Today we discuss the dreaded info dump. In many stories, especially speculative fiction, these are necessary pieces of expositive world-building. The problem is that good info dumps are hard. How do you insert it without beating your reader over the head with it and bringing the pace to a halt? We’ll get into it below.
Drawing from the Well
No news here, which is disheartening to write. Work has been a lot and I was sick to boot. I hope to have an actual update next week.
Filling the Well
No updates here either for the same reasons as above. I’m falling further behind my pace, but I’m putting more effort into all my hobbies this week to get back on track.
Well Chat
That very quickly brings us to our blog topic for today: info dumps. Getting this right is harder than doll brain surgery. And you have to make it so natural that the reader barely notices. You can’t just send it careening over a hill to crash into the middle of your chapter. Sounds like an impossibility, right? Well, maybe. With a few tips, though, you can change how you approach and implement info dumps too.
For me, I don’t worry about this recharacterization until editing. If I need info in the story during drafting, I just drop it in. This may make some of you cringe, but, for me, drafting is about speed, not precision. That also means that I have to find these when I go back through the manuscript repeatedly. Once I do, I basically have to rewrite the whole section in order to disguise and naturalize the info dump itself. There are times I cut it wholesale, though, because it isn’t relevant to the moment.
The key is how I determine all those aspects. The tips for this I took fully from K.M. Weiland. In October ’19, she posted a blog titled “This is How to Transform Info Dumps into Exciting Plot Reveals.” Sounds good, right? What’s nice about this is that it automatically puts you in the mindset of cutting an info dump. If you intend for it to be an exciting plot reveal and it isn’t, do you need it at this moment in the story at all? It’s good, right? Here are the steps:
- Make it so the character explicitly needs/wants the info or doesn’t need/want the info or some combination thereof. Yes, it can be both.
- Information is never free. There should be a trade-off, if not an outright cost. Choose between two bad options or two good options and make them mutually exclusive. Again, you can even do both.
- Knowledge is power – and with great power comes great responsibility. Make knowing the information dangerous in some way.
- Clues should be visual whenever possible.
- Clues are even better when they’re dramatized.
This may all read as rather obtuse and archaic. Let’s step through it. If the character needs the information, but doesn’t want it, you’ve already dramatized the scene. They have to already overcome the fact that they don’t want to know this in order to learn it and move forward. Then, if you add a cost to that, even if just in a trade-off, the discomfort is heightened. Then if there’s added danger in knowing it because now the character, at the very least, is aware of “something out there” that they weren’t before, it adds tension to the rest of the story. And if this is done visually, rather than just with a conversation, it becomes an unforgettable scene.
I think about when Harry and Dumbledore encountered the Potion of Despair in the Half-Blood Prince with this. They sought a horcrux, which was a physical thing, but the allegory can still work. Already, you have a physical thing that can be seen: the pedestal supporting the bowl holding the potion itself. Even the drinking is visual. The characters needed the horcrux at the bottom of the bowl. If this were information, the same would be true. They needed the information but also didn’t want it BECAUSE of the trade-off involved: the intense pain caused by drinking the potion, which was the only way to remove it from the bowl. Having the horcrux, or knowing the information in our scenario, made it ever more dangerous to be about in the world because Harry was easier to track and find as he found more horcruxes. Lastly, the process of Dumbledore drinking the water, one small sip at a time, and the agony he experienced because of it is highly dramatic. This scene, were it for an informational reason, ticks all five boxes.
I may have strained the metaphor there, but the point is clear: information can be stylized and dramatized into something exciting rather than a mid-chapter essay on bicentennial aqueducts (and bicentennial aqueducts probably aren’t important unless you’re about to enter one, then keep it to a minimum). As authors, we get so wrapped up in the interesting worlds we build that we want to show them to our readers. If it doesn’t matter to the story, though, the readers won’t care. Follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to a tighter, more exciting, better-quality novel.
Have a great week!
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG