Exposition

Right now, I've got a bit of a problem on my hands that I'd like some help with (duh).

I'm trying to write some exposition into my urban/high fantasy novel, but I can't have an exposition character because every character, and I mean every character should already know about it. Otherwise, they'd be dead. Or in jail. But mostly dead. I've written exposition 'excerpts' of in-universe book which go at the beginning of every chapter, but it's really quite clunky and awkward.

Tips?

One of the things I've seen which I think is really clever is when writers do exposition via character development or conflict.

Instead of saying 'in this world everyone has a snout, and longer snouts are seen as more attractive,' you could say 'her snout was shorter than others, and she'd seen pictures in medical magazines of snouts as short as two inches long, but that didn't ease her insecurity.' Or some form of cultural conflict, like 'the grown ups where concerned about how children as young as ten were getting their snouts pierced, but the thought that at the age of ten one was seen as old enough to gather metal from the mines but not stick it through their own snouts was ridiculous.'

I do quite like excepts of in-universe texts, especially if they vary in style and dating period. They actually add a lot of flavour to the text and create a sense of a much broader world beyond the characters perspective. At the beginning of the chapter they might feel a bit dry- usually at the end of one chapter I'm super excited to see what happens in the next one, so ploughing through exposition at that point isn't great. Including it at other places though, especially if it fits into the context of a scene, is something I actually really enjoy. If you can make it work there's no reason not to stick with it!