Are You an Accidental Info-Dumper?

The infodump: one of the Four Horsemen of the Writerly Apocalypse (the others being Passive Voice, Too Many Adverbs, and Telling Not Showing). When authors infodump, they interrupt the flow of their story to drop a chunk of exposition onto readers’ laps. You’re happily reading along, following, say, the protagonist as she goes to board an abandoned spaceship, when—bam!—you smack your head against two full pages of how exactly this class of spaceship creates artificial gravity. (Probably because some nerd complained about how their immersion was ruined if the author didn’t explain how artificial gravity worked.) Regardless of the reason, the interruption takes the reader out of the story, breaking the illusion of the fictional reality.

The opposite of infodumping is “incluing,” a word attributed to author Jo Walton. Incluing is the process of scattering information seamlessly throughout the text. The author who is adept at incluing provides just enough information to situate the reader in the story without interrupting the flow of the narrative.

But like everything writing-related, this is easier said than done. Not only can it be difficult for authors to recognize that they are infodumping, it’s not always obvious where or how to include background information in a story. As a result, in attempting to avoid infodumps, writers seem to have created a few new troublesome habits. Like Hydra’s heads, as soon as we think we have solved one problem, more crop up in its place.

Others may have coined terms for them, but for my purposes I’m calling these pitfalls “uber-minimalism,” “the mirror glance,” and “the side quest.” While these are all attempts at solving the same problem, they also all have the same fundamental flaw: they take the reader out of the story.

Uber-minimalists provide zero information or context clues to help situate the reader. You know the type: you pick up a science fiction book (scifi often gets ragged on for doing this, though it’s hardly unique to that genre alone), and right away read a sentence that sounds like this:

“I picked up my blargstetter from the floor and set it next to my old flerf.”

And nowhere in sight is an explanation, or even a few context clues, of what a blargstetter and a flerf are.

Then you have the mirror glance, an only slightly less awkward cousin to the “men writing women poorly” genre. You know how it goes:

“She stood in front of her bedroom mirror and ran a hairbrush through her shoulder-length brown hair, noticing the slope of her too-pointed nose and sharp cheekbones in the morning light.”

(For “men writing women poorly,” just have the character notice her breasts, a definitely normal thing that people with breasts do on a daily basis.)

The side quest is less of a sentence-level problem and more of a structural issue that I’ve seen crop up in some critique groups and workshops. Writers are so worried about infodumping that rather than take a moment to just explain something in exposition, they create new plot threads, scenes, or other narrative tools to “show” some important aspect of their worldbuilding. It’s fair to say that if you have to invent a side plot to provide important information, that information may not actually be as important as you think it is. But you may also need to share a piece of worldbuilding that won’t necessarily come into play until later, yet provides critical context for a character’s actions in the present moment. In that case, wouldn’t it just be easier to simply include a brief sentence or two of exposition?

How to Recognize Infodumping

Ideally, every writer has an editor, beta reader, or critique partner who can identify instances of infodumping. But not only does every writer not necessarily have access to such help, we probably don’t want to overburden our dear friends and colleagues with the role of Infodump Police.

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is a whiz with writerly advice, and has recommended that writers consider both the necessity and the relevance of any worldbuilding details they provide. Of course, this assumes that we writers are capable of knowing what is necessary and relevant in our work. I would wager that many of us probably think a lot of what we write is more necessary and relevant than it really is. It’s difficult to be objective about one’s own work when you’re immersed in it. That lengthy description of the statue in the town square may seem crucial to you, the author, because perhaps it provides insight into the character of the town that shaped your protagonist’s worldview. But to the reader? Perhaps not.

As with many things, identifying instances of infodumping gets easier with practice. In the meantime, to figure out what aspects of our stories are necessary and relevant, I’d like to revisit a post I made last year about “story-first worldbuilding.” This approach to worldbuilding focuses the writer’s energies on creating contextual details that directly affect the story being told. This is in contrast to many traditional “kitchen sink” style worldbuilding guides, which ask writers to figure out everything about their world not just including the kitchen sink, but also what type of material that kitchen sink is crafted from.

One of the reasons I caution other writers against this kitchen sink approach is because of a fundamental law of worldbuilding: once an aspect of a world has been created, it will try to work its way into the story. This can become a problem if an author is creating too many details that are not immediately relevant to the plot or characters. You may do all this extensive worldbuilding only to find that you can’t work it all into your story. But you worked hard on that worldbuilding, and you want people to see it! So you find ways to work it in, but then your readers come back and say that the story is bloated and/or slow-moving. But if you focus your worldbuilding on what’s relevant to the story, then you won’t have to work as hard to fit it into the text.

So when you find yourself starting to explain something in your story, stop and ask yourself: does this detail directly influence the progression of the plot or a character’s development? If not, you may want to consider leaving it out.

Maintaining POV Integrity

Recognizing where and how to include worldbuilding details “seamlessly” is particularly difficult when one is writing from a deep point of view (POV). Deep POV is a type of third-person subjective that silences the narrative voice and situates the reader fully in the head of the POV character. There are many benefits to deep POV: it shortens the distance between reader and character, allowing readers to feel more connected and invested in the characters, and provides a sense of immediacy to the action. Think of it like a first-person shooter video game; character and reader/player are one and the same.

But deep POV is harder to accomplish when readers and characters do not share the same worlds, frames of reference, or contexts. It’s easier to refer to commonalities without explanation in works that are set in our world. But if you’re writing secondary world fantasy or far future science fiction, and if you are doing the detailed work of creating new worlds out of whole cloth, there will inevitably be a disconnect between what a character in your world will understand and what your reader will understand.

That’s when you get people trying to implement deep POV in a context-less scenario, and you get unexplained nonsense like blargstetters and flerfs.

There are instances when it simply makes more sense to explain something in the text, rather than ignoring it or trying to shoehorn it into the story in a way that distracts from the narrative or the characters.

Rebecca Roanhorse does this well in her novel Trail of Lightning, which is set in a future North America where all but Navajo land has been destroyed by a worldwide flood known as the Big Water. The novel is told in first-person, with similar principles to deep POV. Several chapters in—once the readers have a solid sense of the narrator and her world already—Roanhorse spends about a page simply explaining what happened during the Big Water. While it might be exposition recounted for the benefit of the reader, not the narrator, this passage does not feel like an infodump. Sure, Roanhorse could have worked in some history lesson about the Big Water somewhere, or figured out some convoluted way of hinting at the flood and allowing the reader to put together the pieces. And certainly there are potential reasons why an author may want to encourage their reader to put the pieces of the backstory together on their own. But that’s not Roanhorse’s book: the book is about a monster hunter who is on a mission, a fast-paced and gritty story in a violent post-apocalyptic future. Working in a meandering reference here and there to the flood would have slowed down the action by making the reader stop to try to make sense of the details.

Instead, the story of the Big Water is concise, well-told, and relevant to the plot and to the characters, and it’s important that we, the readers, know it for context. Is it a perfect example of POV integrity? Maybe not. But so what? It works.

And in the end, isn’t that what we’re going for? The rules are there to guide us, but I’d be perfectly happy if someone finished reading my book, set it down, and said, “It worked.”

Writers, what are your top tips for working these details into your prose without boring your readers? How do you decide when your story needs you to break a rule, dump some info, use the passive voice, etc.?