Info-dumps. They are so tempting.
It starts with this bunch of stuff that I spent weeks researching. It’s all essential to understanding my story. Readers have to know this, or my story won’t make sense. So, I write a mini-essay to explain it all. Meet my info-dump. When I contemplate it, the lyrics to the Ronettes song, “Be My Baby” play in my head: The night we met, I knew I needed you. If I had a chance, I’d never let you go. So, won’t you, please (be my, be my baby)?
After all, info-dumps like this worked for Jules Verne, right? I remember reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It seemed that every few pages, the story stopped while Verne copied an entry from his handy Encyclopédie. These narrative inserts told the reader the state of scientific knowledge as of 1860. The reader needed to know this in order to understand the plot. Of course, I was reading these about a century later, so it was all a little dated.
I also read lots of Heinlein back then. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel includes almost endless discussions about the construction and provisioning of spacesuits. In 1958, when he wrote the novel, there weren’t any spacesuits, but he did present the state-of-the-art engineering for what they might be like. My adolescent brain found these fascinating. They are a bit less so today, though, and not just because they are out of date. Now, I’m more interested in minor things like character and plot, but that was then and this is now.
I don’t read much fantasy, but in Harry Potter we get Hermione constantly reciting passages from The History of Hogwarts to fill in the ever-clueless Weasley. These are another version of info-dumps, but slightly less intrusive than those of Verne of Heinlein since it’s an interaction between two characters.
In fact, the Weasley-type character is a trope in fiction, better known as The Watson. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was a super-genius who unsnarled mysteries from obscure clues, leaving readers asking how he figured it all out. Except the readers didn’t have to ask, because Dr. Watson was right there, in the novel, asking their questions for them. Holmes was there, too, to answer the questions.
In fact, The Watson has an even longer history. In The Divine Comedy, Dante inserted himself into the story as the narrator. Dante’s just a visitor to Hell, but he’s got his guides, Virgil and Beatrice, who are old hands at the place and can explain stuff to him. They are Hermione to Dante’s Weasley, Holmes to his version of Watson. Since Dante did it first, more accurately, it’s the other way around and they are like Virgil to his Dante. .
What is an Info-dump?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an info-dump is a large (often unwieldy or indigestible) amount of information supplied all at once, specifically as background information in a narrative.
With this definition, we can see all those “begats” in the Bible as an info-dump, giving an even longer history for the pesky things.
The key points are that it’s narrative, all at once, and not part of the story. Verne gives us the purest form, where the reader leaves the here-and-now of the fictional world and reads an essay that fills in essential details of the fictional world. In other words, the story stops while the narrator intrudes to deliver a lecture. It breaks the fictional dream playing in the reader’s head and, in so doing, breaks the reader’s always tenuous connection with the fictional world. It’s this break that makes the info-dump so pernicious and is the reason for avoiding it, no matter how tempting.
Readers don’t want to read your essay on life in France during the 1820s. They, do, however, want to read Les Miserables. I admit, I want to read both, but I’m wierd. You’ll limit the reach of your story if you write for wierd people like me.
Not all info-dumps arise from world building. For example, as part of their writing process, authors often create character profiles that include physical and psychological traits. Knowing your character has blue eyes can avoid continuity errors like mentioning one eye color in chapter one and a different color in chapter eighteen, but do readers really need to know a character’s eye color, height or weight? This kind of detail is important for continuity, but is is usually not important to the story. If any physical traits are important to the story, then the way to reveal them is through the words and deeds of the characters, not through narrated summation. Likewise, show personality traits–which often are critical to the story–in the character’s behavior, not through an info-dump.
Readers don’t want to read what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has to say about narcisists. . They do, however, want to read The Picture of Dorian Gray.
More generally, readers want to experience your fictional world holistically, the way they experience the real world.
The question then becomes, if the stuff in your info-dump is both so fascinating and so essential, how do you get it into your story?
Alternative Strategies
We’ve already met one alternative: The Watson. Have a character who needs an explanation, like Weasley or Dante, and asks questions for the reader. Of course, The Watson needs The Sherlock—or Hermione—to answer the questions. This can work, but it runs the risk of becoming tedious if used too often. At one point in Potter, Hermione asks Weasley why he never read The History of Hogwarts, and he replies that he doesn’t have to; it’s easier to just ask her.
The advantage of The Watson is that the character is in the story, and there are credible reasons why the character needs explanations. If the character appears naturally in the story and needs explanations, then the reader stays in the here-and-now of the fictional world, and the author has overcome the main drawback of the info-dump. Weasley, for example, constantly comes up with numbskull ideas that won’t work, which require the ever-patient Hermion to explain why they won’t work. This sequence keeps the reader inside the Potter universe. In fact, the repetition of this sequence can help to solidify the reader’s connection with that universe as they anticipate dumb suggestions from Weasley and patient explanations from Hermione.
A more general variation on The Watson is to create a scene in which a character interacts with the fictional world in a way that forces her to learn some essential feature of that world, i.e., something that’s in your info-dump. Repeating this technique lets you introduce the elements of your info-dump in bite-sized chunks that arise in the ongoing action of the novel, in the here-and-now of the fictional world.. When the character overcomes the obstacle in the scene, you’ve advanced charactor, or plot, or, better still, both. You can find countless examples of this technique in fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, and other genres. Rowling puts Harry Potter in these scenes all the time. Dasheill Hammet’s detective Sam Spade constantly found himself such situations in the course of his investigations. In Ringworld, Louis Wu has to figure out multiple cultures and scientific mysteries in the course of the novel, each of which fill in details of the world while advancing plot and character.
Another alternative might be to write The History of Hogwarts, and then use snippets from it as chapter headings. Asimov did something like in his Foundation series, where chapter headings often include quotes from Harry Seldon or brief extracts from his Encyclopedia Galactica. In The Mote in God’s Eye, Niven and Pournelle include encyclopedia-like extracts on things like planets or “Langston Fields” that appear in their fictional universe.
Maps are another way to convey information. The Lord of the Rings includes maps of Middle Earth so readers can better understand the geography of the place. In my novel, Murder on Cabot’s Landing, I included a detailed map of the islands on which the action takes place.
Heinlein wrote a whole sequence of stories based on a shared “future history.” The outline of this history eventually got added as a frontispiece to his novels, sort of like Tolkien’s maps.
Summary
Details like maps ,“future histories,” or the other technical particulars of your fictional world add a sense of richness and depth to your story. My always-insightful colleague , Breanna Tientze, has pointed out that these are like the bag that comes with Crown Velvet Whiskey—it doesn’t add to the flavor of the liquor, but does imbue it with a sense of richness. The stuff in the info-dump both informs the readers about the fictional world and assures them that the author has given thought and care in constructing that world.
Most of the time, however, info-dumps as they appear in novels are intrusive, patronizing, and downright boring. Sometimes they consist of characters sitting around telling each other stuff they should already know or, even worse, they are explaining stuff that the action has already revealed. At their worst, they don’t advance character or plot and just sit there, like an indigestible lump. For these reasons, “info-dump” is often used in a pejorative sense.
But the stuff in the information dump—that’s often gold. There are ways to show this information in the here-and-now of the story, revealing it through the words and deeds of the characters as they interact with the fictional world. Finding those ways is often the difference between effective and ineffective fiction. The Watson and the other techniques mentioned above are some of the ways successful authors have overcome the temptation of the info-dump and still managed to get the essential information onto the page and in front of the readers.
As always, showing the information is superior to telling it. It’s worth the effort.
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