Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Terrible exposition

So there’s dialogue that can inspire us as writers. Dialogue that employs the best practices and principles to help steer us toward greatness. Then there is crap dialogue. One form of crap dialogue is terrible exposition.

What is exposition? Here’s a definition: “Dialogue, description, etc., that gives the audience or reader the background of the characters and the present situation.”

There is a saying in Hollywood writing circles: “Exposition equals death.” Nothing can dull the reading experience and slow a story’s energy more than exposition. In fact that’s why I put together an SMC class called Handling Exposition.

So when Teddy Pasternak suggested we focus on terrible exposition as a Daily Dialogue theme, I think the overall response was we could learn something from seven days of confronting that.

Therefore let’s troll through the history of cinema and surface some examples of really bad exposition.

You know the drill:

* Copy/paste the actual dialogue from IMDB Quotes or some HTML or text version of the script.

* I’d love to have accompanying video clips, but I suspect these may be difficult to find. Like who will post something featuring bad dialogue? But if you can locate something, great.

Okay, it’s a week’s worth of terrible exposition.

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