In the latest post in Writer’s Digest series on mistakes writers make, editor Moriah Richard tackles information dumps, those ugly pages of narrative that tell the reader a lot about your characters or their world, but not too much about the actual story. “It will make your book feel like a textbook instead of a story, and it usually causes readers to start disengaging,” Richard says.
Perversely, info dumps are easy and fun to write. “It’s essentially a shortcut that writers take so they can get all the details onto the page and then move on to the ‘fun’ part of the story,” Richard write. “However, figuring out how to sprinkle these pieces instead of clumping them—though a learned skill—can be just as engaging in the writing process.”
But how? Richard advises writers to be deliberate in their approach to sharing information, by using action and dialogue to portray what your reader needs to know. Characters in action – not fight scene action, but movement and goal chasing – can tell us a lot about their personalities, as well as other informational tidbits.
Characters can also use dialogue to convey information about their world. Avoid using dialogue clumsily. Characters shouldn’t speak in encyclopedic paragraphs and should never tell each other information they already know. However, a younger character asking questions of an elder, or a newcomer figuring out how an environment works are tested methods for using characters and dialogue to convey information.
