(First time attempting to comment here; let's see how it works!)
The other thing about "as you know, Bob" is that it's often not just something *one* character says; it's a whole conversation. “—He pissed off Canada! Canada, the country right to the north of us!” gets followed by "yes, and Canadians are usually known for being easy-going, to the point where we joke about it" or something equally alien to how people usually talk.
But the trick for *that* (well, one trick) is to get the characters to argue. You can get away with all kinds of exposition if the people involved disagree on the topic, since they have good reason to remind each other of details or bring something up only to dismiss it a moment later.
Marie! Thank you for commenting. I'm happy to see you here.
Yeah, if you keep pushing at it, particularly in a conversation, it can get stilted right-quick. Arguing or other anger is absolutely great (which is why I flagged "someone is wrong" in "condescension" as well.) But I think almost any emotion can be made to work-- it's so much easier to care about exposition when it's natural and there are both emotional and material stakes. Argument very straightforwardly hits all three of these.
To take a couple of examples from my actual writing: I'm writing a novel in close first person right now, and the protagonist is an iconoclastic teenage girl. So she'll regularly go on rants about the hypocrisy of her society, often with framings "everyone *says* that we have universal respect for personal autonomy but *actually* ..." This ends up being a great way to provide setting information-- it's tied to real material (since she's talking about how it affects her life), it's emotionally charged, it shows conflict fault lines between ideology and policy, and of course it's incredibly natural to have an opinionated, idealistic teenager rant about how her society is hypocritical.
But there was also a recent passage where a ship's pilot talked about the role of interplanetary shipping in maintaining their society which was not angry or disillusioned, but deeply patriotic (he sees the work he's doing, while not glamorous, as the very basis of their society-- and he's more right than wrong about that.) For various reasons, this affects the protagonist's life (both in that she has a lot of options at that moment about her life path and "become an interstellar pilot" is a major possibility, and in that this particular character has offered her a lot of love and support in ways that others have not, so she cares about his opinion.)
It's still basically setting exposition in the form of dialogue, but the emphasis is on a positive emotion. It's definitely trickier to pull off but I think it can work as well.
Of course this is a novel so I can pace these things out. In a short story it can feel a lot more cramped and thus end up stilted.
Anyway, I hope that ramble was at least somewhat sensible.
Yeah, a lot of it boils down to "make the exposition personally relevant to the character, something they have an emotional response to." That response can be pride, anger, fear, whatever -- just so long as it isn't neutral and abstracted from their life.
Yeah. (Of course, after I wrote that, I remembered that you did some absolutely amazing work with exactly this in the Lady Trent books-- which I actually took as a model for the current WIP. And then forgot about when posting this response T_T.)
Heh, no worries. I basically tripped and fell into those techniques when writing those books; I didn't realize until I was *doing* them that my pov choice had opened up those doors for me.
(First time attempting to comment here; let's see how it works!)
The other thing about "as you know, Bob" is that it's often not just something *one* character says; it's a whole conversation. “—He pissed off Canada! Canada, the country right to the north of us!” gets followed by "yes, and Canadians are usually known for being easy-going, to the point where we joke about it" or something equally alien to how people usually talk.
But the trick for *that* (well, one trick) is to get the characters to argue. You can get away with all kinds of exposition if the people involved disagree on the topic, since they have good reason to remind each other of details or bring something up only to dismiss it a moment later.
Marie! Thank you for commenting. I'm happy to see you here.
Yeah, if you keep pushing at it, particularly in a conversation, it can get stilted right-quick. Arguing or other anger is absolutely great (which is why I flagged "someone is wrong" in "condescension" as well.) But I think almost any emotion can be made to work-- it's so much easier to care about exposition when it's natural and there are both emotional and material stakes. Argument very straightforwardly hits all three of these.
To take a couple of examples from my actual writing: I'm writing a novel in close first person right now, and the protagonist is an iconoclastic teenage girl. So she'll regularly go on rants about the hypocrisy of her society, often with framings "everyone *says* that we have universal respect for personal autonomy but *actually* ..." This ends up being a great way to provide setting information-- it's tied to real material (since she's talking about how it affects her life), it's emotionally charged, it shows conflict fault lines between ideology and policy, and of course it's incredibly natural to have an opinionated, idealistic teenager rant about how her society is hypocritical.
But there was also a recent passage where a ship's pilot talked about the role of interplanetary shipping in maintaining their society which was not angry or disillusioned, but deeply patriotic (he sees the work he's doing, while not glamorous, as the very basis of their society-- and he's more right than wrong about that.) For various reasons, this affects the protagonist's life (both in that she has a lot of options at that moment about her life path and "become an interstellar pilot" is a major possibility, and in that this particular character has offered her a lot of love and support in ways that others have not, so she cares about his opinion.)
It's still basically setting exposition in the form of dialogue, but the emphasis is on a positive emotion. It's definitely trickier to pull off but I think it can work as well.
Of course this is a novel so I can pace these things out. In a short story it can feel a lot more cramped and thus end up stilted.
Anyway, I hope that ramble was at least somewhat sensible.
Yeah, a lot of it boils down to "make the exposition personally relevant to the character, something they have an emotional response to." That response can be pride, anger, fear, whatever -- just so long as it isn't neutral and abstracted from their life.
Yeah. (Of course, after I wrote that, I remembered that you did some absolutely amazing work with exactly this in the Lady Trent books-- which I actually took as a model for the current WIP. And then forgot about when posting this response T_T.)
Heh, no worries. I basically tripped and fell into those techniques when writing those books; I didn't realize until I was *doing* them that my pov choice had opened up those doors for me.