How to Avoid Expositional Dialogue in Plays

Video Transcript

STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno, on behalf of Expert Village, here to talk to you today about dialogue. Now, let's look at expositional dialogue. What is exposition? Well, exposition is giving people the information they need to know. A lot of this is probably the status quo stuff that we talked about in the plot outline; status quo. What are we trying to say about status quo? Well, status quo is what happens when we first start the show, so some of that stuff might need to be known. If there's a war going on, we need to know about the war but we can reveal this in different ways. It's always good to not reveal this on the front--in just someone coming on and saying it. You want to have--have it revealed in the dialogue. So, instead of having exposition with two soldiers hanging out and talking about how rough the war has been and how the battles been said. Even on that stage, you can have those soldiers in the midst of a conflict; maybe they're hiding from enemy. So, in this moment, they're talking about something. They're not just hanging out and kinda shooting the breeze. They're actually talking about, "Let's put that box over here. Let's put this box over here. Let's block the door, they're coming in." And we get a sense of someone's coming in. They're not saying, "Well, tomorrow we need to block the door," and they're not giving this expositional thing, that telling everything in the moment. Give it on the fly. So, if you have--you kinda have to just throw things out and kinda build that world. If you're doing a police procedure or if you're doing something like that, you want to have them come in and say, "The blood samples are tainted," or "There was a gruesome scene," that's kind of expositional whereas if you say, "I found a finger on the couch and the blood was running down." and things like that, that kinda gives you more of an--that kinda gives you more of about on the fly. Basically, it's just more descriptive and more focused on the action that's happening as opposed to just giving information for the sake of giving information.

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