Even with the best intentions, you’ll write yourself into a predicament expounding on your story’s background information. Sometimes it’s necessary as you’re attempting to figure out what’s happening in your story because rambling about the broader facts and setting your characters contend with helps clear up where the story goes next and why. Actions gain clarity and nuance and you, the writer, understand how the scene fits into the lager narrative. You have to write something so you write without thought. Then you get a wall of text that doesn’t relate much to the story but feels indispensable.
I won’t say just don’t write infodumps because it’s impossible to know as you’re writing whether the information created is pertinent. Writing in the entire infodump elsewhere by force does expound on every element but leaves nothing to curate in a laborious, plodding story where tenuous plot points exist just to salvage a mistake. The key is knowing how to handle infodumps in the editing process.
Like wet clay, your primary tool to clear the issue is to cut away. As you read back your story, evaluate line by line whether the information advances the plot or adds characterization. It’s a basic but necessary means to trim down faff. There’re tricky qualifiers with adding backstory and establishing a scene as most infodumps focus on these two to make the world feel more alive. As a blanket statement, adding backstory and establishing scenes are good elements. But there comes a tipping point of self-indulgence. You have to ask, “If not for this, would the audience understand what’s going on?” Unless someone falls into a pond, we don’t need to know how deep it is.
Once you’ve trimmed away the worst excesses, then you should disperse the infodump across the story. Let’s say in your story, a character does fall into that pond. You could in its first appearance state the pond’s existence as characters walk past it. In its second appearance the characters are throwing stones across its surface. One character just lobs the rock which, “sank ten feet into the swirling muddy waters.” Then the danger is set up for when the character falls in and drowns. A brisk description doesn’t offend the eye. Plus, due to your first draft’s expounding, you have additional details to pepper into the description each time it comes back around. The third time the characters are at the pond you can bring up the type of fish jumping out the surface and the how the birds, and which birds, hunt those fish. That’s an easy to digest couple sentences.
For backstory, there’s a strong temptation to explore the world’s intricacies and its characters. It might be what inspired you to write the story and what you spent the most time musing about when brainstorming the perfect idea into the perfect story. But until the reader is as invested and has a general understanding of the story, they won’t, nor can they, care as much as you. But, no one is mad at a one sentence opener like, “Since the monarchy’s fall, the nation rotted into a shambling corpse eaten by disorder and violence.” Start any story or chapter with that and move on to the characters dealing with the problem. Then once they face corrupt military tribunals set up in place of the defunct judiciary system, you can add in the finer points of how the nation fell to pieces because it explains how they find themselves in their predicament and hopefully how they might escape.
Rather than give away everything about a character in their debut, give what makes them interesting to read about. In subsequent scenes, expand on what makes them unique through trials and tribulations. Hint and then deliver. We don’t need to know they hate spiders on page one. On page twenty they might flinch assuming a dust bunny is a spider or spider’s silk. Then when it’s called for, they face a spider.
The third means at your disposal is delivery — how the information is presented to the reader. The ultimate poison is a third person omnipotent narrator (diluted author) delivering the entire breath and scope of the world from on high without consideration for whether the reader cares. No piece of information should make the reader feel as if they need to write it down for memory’s sake. The way the information is delivered should elicit a positive emotion (anywhere between laughter and horror).
A common means to deliver backstory broad strokes is to have a parent tell their child a bedtime story that relays such information. Heartwarming and effective. Perhaps the rumor mill starts when a new kid transfers into school or an outlaw rides into town. Maybe some information is incorrect but the truth can be layered in between. Curiosity, mystery, danger. A character picked on as stupid could prove their intellect by expounding on a subject they know intimately. It’s a redemption or tables turned moment laced with expository dialog from a character we’re rooting for. Also, if you’re so inclined, critical information delivered in poems stands out amongst narrative and dialog. It’s an old trick but it works to have rhyme and meter to remember something. Essentially, anything that helped you prepare for a test which didn’t feel like studying can be used to work in bits of an infodump.
Once you’ve applied these principles while editing, you should see the infodumps shrink considerably. The best information you worked so hard to craft will remain in the story but spread amongst many places and in inventive ways. If at the end a small portion of the infodump remains in its original place that’s fine. So long as it has a purpose and is digestible; let it serve the story. After all these changes, it’ll still be the same story, your story with every detail that makes it like none other. The difference will be the far fewer number of readers who throw it down after seeing a wall of text.
Colin Klawans 