“One of the biggest sins of writing is information dumping. Info dumping includes getting too much information into a section and making the whole process unnecessary and boring.”
“Info dumps occur when the writer has information they want to convey in a story and just dumps it into a paragraph, page, or even scene. Some of this information may actually be important. Other parts might be information from research that a writer has made and they can’t bare to not show it off. Big places this occurs is in the beginning and as backstory, but info dumping can happen anywhere.”
Excerpt from an article in The Writing Cooperative by LL Hennessey
Modern writers must be on guard against info-dumping for some reasons beyond their control—culture, readers, and peers. We live in an age in which people have been conditioned to being fed information, descriptions, and conclusions. “What you need to know” is the subtitle of many “news” articles. The phrase lets readers/listeners know which side to be on without a time-consuming sifting through the facts. When writers set out to explain, they generally are no longer showing, but telling.
I’ve seen writers (especially sci-fi writers) in critique groups bombarded by well-meaning peers with advice to explain their entire world and storyline before beginning to tell it. The reason? They cannot wait for the story to develop before knowing what side to be on. I had a reader tell me they wanted a complete explanation of the world as it appears in the book before getting on to the story itself.
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is one of the greatest books ever written. It is 107 pages long in Penguin’s mass market paperback edition. Those 107 pages contain a story of an unlikely relationship in a tumultuous time and place with minimal explanation of either. My children read it while in elementary school and not one of them struggled to understand the story, the time, or the characters’ motivation. As a father, I’d like to say they all inherited exceptional intelligence from me. The truth is, they are smarter than I am.
They understood a story without five chapters of backstory. Don’t get me wrong, backstory is a must. However, well written stories begin in medias res, the middle of things. The backstory is woven into the story as it develops, not all vomited up in the opening chapters.
Granted, a great many people nowadays have little possessed knowledge. It’s considered unnecessary when Google is so readily available to explain things like the date of the War of 1812. Writers often feel obliged to explain their stories. Of course, if you do, you might not have to explain why “voodoo summoning spells” is in your search history.
Here’s the thing, if readers ignored the boring explanations of how the world works from their parents and teachers what makes you think they listen any closer to authors? Or that they are readers to begin with?
Jack LaFountain
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