The Dreaded Info Dump
Tips to Avoid an Exposition Dump but Still Bring Life to Your Story
Your story has been brewing in your head with the juiciest of details that span one thousand years. The world as it was is not how it is now. People have changed, as have politics and the food … and the reader needs to know it.
But how do you give the reader what they need to know in a way that isn’t pages of overwhelming prose? How do you build out a world without ripping the reader out of the story? In this article, we’ll offer a few trips and tricks to identify whether what you’ve written is necessary explanation or just an exposition dump—and how you can avoid the information overload in the future.
Is This Really Necessary?
Identifying necessary versus unnecessary exposition should be top priority when tightening up a story, and it starts by asking the following:
- Without this passage, does the story make sense?
- Does the plot still move forward?
- Is the passage interesting enough that the reader will keep reading it?
Exposition should add to the story rather than take away from the flow of the narrative by adding unnecessary detail. Characters with strong motivations should drive the plot forward for you based on who they are and what they do. Giving the details the ax isn’t always the solution—sometimes the details are just in the wrong place and can be moved or utilized elsewhere in the story to help the flow and maintain relevance.
Once you’ve determined whether your backstory or piece of lore is relevant to the plot—and will matter to the reader—there are a few methods for working it into the story without disrupting the momentum you’ve built. These can be subtle, such as subplots designed to introduce characters to key details, or more obvious, such as a knowledgeable character who is there to explain relevant background information. But they can help maintain the pace you’ve set without bogging things down with details.
Side Quest
If you’ve determined that the reader is lacking significant information they need to feel vested in the story, introducing a side quest just to deliver the necessary details is a way to skirt around the info dump. Characters are free to discuss, act, discover, create, and destroy in your world, and it’s up to you to make the explanatory information around it a part of the story—one that builds your characters out.
Consider creating a side quest in which your characters fail but where lessons are learned, painful memories (that the reader needs to know about) resurface, or an old villain emerges from the shadows. Maybe that villain just happens to know your character’s secrets—the ones that have been a mystery to the reader until now. A side quest is action, tension, and an opportunity to build your characters and world without dragging the reader through pages of backstory.
Watson
In Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson is more than Sherlock’s confidant; he’s also there to represent the audience, or the everyman. Since Watson isn’t privy to or doesn’t understand Holmes’s deductions, Holmes explains them to Watson, and thus explains them to the reader. Through Watson, the reader understands Holmes, the crimes they’re solving, the world they live in, and the emotional and moral weight of it all. To further immerse the reader, Watson narrates and writes stories within the story universe, justifying the storytelling voice the character has and filtering Holmes’s genius through someone more relatable to the reader. Watson delivers information the reader needs in a way that’s engaging and believable, without bogging the reader down.
Include a Watson, an everyman, or a character who joins the narrative with a similar understanding of how things work to deliver details to your reader. The everyman can voice the questions readers have without interrupting the story or filling a page with unnecessary text. With certain stories, the narrator can even be the everyman, breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the reader in a cheeky, off-the-cuff, comedic bit. This type of narration becomes a clever tool to add comedic relief, ease tension, or explain things the reader needs to know.
A Necessary Evil
Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done—the exposition your story needs can’t be delivered any other way. In this case, rely on the fact that every reader has become accustomed to the occasional information dump—and if you do it sparingly, they’ll understand that it’s more important to pay attention when you do. Make these passages count by using tight prose and weaving the information into the story; let characters move or speak between details so the narrative continues to progress.
Moving Forward
Although readers are accustomed to the occasional information overload, it’s not fair to them to rely on that trust to deliver pages of exposition to build out a world. That’s just lazy writing, and you’re too clever for that. This list isn’t all-encompassing, but it should get you started on crafting your story to be as lean as possible. After all, the most important part of your story shouldn’t be what happened before page 1; it should be what happens next.
David Viergutz
