consider all possibilities
Here are a few very familiar examples of how writers can convey exposition:
- A group of press clamouring around a key character with cameras and microphones, asking questions.
- A TV or radio news report conveying story information.
- Police officer arrives at taped-off crime scene, PC lifts the tape. Police Officer: ‘So what have we got?’
- A character remembering or thinking about other characters by looking at photos of them (especially photographs on a domestic mantelpiece).
- Letters read in voice-over as they are written – particularly in period films (desk, quill pen, etc.).
- Or, the modern equivalent: characters reading aloud from a screen (phone, laptop, etc.).
- Characters talking to themselves in a way that isn’t real but is helpful to the audience’s understanding of plot.
I’m not saying there is anything inherently wrong about these familiar storytelling scenes – just be aware that audiences (and, importantly, the person reading and considering your screenplay) will have encountered them all many times before.
Often, you should reject the first idea you have about how to play a scene, and explore ten other possibilities before coming to a decision. Everything is about character and context – about what makes sense of the character and their actions – making the scene meaningful, but also surprising.
This is an edited extract from Screenwriting: The Craft and The Career by Philip Shelley – out now, published by Nick Hern Books. Save 25% with discount code LDNPLAYWRIGHTS25 when you order your copy here.
Philip Shelley is a producer and script editor who has been working with screenwriters for the last thirty years. He has run the Channel 4 screenwriting course since 2010, and also runs the Greenlight Screenwriting Lab for new writers in Ireland. He has run many screenwriting and script-editing courses through his own script consultancy (www.script-consultant.co.uk) and with BBC Studios, ITV Studios, Screenskills, University of the Arts London, Baby Cow Productions, and many others. He has extensive experience as a script editor on series like Waking the Dead (BBC), Inspector Morse (ITV) and many others. He was Head of Development for Carlton TV Drama for seven years, where he also ran the Carlton New Writers’ Course, and has worked in script development for BBC TV Drama and several independent production companies.
Photo Credit: Lin Zhang