Information Dump

When your novel features a world that is vastly different from our own, you have to supply enough details to show how people in that realm operate. This imperative appears most often in the historical and sci fi/fantasy genres, where old or new cultural norms represent a large portion of the book’s appeal. Inserting such explanations works well if you have an entire book in which to scatter them. What happens, though, when the main character(s) has to enter a new world, say, halfway through the book?

This problem appears most often in novels featuring a journey. While it’s fun to voyage to new lands, you also have to tell the reader how the joint runs. What were the people like in Atlantis? Who was fighting who in 19th-century Ceylon? Once you get started on a flight of fancy, you soon find that it must contain enough complexity to make it feel satisfying enough to the reader to bother going there. 

Not only does that add up to a lot of information, but you need to place most of it when you first cross that land’s threshold. That way the reader understands how different it is, or what the stakes are in this strange place. As a result the book slows down. A new character or two becomes a mouthpiece telling the newcomer everything that’s going on. The reader is overloaded with a new cache of information. None of that bodes well for the pacing of a story.

What can you do? One good idea is to break up the background dump into smaller chunks. This can be done in several ways. The first is to front-load material before the character ever gets to the world. For example, a gray-haired exile from that land could, upon learning where the character is going, tell a story about his former land. When a page or so is dropped in here and there, a good deal of background can be pre-told.

Second, you can determine which material needs to appear as soon as the new world appears. Maybe the reader only has to know right away that the Klingons and Metastis have been at war for hundreds of years. The stuff about the Klingon emperor can wait for another 30 pages, until the character reaches the palace. That way the reader can put her feet solidly on the ground, enjoy the view, but the pacing does not slow down.

Exercise: Review the manuscript for any long blocks of expository dialogue. Past a certain length, this device can strike a reader as artificial. Determine what needs to be said, because the main character interacts vocally with it, and what could be turned into narrative. All you have to is change it to indirect speech: She went on to relate how . . . 

“When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.” —Ken Kesey

Copyright @ 2023, John Paine