I often consider why in draft writing we try to cling to everything as writers. Backstory goes in, exposition goes in, the kitchen sink goes in. I consider the exposition in John Carpenter’s The Fog, hence the reference to the leper colony. The lepers in that story become first the monsters and then the avenging hand. We realise the monsters were the ancestors of the towns people and not the poor lepers. To make that reveal there has to be some exposition delivered by the wonderful Hal Holbrook as Father Malone who reads the exposition straight from a diary.

However, when does exposition become too much, when does telling become wearing? We are told as writers to show not tell but this an over-simplification of the idea of beats in a story, the rise and fall of tension in tale, in a scene. We have to live the beats…