Pro tip: Remember to put lots of infodumping in your story!

[Kasper Hviid]

I began re-reading The Neverending Story and had an epimy, or whatever those fancy things are called where, BLAM!, you suddenly just realize something. This story was throwing huge infodumps in my face, and, you know, it worked! It was entertaining, despite conventional wisdom telling us that it's a big no-no.

And I couldn't help to contrast this with novels which did things The Right Way. So, instead of just telling that the MC is a hunchback and worked in the government and that the political tension goes like this, there some other character making a remark about the MC being a hunchback who work in the government, and the bit about the political tension. I'm exaggerating, I'm mixing two novels here, but my point is that the novel not only misses out on an interesting infodump, but also twists the story into artificial and weird shapes, just to be able to deliver the info by "showing".

And I'm guilty of that myself, trying to make the story reveal some information in a showy way. It just feels fake and cheap.

That said, I think there's some truth to the old cliche about "show, don't tell". Like, how, at the beginning of GONE GIRL, we are presented with what physically looks like a perfectly blissful morning, but the protagonist's reaction tells us that, damn, something is a serious wrong here.

Likewise, in a book by China Mieville, there's a whole subplot which only serves to show that a specific creature is very dangerous. Yet, after having demonstrated the creature's reputation as something not to be fucked with in the legit, showy manner, the novel has a long infodump about it, giving us all the backstory ill-fitted for showing.

In fantasy, the main appeal is the discovery of an entirely new world. Even if orcs and wizards are pretty established tropes, your take on them is what makes your world feel strange and unknown. And the most direct, in-your-face way of showing discovery and wonder is info-dumping. Actually just ... telling the reader what he wants to know.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I haven't read The Neverending Story since I was a kid, so I don't remember the details and won't comment on that. Something else to remark on, though is this part:

Likewise, in a book by China Mieville, there's a whole subplot which only serves to show that a specific creature is very dangerous. Yet, after having demonstrated the creature's reputation as something not to be fucked with in the legit, showy manner, the novel has a long infodump about it, giving us all the backstory ill-fitted for showing.

Could it be that the subplot about the creature prepares the reader for the infodump to come, so that once it arrives, the reader is interested in the topic and will enjoy learning more about it? Would it have had the same effect if the infodump came first and the subplot after?

 

[Steerpike]

For me, the effectiveness of a lengthy infodump is proportional to the extent to which the narrative voice is unique and/or engaging.

 

[Eduardo Ficaria]

Infodump is a dangerous thing to use: it can stall the narration and, depending on how it's written, has the potential of breaking its voice. In its most basic form, it's like doing copy paste of the writer's personal encyclopedia of the ficticious world in which the story happens.

Yes, the writer has to explain things and sometimes there's no way in the story to fit a scene in which to show those particularities. In that case, the writer should consider to obviate those things altogether since they just hinder the story and, worse, force the reader to study a bunch of things that probably won't be that relevant in the narration. Of course, you can write that infodumping in a very attractive way, but it is still infodumping and deviates the reader from the story. In fact, sometimes infodumping is camouflaged as another story (in the form of a letter, for instance) that has little to do with the main one.

To sum up, for me infodumping is not narrating at all, just fatting the text (not the story, mind you) because the writer needs to show how cool their ficticious world is or to fill us in about some events they forgot or didn't knew how to put in the story. Writers of the world, please, nowadays you can leave the infodumping for your blogs or wikis, and fill your narrations just with the story itself. I'm sure many readers will be very grateful of this.

Sorry if I seem rather blunt on this, but this topic reminded me a couple of examples in which I found truly awful infodumping (one is Moby Dick and those lenghty chapters about the ramblings of some ficticious sailor -those made me abandon ship-, and the other is some scifi novel not even worth being mentioned at all).

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Different periods in writing dealt with things differently. There’s a reason many professors let students skip a god chunk of Moby Dick, LMAO. I think my prof said, “If you want to learn about whaling go ahead and read X chapters, but otherwise, skip to Y.”

Another point is that bending over backwards to “show” the infodump can be worse than just dumping away.

As a reader I prefer not to be shown or told everything, I want the story and world building organic, and I do my damnedest to write what I want to read. So far, so good. But I also know there is a subset of readers who want every detail spelled out... much like a Sanderson magic system.

 

[skip.knox]

I've said it before, but I love repeating myself.
An infodump is what you call exposition you don't like. Another person likes the passage and they call it description or narrative or deep world building. IOW, infodump has no objective reality. It's just the term we use for "I didn't like this bit that had a bunch of details I didn't care about and the writing wasn't strong enough to carry me." It really isn't about information or about dumping.

 

[Steerpike]

I don’t agree. An infodump is any time and author provides a large dump of information—backstory, world building, or what have you. It can be good or bad depending on the execution. There are some infodumps I like just fine.

 

[Maker of Things Not Kings]

I like to think of it as going to a new amusement park. I don't want someone to tell me, before I'm barely through the front gate, about all the rides and attractions I might see there. I want to discover them as I wander along through the crowds and experience the smells and the sounds of it myself. I want to come around a corner and see the terrifying corkscrew coaster track emerging above a grove of trees, not have my friend give me a play by play of the ride as we're driving there. I want to experience someone passing me, carrying a dip cone, ice cream running down their chin. Then I think Ooooh I want that! I don't wan't someone to tell me how good it is and that I must get one!

Now, once I'm in there awhile, a little dizzy and nauseous and reeling, then I don't mind slowing down for my friend to tell me about his last experience on such and such a ride in greater detail. Then I have some context. Some inner sense of what he's going on about but not before I take a ride or two myself!

I put this in the category of great advice for new/inexperienced writers who haven't even begun to study the craft and deepen their understanding of it by writing A LOT. New writers tend to tell and not show by using long descriptive run-ons that go nowhere. Signaling them out as info dumps is an easy way to highlight that and point them towards reworking the narrative to eliminate it, which is, at the very least, good writing craft. (as is making those expositions interesting to our readers and not only to ourselves) Most new writers, while full of enthusiasm for their new world, have little concept of what is and isn't important to telling their story the best way possible. Even with the most amazing fantasy world (which every new world-builder is 100% positive they're creating) you can seed a detail or two about your fantasy world on practically every other page if you're patient and think it through.

That approach seems more likely to hold readers over the long haul.

If I find myself feeling like what I'm doing is research, be it victorian era fashion, how space telescopes work, planet Gamma Beta 00 or the history of whaling, and not reading a novel, that's usually when I'll start skipping over those bulky bits if not the rest of the book.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Continuing to say something doesn’t make it so in everyone’s reality, that is just your interpretation and definition. There are parts of books and movies that are enjoyable but they are still infodumps. The Matrix has infodump, for instance. It works, but it’s still infodump. LoTR has some infodump on the ring and history. The big thing is that both infodumps are answering questions that (hopefully) the audience/readers are already asking. Too many infodumps are answering questions that the reader just isn’t asking. That could also work into the definition, if getting nitpicky.

If insisting on the negative connotation, which I think is a positive, then it would be defined as excessive exposition, not exposition you don’t like. Of course there isn’t an objective observation, nothing in writing is, outside of grammar and spellin’, and that there is flexible, ain’t it? Infodump defined... first part, info = exposition, dump = large amount. An infodump, in fact, may not even be excessive exposition but instead excessive in one helping. If an infodump is spread out in spoonfuls instead of a shovel, the exact same info may be just fine.

And of course, much depends on the Target Audience, MG, YA, NA are going to be different than a literary adult tolerance level. When I read Shanarra in High School many moons ago, the infodump bugged me, but it wasn’t a killer like it would be now.

I've said it before, but I love repeating myself.
An infodump is what you call exposition you don't like. Another person likes the passage and they call it description or narrative or deep world building. IOW, infodump has no objective reality. It's just the term we use for "I didn't like this bit that had a bunch of details I didn't care about and the writing wasn't strong enough to carry me." It really isn't about information or about dumping.

 

[skip.knox]

>Continuing to say something doesn’t make it so in everyone’s reality,
No worries. I take that angle because most times when I see the subject come up, it's presented as if "infodump" were an objectively identifiable thing--akin to spelling--that any editor would flag, any reader would flinch at, and every author should learn to avoid. I would encourage writers to forget the term entirely.

 

[Steerpike]

Hard SF tends to incorporate infodumps more often, it seems to me. I am usually fine with those because the subject matter is interesting, though I prefer that the writing be engaging as well.

One of my favorite infodumps is the start of Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, which was published separately in Interzone. The characters in the story are mostly software-type intelligences, mostly created specifically by progenitor intelligences. Every so often, the system in which they all live spontaneously creates an orphan.

Diaspora, which is a novel that is truly epic in scope, starts with an explanation of this process and by following the orphan from inception through self-awareness and "citizenship." It's is on Egan's website HERE.

 

[FifthView]

This story was throwing huge infodumps in my face, and, you know, it worked! It was entertaining, despite conventional wisdom telling us that it's a big no-no.

I'm trying to decide whether to do a Gladiator reference or a Nirvana reference. "Are you not entertained?" vs "Here we are now; entertain us!"

It comes down to that. Is it entertaining?

I feel lately, and this might be a faulty impression I'll admit, that more people are entertained by character, and by all the things to do with character, than by:

• things
• places
• abstract ideas
• and so forth.

Even with characters, people are less entertained when characters are presented as objects or in the abstract, i.e., being told about them at a distance, third person omniscient, and so when infodumped.

So it strikes me that infodumps, when viewed negatively, might be viewed that way for one of two reasons. Either the info is about things, ideas, places, people in the abstract; and, readers are naturally more likely to be bored by this subject matter. Or the info is simply being presented in a very boring way.

On the latter: A very witty, funny, interesting narrator voice, in storyteller mode or in first person, can get away with lots more info dump than some other types of narrator, regardless of the subject of the info dump.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

My age old habit of picking on Sanderson takes a diversion... his audiobook reader. The narrative voice being entertaining to get away with info dump is big, and this guy reading his books? OMG, everything he says feels like an infodump I wanna sleep through.

All of writing is telling, showing is simply telling with style (my Buzz and Woody ripoff). People with narrative gifts like Twain and Dickens could get away with a lot. 1st POV absolutely, or the Omniscient 3rd storyteller of Tolkien and Dickens can get away with these dumps easier than 3rd Limited, IMO.

I'm trying to decide whether to do a Gladiator reference or a Nirvana reference. "Are you not entertained?" vs "Here we are now; entertain us!"

It comes down to that. Is it entertaining?

I feel lately, and this might be a faulty impression I'll admit, that more people are entertained by character, and by all the things to do with character, than by:

• things
• places
• abstract ideas
• and so forth.

Even with characters, people are less entertained when characters are presented as objects or in the abstract, i.e., being told about them at a distance, third person omniscient, and so when infodumped.

So it strikes me that infodumps, when viewed negatively, might be viewed that way for one of two reasons. Either the info is about things, ideas, places, people in the abstract; and, readers are naturally more likely to be bored by this subject matter. Or the info is simply being presented in a very boring way.

On the latter: A very witty, funny, interesting narrator voice, in storyteller mode or in first person, can get away with lots more info dump than some other types of narrator, regardless of the subject of the info dump.

 

[FifthView]

As a lark, I just tried an experiment. I would open a book to a random page and tap a word at random, then I'd look up that word on Wikipedia, find some dry info-dumping paragraph, and see if I could rewrite it to make it entertaining.

The experiment was a failure. The word, from a book on Anglo-Saxon history, was, luckily enough, Cnut.

A fascinating subject, for me. But I don't already know enough about him, must not be interested enough in him, to pour myself into writing an info dump about him.

Or I was just too tired, my brain too much mush.

I knew I'd fail at it, when I looked over the Wikipedia page, so I didn't bother trying.

An alternative exercise would be to take a subject I'm very interested in and know well and see if I could turn that into a paragraph of info dump that can entertain.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Not exactly a rewrite...

As a great king (check my title for proof), you might expect that I, Cnut the Great, could offer reams of sound advice for a fledgling ruler to achieve such a moniker as “the Great”, but there is really only one: If you wish history to be kind to you, be kind to those who will write your history. If I had been meaner to the church, I might have been known as Canute the Snooty.

 

[Miles Lacey]

Often when I read opinions about info-dumps I note that many people don't consider the context of when the books were written. A person reading a book like Bram Stoker's Dracula at the time it was published didn't have access to movies, television programmes, the Internet and most of the other things we take for granted. Most people didn't even travel across their own country, let alone to another. To them, Transylvania may as well have been another world. For them, learning that people wore certain types of clothes and ate certain types of food was part of the experience of making the places they were reading about seem more real. Today, such descriptions aren't necessary because you can assume there's barely a person alive who hasn't heard of Transylvania or have some idea of what it looks like.

I love a decent info-dump. I also love the"show, don't tell" approach. However, both can be done very well or very badly. For me, the difference is often the context in which the info-dumping or "show, don't tell" approach is taken and whether or not the information is going to be useful later on in the story.

 

[Kasper Hviid]

Could it be that the subplot about the creature prepares the reader for the infodump to come, so that once it arrives, the reader is interested in the topic and will enjoy learning more about it? Would it have had the same effect if the infodump came first and the subplot after?

Yeah, it's essentially a long build-up to the infodump. I never really thought of how a story could be structured around the infodump. I guess a fast-paced section could be followed by an info dump as a kind of breather for the reader. Or the infodump could put the previous action into a new perspective.

For me, the effectiveness of a lengthy infodump is proportional to the extent to which the narrative voice is unique and/or engaging.

Heh, I disagree, actually!
I mean, you can try dressing some dry information up with some jokes and whatnot, but that is kind of a cheap trick. In fantasy, what really makes an infodump work is that the information itself is peculiar and otherworldly, that it instill a sense of wonder and amazement. Like the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The idea of a leech that feeds on conscious brainwaves and shits out a translation is entertaining in itself. (but admittedly, after the dry description of the fish, said fish is used in an over-the-top theological argument)

Of course, you can write that infodumping in a very attractive way, but it is still infodumping and deviates the reader from the story.

I think where our point of view differs is that you see the "story" as being defined as the plot moving forward. Thus, anything disrupting this is bad.
Me, on the other hand, I see the "story" as a larger collection of stuff that keeps the reader engaged. Here, the sense of having the plot moving forward is just one possibility, albeit a powerful one. In the Phryne Fisher series, a constantly reoccurring theme is descriptions of what the protagonist is eating, what she is wearing, and whom she is shagging, things often totally irrelevant to the murder plot. This works, not only because the reader is able to share the protagonists' pleasure, but also because things like 1920's Australian cuisine are strange and interesting in itself.

I feel lately, and this might be a faulty impression I'll admit, that more people are entertained by character, and by all the things to do with character, than by:

• things
• places
• abstract ideas
• and so forth.

Ush, this bit hurt! Possibly, you're right, I haven't thought about this before. But it may be what people really talk about when they talk about their dislike of infodumps.

 

[FifthView]

Ush, this bit hurt! Possibly, you're right, I haven't thought about this before. But it may be what people really talk about when they talk about their dislike of infodumps.

I remember dry sections of info dump from various books, and they usually involved a description of a collection of cities, long-past historical events, even descriptions of all the banners in an assembled army. That sort of thing.

I do think this is unfortunate. I also have sometimes loved that sort of thing, at least when it involves interesting info about places and things.

I suppose it depends upon context, writing style, and the sorts of things being communicated?

 

[FifthView]

Not exactly a rewrite...

As a great king (check my title for proof), you might expect that I, Cnut the Great, could offer reams of sound advice for a fledgling ruler to achieve such a moniker as “the Great”, but there is really only one: If you wish history to be kind to you, be kind to those who will write your history. If I had been meaner to the church, I might have been known as Canute the Snooty.

Ah, interesting voice. But I'm not sure I'd call that an info dump. I was imagining the addition of various facts, names and places perhaps, perhaps dates and general relationships between all these...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I just had to write that after skimming a piece, heh heh. Totally off topic.

Ah, interesting voice. But I'm not sure I'd call that an info dump. I was imagining the addition of various facts, names and places perhaps, perhaps dates and general relationships between all these...