
Ah, exposition.  That place in your story where you stretch your little writer's wings and take flight, astounding one and all with your magnetic, nay magical prose.  Or the part where your readers fall asleep and/or hit the "Back" button while cursing your name.  Dr. Merlin has been known to shout at her monitor when she finds herself in the middle of Too Much Information, and not even in the fun way.

Exposition is not your friend.

My gentle readers already know the basic writing tip, "Show, don't tell," but Dr. Merlin still stumbles into long passages of text where nothing happens, or worse, too much.  Exposition is the little devil sitting on your shoulder that says to get the history out of the way to get to the good parts (not to be confused with the devil sitting on the other shoulder urging the author to tell her audience every single detail of the childhoods of each character).

Exposition means telling the audience what happened, typically in simple prose.  In film, the exposition happens when one character tells another a core-dump of information ala "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  In fiction, the author's doing the telling.

An example is in order.  As you are reading a story, you are told that the heroine met her beloved at such a place and time, that they were married in a gala fashion, and that her husband was murdered in front of her eyes.  You would not expect this entire sequence to take two pages, during which time both he and she only get two lines of dialogue each.  You would expect the author to spend some time on the husband's character, evidencing by his speech and manner how deeply he loves his wife, and you would equally expect the heroine to show through big and small ways how much his presence in her life changed and enriched her (especially if the story were to tell you flat out later that this was the case).  A proper introduction to the husband's character would allow you to become emotionally involved with his fate and would give you insight into the heroine's character: what she saw in him, how deep their bond was, clues about her thoughts and beliefs and dreams as reflected through the prism of his eyes, and so on.  You would mourn his death with her, and so grow more connected to the heroine herself.

In short, you would expect meat on the simple bone of the storyline: "They met, they married, he died."

As a writer, you need to provide that meat.  (*looks at metaphor, sighs, plunges onward*)  Sometimes it is tempting to rush past certain things.  Perhaps you're introducing a new character and you know he used to be in the Air Force, and he's the night manager of a gas station now, and he was married twice, no kids, likes to go fishing on the weekends, secretly dreams of owning the gas station someday and had Eggs Benedict for breakfast. 