Conveying information

Fiction writing is ultimately about giving readers information in a controlled fashion. That’s what words do – they convey information. “There’s a lion behind that rock.” “This person is likely to steal your diamond necklace.” “That route ends in a dead end.”

All the ways we break fiction down into parts have to do with what information the reader needs to know, when they need to know it, and how to give it to them most effectively. “Effective” usually means keeping the reader’s suspension of disbelief going as well as keeping them interested, allowing them to believe in this fiction at least long enough to finish the story.

Keeping the reader interested is a large chunk of both what information the author needs to provide and when the author needs to provide that information. Very few mystery novels begin by telling the reader who the murderer is and how they were caught, even though most mystery writers know both things from early on. There’s a reason why so many people dislike “spoilers” and complain about writers telegraphing plot twists or being too obvious about character development. Watching things unfold is part of the fun.

Keeping the reader’s suspension of disbelief going is the other part of conveying information, and it affects all three of the other pieces (the what, the when, and especially the how). Fiction readers are accustomed to accepting stories on their own terms – it’s why an enormously long novel about elves and hobbits going on a quest can be so well-known and loved, in spite of the fact that none of the readers has ever seen or heard of elves or hobbits or magic rings in real life. Nonetheless, it’s possible to break the reader’s acceptance of  or interest in the story by giving them the wrong information at the wrong time in the wrong way.

There are potential problems with all three parts of getting information across. What information to give is determined in large part by the story the writer wants to tell and the characters they are telling it about, so it seems as if it ought to be the least problematic of the three. It isn’t. Loads of experienced writers fall into the “too much” or “too little” traps – either they are so in love with their world and/or characters that their stories bog down in endless details (which, OK, fascinate some readers, but end up boring far too many others), or else they are so afraid of falling into that trap that they go to the opposite extreme and end up with a story that’s practically impossible to understand because they’ve left out key motivations or other details.

(Actually, sometimes writers leave out details not because they’re afraid of being obvious, but because they know their characters, world, and plot so enormously well that they not only forget to hang the proverbial gun over the mantelpiece, they also forget to mention that the butler took it down and shot the victim, making it impossible for the reader to understand how everyone in the story could conclude that the butler did it based on no evidence at all.)

When the reader gets information can affect everything from pacing to characterization to the reader’s reaction to the story as a whole. Loads of readers really, really hate books that have a surprise “…and then he woke up; it was all a dream!” ending, but if the story starts with a character telling what he saw in his dream of another planet, you get E. R. Eddison’s classic The Worm Ouroboros.

When to reveal information can be particularly tricky when it comes to characterization. Readers tend to form their impressions of characters early, and they can be highly resistant to changing their opinions when a supposed “good guy” betrays the protagonist or when someone “evil” turns out to have been working to undermine the Evil Overlord all along.

How the writer conveys information to the reader is probably the thing that most strongly affects … well, everything in the story. The writer’s choice of viewpoint and viewpoint character obviously affects what information can be conveyed, but they also affect how. A first-person viewpoint character can say things in the narrative that would have to be done in dialog to get the same effect in a third-person viewpoint (and even then, if the character is speaking to someone other than the reader, the effect of a statement like “I never loved my godmother the way I thought I should” is very different).

Information in stories comes in many ways: stated directly in dialog or narrative; shown on stage as the reader watches; implied by dialog, by a character’s actions, by the viewpoint character’s thoughts, or even by the way the writer phrases a description; dribbled out over twenty chapters as hints and details and bits that the reader has to put together; infodumped all at once in a three-page speech or narrative summary. Information can even be conveyed by what the writer chooses not to say. There are probably other ways I haven’t thought of.

The important thing here is that all of the hows apply to pretty much any kind of what, whether it’s the mysterious bandit’s angsty backstory, the series of clues that reveals the murderer, the motive behind the politician’s sudden change of gears, or the way the Chinese bureaucracy worked in the Forbidden City in the early 1800s.