I know that somebody is going to pop in and say 'It normally isn't' but I know for a fact that there are plenty of stories where the exposition at least feels natural. I guess a better word is organic like every time master yoda explains the force.
I know it's cliche at this point, but in my current project I used a news report, however the actual news report is brief and instead of the senator giving the information outright I had the reporters ask for information. I would've preferred the report itself to be shorter, but I wanted to propose some plot relevant questions for the reader.
I agree with Ellen, in a lot of fantasy stories, the MC has to learn the magic system and that is usually used as an exercise in exposition.
What if you augment the standard exposition with dialogue? Like having the MC learn about whatever it is through a conversation with another character who has been there/done that?
You make it feel natural by only revealing the bits as and when they become relevant to the story, rather than info-dumping it all at once.
Yeah I know there's a balance, but finding a balance (and the right time to execute it) is part of learning how to write. Not being sure when or where to place my exposition is literally my bane I think~
It's all related to POV. What is natural to the character? More importantly, what would feel unnatural to the character are warrant some form of explanation (exposition). For myself, if I took a rocket ship to the moon, walked around some craters, maybe took a dump in the moondust, that would be very, very unnatural and be worthy of a blow by blow exposition. From Homer's POV that is as cool as cool is likely to ever get and would be the greatest story ever told from my POV. Now take a futuristic astronaut who does that every day. There would be nothing interesting about it and nothing to expose in a scene from a moon-dude's POV. It's another day the office for the moon-dude. And that's why most sci-fi and fantasy sucks because they think they have to explain everything that seems unnatural to the reader, whether the POV character finds it natural or not. I always use the motor vehicle vs spaceship example. Driving a car is natural to me and every reader. We don't explain anything about how a car functions in literary scene that involves driving. So why would we explain every last detail of a spaceflight from the POV of characters who treat spaceships the way we treat cars? All that space stuff might be unnatural to us Earthling readers, but it isn't to the sci-fi characters.
Homer's Space Odyssey. And rather than a Monolith, a big turd with a DQ swirl on top that causes the advancement of Moon life, in the specific form of new weapons plumbing technology.
