: Re: Using questions in dialog to facilitate exposition What are the guidelines on using questions in dialog (between ignorant characters) to expose setting and backstory? A few exchanges between my

@Holmes449

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I'm not sure if I am interpreting this correctly, but I would not "mix" character questions with explanatory exposition (or answers in exposition), and I wouldn't make characters too "ignorant," that sounds too "convenient."

A difficult aspect of world-building is to use it and NOT write about it. Sure, I laid out my world, with twenty cities focused on different aspects of commerce. But it turns out my story needs seven of them, and very little needs to be said. Lumber comes from Pickford, that's true, Marble from Ansley, but how far Ansley is from Pickford or how to navigate that distance never matters, really. It's six hundred miles and requires travel on two rivers, but no character ever needed to know that, so it isn't in there.

To me a better solution is knowledgeable characters, in conflict:

"We'll just cart it to Binton and put it on a barge. I priced it in."
"What were you smoking, Jack?" Andy asked, laughing. "You can't put a hundred ton barge on Juvala, it's barely a creek. You'll drag bottom. You need five barges, and you'll be paying five crews, at least until you reach halfway, about Morristown. Did you price that in?"
Jack winced. "No."
"Well, you can cart it across Juvala, another fifty miles to Markham and barge it there, that's likely cheaper. but at the bottom you'll have to cart it back to Santos on the coast road."
"What's that, a hundred miles of carting? What does that cost?"
"I don't know," Andy said, "Go ask Philip."

Another option is mental imagery in a character.

"We're coming from Alvatown," the man said.
Images of Alvatown rose in Bill's mind, the seashore and long docks, the iron ships, the seemingly thousands of hard sailors in gritty bars seeking alcohol and affordable accommodating women, in equal measure. A town where anything could be had for the right coin.

When things fall flat, it is typically for lack of conflict. Create some. Even in exposition; for me, my exposition is done with my POV character in mind. I want to talk about the stone altars of the Ancients (something like our pyramids):

The altar stood a hundred feet tall, built of hundreds of closely fitted granite blocks, Gracie heard they weighed fifteen and twenty tons each. A lot of people saw these fantastic works as a testament to the ingenuity of man, a lost art of stone carving, seen with awe.She didn't buy it, she saw twenty thousand people in slavery, whipped into back-breaking and lethal labor to satisfy the ego of some psychopathic nut job that thought he could buy immortality. She saw a hundred foot tall pointlessly meticulous monument to the cruelty of absolute power. It wasn't awesome, it was disgusting. The only thing worth praying at this altar was that the man that built it died screaming.

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