Info Dumps

This is Australia.









...and this is Australia before the nuclear attack.


Yes, I stole this joke. No, I'm not proud of it, but here we are.

Editing hack:

Take the info dump out completely.

Does your story still make sense?

If yes, editing complete.

If not, what is the minimum amount of the infodump that would be needed to make it tie together. Put only that piece back in. Repeat process as necessary.


My drafts are full of pages and pages of exposition about really, really unnecessary world building, thousands of words of navel gazing, and even a few bits of actual good story telling. I know, even as I type most of my draft that these infodumps are wrong, boring (I've even bored myself out of writing the story before), and will eventually end up in the notes section to reference later. But we persist through it because as Patty said earlier, it is important to you the author that you've built this amazing world, and you want to tell everyone how it works. Do that, but go back and take out the unnecessary bits in editing.

I know JK Rowling takes a bunch of crap from the internet on all of the revelations she made about characters post Harry Potter. For example, Dumbledore's sexuality, since it wasn't pertinent to the story, it got edited out. Doesn't mean it wasn't true to her world, and it doesn't mean there's not some notes file somewhere in her possession that contains full scenes of his romance with Nicholas Flamel.

Bufty said:

We avoid info dumping if and when we realize that what we have written is an undesirable/indigestible dump of irrelevant/boring/unnecessary information.

Mind you, one reader's info dump could be another reader's interesting block of information.

Readers don't need as much explanation as we think they do, and initial explanations of the unknown ahead can easily be boring because there is nothing to which the reader can relate the explanations.

It's preferable to draw readers into new world elements as the story unfolds by showing how characters act/react in relation to these elements.

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This is exactly right. I read somewhere that the original Star Wars movie was created with the idea that people didn't need to know a whole lot about the greater context of what they were seeing on the screen because it's not that hard for audiences to adjust to a strange, fantastical world. They just need to be able to understand and accept as plausible the basic rules which the story hinges upon. The manga Fullmetal Alchemist is another great example of this. The first installment doesn't even tell us that Edward and Alphonse Elric are on an quest to repair their maimed bodies. Hiromu Arakawa, the writer of the story, just dived in, established the characters of Ed and Al, and used a minimal, natural twist of story to give a brief demonstration of how the story's magic system worked. It's an awesome series.

Here's what seems to work for me... To avoid putting in all the super important, totally interesting (to me) background info, I just have a plan that once I am highly successful I will put out a sourcebook with all the info that isn't required for the story. Since I know that info isn't going to "waste", it's easier to withhold it from the main book because I'm saving it for the world sourcebooks.

AwP_writer said:

Here's what seems to work for me... To avoid putting in all the super important, totally interesting (to me) background info, I just have a plan that once I am highly successful I will put out a sourcebook with all the info that isn't required for the story. Since I know that info isn't going to "waste", it's easier to withhold it from the main book because I'm saving it for the world sourcebooks.

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And a highly successful author could put snippets on their website, as well, as a reward for the readers!

Sure, as long as I know the information is not going to go to waste somehow, then it's easier to resist putting it in the main book.

Justobuddies said:

I know JK Rowling takes a bunch of crap from the internet on all of the revelations she made about characters post Harry Potter. For example, Dumbledore's sexuality, since it wasn't pertinent to the story, it got edited out. Doesn't mean it wasn't true to her world, and it doesn't mean there's not some notes file somewhere in her possession that contains full scenes of his romance with Nicholas Flamel.

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I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that she seems to want to be a "woke" author but her books weren't really "woke" at all, rather the opposite. I've not read Harry Potter, but by the later books, they were quite popular, if she really cared about representing diverse people she could've forced virtually anything through the editing process. Instead, she didn't, then she retcons her own world and expects to be treated like she wrote some way progressive fantasy novels.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that she seems to want to be a "woke" author but her books weren't really "woke" at all, rather the opposite. I've not read Harry Potter, but by the later books, they were quite popular, if she really cared about representing diverse people she could've forced virtually anything through the editing process. Instead, she didn't, then she retcons her own world and expects to be treated like she wrote some way progressive fantasy novels.

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This is how it seems to me too, unfortunately. But she's not the first author of a series to retcon.

Cobalt Jade said:

This is how it seems to me too, unfortunately. But she's not the first author of a series to retcon.

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No, but I find her conduct particularly appalling. She can write virtually anything she wants at this point and it will be published and highly marketed. She could easily write about a gay sorcerer or a lesbian witch or whatever and rather than do that she just tweets shit insisting every character in her books was totally actually of a minority or something.

Guilty

I am really bad at this, and I believe t's because I'm a visual person. I write what I want other people to see, and for better or worse, it's always too much.

I find the best way to avoid info dumps is to give the information out gradually. If you need to provide some background information, give it when it's necessary to the plot - not before. Slide it in as small pieces; let characters discuss it or use it in describing the environment. Make it organic and keep it short. Let the readers discover the world as they move through the story.

As with pretty much everything else, your narrative viewpoint will determine your approach here. If you have a chatty, first-person narrator, you can get away with some explanation of the situation and world if you make it interesting. If you have an omniscient narrator, you have the freedom to step outside the characters and provide some set up. It's easy for writers to abuse this freedom, though. I find novels that open with long explanations, descriptions of scenery, of social institutions, or historical set up to be off putting, as a rule. I don't know if everyone feels as I do, however. I still run across books where writers do this.

My advice is, if taking this approach, not to go on for pages and pages, and to utilize a lively and engaging voice that keeps readers entertained.

Personally, I find limited third most challenging in this respect. You're bound by the same "rule" as in first--nothing the viewpoint character in a given scene isn't aware of and thinking of at the time. But you don't have that first-person perspective to step outside the current story and talk directly to the reader without it sounding omniscient.

I prefer when the story starts with a character doing something, and information is provided when it becomes relevant. A fellow writer once described it to "dribbling" intriguing bits of world building in as needed. With SF and F, there's a tendency for people to default assume certain things about a world, based on the cues you provide. My nemesis, since I like pre-industrial settings, is for readers to assume we're in the bog-standard "faux medieval" kind of world, so they can rebel when elements that aren't (in popular perception) medieval are "dribbled" in.

It's especially tough if one is trying to create a culture and society that isn't based on a given real-world one but just so happens to be at a particular technology level and exist in a particular kind of biome people associate with a given (often stereotypical) culture. This is probably why so many writers default to appropriating superficial cultural elements to give their fantasy societies generic "Asian" or "Middle Eastern" or "African" or "European" feel etc., something that is becoming increasingly problematic if proper attention to the deeper elements of a culture (and not just surface trappings) aren't thoughtfully incorporated.

This is actually an issue that's shut down my writing efforts recently. How to gradually dribble information in that creates a rich and immersive setting that informs the story and characters (so they don't just feel like modern westerners playing dress up) without readers going, "Huh?" when I dribble in something about a god or cultural institution or whatever that either contrasts with assumptions they have already made, or leaves them wanting more information about how things work NOW.

I see lots of writers doing it in various ways, but since most who aren't using standard issue "fairy tale" versions of Medieval Europe (inaccurate, but at least in line with what most fantasy readers expect) are using world building models that are based on a particular "real" time and place (sometimes kind of clumsily, sometimes with more skill), it's hard to get a sense of how to do what I want to do.

Maryn said:

I got into a literal argument about this very thing last week, at another site. A writer wanted to know why she was getting rejected. Her scifi novel opened with a six thousand word explanation of how the world worked. I said that probably wasn't necessary, could be the reason for rejection, and that the important bits could be worked in around something happening. She said the working-it-in part wasn't possible. I said she should read twenty scifi books of the last decade and see how each author did it, because an info dump was not the only way. And now she follows me around down-voting my every post at that site.

Maryn, antagonizing others on a daily basis

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Oh, Good Lord!

I read this thread with great interest, considering that at some point in my WIP I have committed every sin mentioned. I did have a not-too-long info dump that took place in dialog (at the end of which the recipient plaintively asked "could you please explain the bit about X again?", X having been at the very start . . .) that was probably de trop despite being in dialog. (Fear not, Reader! It came out--with much else--when I decreed on a 10% bread-and-butter RIF on my draft.) The dump in question was one of the "important-to-me-if-not-to-the-reader-so-that-I-think-I-understand-what-is-going-on" sort, and qualified as an operable tumor (vide. Mittelmark and Newman's informative and entertaining How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them).

I think all that is left is a stray reference to "raging torrents of antihydrogen" beneath the feet of everyone living on a starship. Which I hope readers will not find disturbing; it doesn't bother any of the characters.