Infodumps – those long passages of narrative summary that provide a huge wodge of background or plot development or characterization – have an undeservedly bad reputation among would-be writers. The allergy to infodumps is a bit of stylistic advice which is largely peddled to beginning writers, but which is not upheld by looking at real live published fiction. Infodumps that are ineffective, boring, annoying, or unnecessary should be cut, obviously, but that is by no means the same thing as “all infodumps are horrible and a sign of bad writing.” James White, for instance, used infodumps to great effect for decades in the Sector General books; ditto David Weber in his Honor Harrington series, Patrick O’Brian, and many others.
There are three basic approaches to fixing a story when someone has complained that it is infodumpy: 1) You can rewrite to remove the infodump, 2) you can rewrite to make the infodump work in the context of the story, or 3) you can ignore the advice and leave the story alone because you know your critiquer well enough to know that he/she has absorbed the “no infodumps rule” and is therefore not actually assessing whether your infodump really works in context.
Rewriting to remove the infodump is often appropriate if the infodump is ineffective, boring, etc., but in quite a lot of cases, the problem is not that the infodump is the wrong technique to choose, it’s that the particular author doesn’t know how to write good infodumps, or doesn’t know how to make an infodump work in the context of the story and viewpoint he’s chosen. Rewriting to remove the infodump will do nothing to solve this underlying problem, if it is present, since simply removing all infodumps provides no practice whatever in how to write effective infodumps … and odds are that sooner or later, the writer will need to write an effective infodump.
So the first question the writer needs to answer is: What is the most effective way to give the reader the information necessary to understand the story? Should I use an infodump, or something else? This is generally a question of pacing, rather than structure, because traditional infodump mechanisims like narrative summary or two-page blocks of lecture in dialog lay out information a lot faster and in a more condensed fashion than the slow revelation of needed details in a scene or during a conversation.
Assuming you decide that you need the infodump, the next question is how to make it work. One of the most effective ways to do this is to arrange things so that the infodump is of information that the reader already wants to know. This is one of the reasons why long prologues full of the background history of the world seldom work and are commonly cut by editors – when they pick up a book for the first time, most readers are more interested in the story or the characters than in all the cool history the author has worked out. It isn’t until later, when the information becomes important to the characters and the story, that the reader wants to know more about the background.
Another technique is to lay out the story-problem as a central part of the infodump, or (if the story problem has already become obvious), give the infodump information in such a way that it clearly makes the story-problem worse. If, for instance, you have two characters at the top of a cliff preparing to go down, and you need to infodump a bunch of geological and geographic information, you could probably get everything you needed into an infodump that described, in gory detail, just how high and pointy and hard to climb this cliff is (because of relevant geological facts) and just how many other people have died trying to climb down it (for various geo-political reasons). It’s a matter of focus: the information you want to infodump is all still there, but the focus is on some plot-point that increases the tension.
Some voices and stories lend themselves to effective infodumps more than others. James White makes extraordinarily effective use of the sessions in which his doctors are briefed on their new patients. He slides effortlessly from the setup conversation into two- or three-page narrative summaries of the important background information (which the reader already wants to know because of the hints in the setup conversation) and then back to his fully dramatized scene. A first-person narrator can get away with infodumping information a lot more easily than a third-person narrator. The trick here is to make the narrator sound as if she is musing on or analyzing or explaining to herself something that is important to her at the moment. A story that covers a lot of time – months or years – also often requires a good many chunks of narrative summary to fill in what happened. Memoir tends to have a lot more summary than dramatized scenes.
I’m currently getting lots of practice with this because the Frontier Magic books are first-person and an imaginary memoir and covers years per book. When you have thirteen years of a character’s life to cover, which important bits of her life story you show and which ones you summarize turn out to be a lot less obvious than you might think. Pacing and structure and flow become a lot more important, too. Thank goodness that problem will decrease in the next two books, because they won’t be covering fifteen years in one volume.
At least, I think they won’t.
Perfect timing with this post!! I’ve been having quite the time sorting out my own infodumps, and your insight has definitely given me food for thought. Rather than cutting the dumps, maybe I can make them work… Thanks!!
I love it — the allergy to infodumps. 🙂 It’s like you can’t weave even half a sentence of context into a page containing many sentences without some critiquers being alarmed that you’re doing a massive infodump. I know there’s been a trend lately toward action, action, action and almost nothing else, but how am I supposed to care about the person doing the shooting or being shot at unless I have some inkling why she’s there and what the stakes are?
I think we’ve all seen long, cumbersome passages of infodump that derail the story to the point that you feel like you’re having to study a gazetteer of the world (who knows, maybe there’ll be a quiz at the end) before you’ll be allowed to read about any actual characters. I’m really not seeing a lot of that these days, but it may just not be common in the subgenres I read.
This was very useful, thank you for posting! Definitely something I struggle with.
I do love a good infodump – even, nay especially, as a reader. There is so much fun you can have with them. A bad infodump… yeah, well. It’s the difference between being metaphorically and literally showered with chocolates.
Reckon you’ve struck close to the heart of it with this trick of making it “stuff the reader already wants to know”. That would be the tension side of it, yes? I do like the idea of considering dump neutrally, in terms of information density and pacing, too. Must have a fresh gander at my copy of White’s Mind Changer shortly: see what I make of it.
Fairy tale is definitely another genre in which infodumping in all its forms can be a joy. I think that’s partly about the flavour of the traditional omni narrator, and partly about the great wealth of dump-friendly structural conventions the author has to play with.
I love info-dense stories. In my experience, over-scrupulous info-dribbling is just as capable of trashing the story rhythm as the dumping it would avoid; and then the damage is more pervasively annoying, because the reader never does get past it. I want the problem cleaned up so the story is all shiny, not diffused so that every surface bears an equal film of meh!
Once thing I learnt from you is that a static lump of information is boring – a listing of facts, a character lecturing another. Most of my dialogue-heavy scenes are improves when I remember the conflict – what do the characters want from each other, and how do they bridge that gap (confrontation? cooperation? What’s the result?).
Most description, on the other hand, can be improved by keeping an eye on the focus and flow of the scene – zooming in or out (for a transition to something else) works well in most cases, as does guiding the eye along certain lines. When you just enumerate facts, readers tune out – when you keep promising them something more exciting around the next corner (and deliver, along with another mini-mystery) they’ll keep reading.
IMO, it’s only an infodump if it’s boring or superfluous. Otherwise, it’s worldbuilding and enriching the story.
As a reader, the infodumps I choke on are ones where one character tells another information that should have been covered in basic schooling. New scientific discoveries are one thing, but even geeks don’t lecture their dates on colonial history (unless their date won’t be in the rest of the story!)
David, I’m seeing a lot of opportunities there, and it wouldn’t take very much. If she just sits there and simpers ‘aren’t you clever’ that’s a wasted opportunity – but they might visit a museum on a date, hotly discuss certain facts, compare their upbringings, slip from a discussion about how schools handle the topic into one about their teachers, and, and, and. The trick is to always make such a scene do more than one thing – develop the relationship, seed or foreshadow future plot events, *and* build the background.
Also, remember conflict. What do the people involved want? Impress their partners with their knowledge? Do they have an agenda that will take precedence over a relationship? Do they want to win the other side over to their worldview, do they want to share knowledge, learn something new, are they looking for a fight?
Sometimes it takes only small changes to turn something boring and infodumpy into a good scene as long as you keep an eye on asking (and to a degree answering) questions that keep the reader interested.
David – Yes, those are seriously problematic, especially if the writer uses the “Would the reader want to hear all this now?” test. Who wants to hear a bunch of stuff they already learned in school?
Green Knight – Are you channelling me? 🙂 I think you’ve put your finger on the key: Is the reader interested? And if not, how can the scene be changed to be interesting?
As I read this post, I thought about Thirteenth Child, and just wanted to tell you that you did a SUPERB job of melding your “info-dumping” into the story. In fact, I never felt that you were info-dumping at all . . . which must mean that you did it right! Oh, and if you ever want another critiquer (refering to your last post) I sit here with my hand reaching for the ceiling saying: “Oooooh! Oooooh! Oooooh! Pick me!”
I’m with Betsy – I love how you wrote a whole bunch of exposition and did a whole lot of “telling” in Thirteenth Child to cover many years and a lot of new (but within the world known) information.
And this post proves exactly why I love this blog so much – you don’t take anything for granted. You toss “rules” out the window and focus on what is best for the story and the reader.
Betsy – Thanks for the kind words.
Alex – Ditto. Doing all that narrative summary was hard – or rather, picking which bits to summarize and which to dramatize was very, very non-trivial. I think I rewrote the chapter on the return of the McNeil Expedition five times, with different bits spelled out and other ones summarized every time.
I didn’t feel dumped on when reading Thirteenth and I didn’t get that annoying bouncing around feeling either. It was a very fluid transition from her memories to her current situations. Kudos! I bet that is difficult to write!
Martha – Thanks! And yes, it was hard to figure out how to do the transitions. The most difficult bit for me, though, was figuring out which memories to show and which ones to summarize.