As You Know, Bob
Quick answer: As You Know, Bob is dialogue where characters tell each other facts they both know, purely for the reader. Learn to spot and fix this exposition problem.
As You Know, Bob is the workshop name for dialogue in which one character tells another something both of them already know, purely so the reader can overhear it: 'As you know, Bob, our father lost the farm in the flood of '09.' Stripped of the joke, it is exposition wearing a dialogue costume, and the disguise never fits. Real people do not brief each other on shared history.
The term, popularised by the Turkey City Lexicon and beloved of critique groups everywhere, applies wherever backstory, world rules or technical facts need delivering: openings above all, but also reunions, briefings and any scene where two insiders discuss what insiders would never spell out.
The maid, the butler and a century of bad openings
The device is older than its nickname. Nineteenth-century melodrama and early drawing-room plays opened so routinely with two servants dusting the furniture and telling each other the master's affairs ('And to think the young mistress returns from Paris this very evening, after the scandal!') that critics named the trick maid-and-butler dialogue. Audiences tolerated it as convention; playwrights from Ibsen onward made it obsolete by folding exposition into conflict instead.
Prose fiction inherited both the problem and the cure. Science fiction workshops, drowning in scenes where two engineers explain their own starship to each other, coined the sharper label. The pattern survives today in thrillers where one detective reminds another how fingerprinting works, and in fantasy where siblings recap their family tree over breakfast.
Why the trick fails even when readers need the facts
The damage is threefold. It breaks character: the speaker becomes the author's puppet, and readers hear the strings. It kills tension, because a scene arranged for the audience's benefit has no genuine pressure between its participants. And it insults the reader's ear; we all know how people with shared history actually talk, in shorthand, allusion and things unsaid, so the lecture rings false at once.
There is a legitimate need underneath: stories do require the reader to learn things. The failure is of method, not motive. Verisimilitude is the casualty; the moment characters converse for the reader instead of at each other, the fictional world admits it is staged, and trust drains from every scene that follows.
Getting the facts across without Bob
The classic repair is to create an honest reason for the telling. Add ignorance: a newcomer, a child, a jury, someone who genuinely needs the explanation. Add conflict: two people who share the facts can still dispute what the facts meant ('You call it losing the farm. Father sold it to pay your fees'). Disagreement lets backstory surface naturally, because people rehash the past when they quarrel over it, never when they agree.
Better still, ask how much the reader truly needs and how late they can receive it. Most exposition can arrive in fragments, through implication, props and offhand references, trusted to assemble in the reader's mind. The trap during repair is simply relocating the lecture into the narrator's mouth, an info-dump instead of a Bob; summary narration earns its place only when it is brief, voiced and timed to a moment of curiosity.
Field marks for spotting Bob
Bob announces himself in signature phrases: as you know, you'll recall, need I remind you, ever since the accident. He also hides in strange politeness between intimates, spouses using each other's full names, siblings explaining their own parents to each other, and in any speech that would survive unchanged as a paragraph of narration.
The final test is the eavesdropper check: read the exchange and ask who benefits from each line. If the answer is nobody in the room, only the reader at the keyhole, the scene is a briefing wearing a costume, and it is time to give someone in it a reason to speak.
Bob's family tree: info-dumps and their kin
As You Know, Bob is the dialogue-shaped member of the exposition family. The info-dump is its narration-shaped sibling: paragraphs of background delivered wholesale. Both differ from narrative summary, which is a legitimate compression of events the reader watches happen, rather than a briefing about events offstage.
The device also borders on on-the-nose dialogue, where characters state feelings no one would state; Bob states facts no one would state. The shared cure is subtext and pressure. And note the near-enemy: characters explaining things to a genuine novice is fine, but only if the novice's presence is motivated by the story rather than manufactured for the reader's convenience.
What poets can take from this
- Search your draft for the phrases 'as you know', 'you'll remember' and 'don't forget that'; they mark the fault line.
- Give exposition a motivated listener: someone in the scene who honestly does not know.
- Let characters disagree about the past instead of reciting it; quarrels carry backstory naturally.
- Deliver facts in fragments at the moment the reader becomes curious, not before.
- Trust readers to assemble history from shorthand and allusion, the way they do at any family dinner.
Try it yourself
Two sisters wait outside a solicitor's office to hear their mother's will. Write the 400-word scene so the reader learns the family's whole financial history, the debt, the sold house, the estranged brother, entirely through the sisters' bickering, without either ever explaining a fact the other knows.
Questions
Where does the name As You Know, Bob come from?
From workshop culture's habit of naming faults after their most parodic form, a speech beginning 'As you know, Bob...'. The label spread through science fiction critique circles, notably the Turkey City Lexicon, and is now general shorthand for disguised exposition in dialogue.
How do I give readers necessary backstory without it?
Route the information through motive: a listener who needs telling, a quarrel that rehashes the past, a document or object that provokes questions. Deliver it in fragments timed to curiosity, and accept that readers can infer far more than beginners expect.
Is all expository dialogue bad?
No. Explanation is natural whenever one character genuinely knows more than another and the scene gives them a reason to share. The fault appears only when both parties already know the material, so the speech exists for the eavesdropping reader alone.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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