“Hillside Dump,” Gene Daniels, Photographer.

As you’ve probably noted, I’ve read a number of novels by obscure writers in the last year or so, when they became available free or very cheap for Kindle. I think such reading is actually beneficial for a writer, because it teaches vicariously, through others’ mistakes.

The previous paragraph, by the way, can be described as exposition. Exposition tells back story, sets up the situation, and prepares the reader for what is to come.

And what is to come is a post about exposition.

The dreaded Info Dump is one of the most common mistakes I observe among fledgling novelists. You’ve probably run across it yourself. The characters are going along, doing whatever it is they do, and then the author stops everything to

a)Tell you the back story of the characters, or the country, or the world, in his own voice, or

b)Have one of the characters do it.

In general, option b is better than option a, but either can annoy the heck out of your readers if done clumsily.

There’s a particular fantasy writer, of whose books I have read one and a half. In the second book I tackled, his main character rode into a new country about half way through the story, and everything stopped while the author delivered an extended lecture on the whole history of that country. I dropped the book and never tried another of his.

Now this author is far more successful than I am, so he probably possesses many virtues I lack. But I still say there was no warrant for that kind of info dump.

There are good ways to give your reader the same information, without braking to a full stop.

One of the best is simply to introduce a character who’s a stranger, and get somebody (or several people) to explain things to him. That’s why so many good books center on strangers going to new places.

(By the way, the information doesn’t have to be dispensed all at once. You can introduce it bit by bit, as the story warrants. The stranger character asks, and he gets his answers. It’s natural and true to life, and pretty painless for the reader. It’s also not necessary to satisfy the stranger’s curiosity right away. Let him be mystified for a while. The reader will share his mystification, and it will add to the intrigue of the story.)

One caveat — For heaven’s sake, have the person who is informed be someone who needs informing. Nothing destroys a story’s credibility like the dreaded “As you know,” speech, such as, “As you know, Fred, I am your elder brother.”

If you have to do an info dump, for heaven’s sake break it up a little. In Wolf Time, my main character is a college instructor who gives a lecture on Norwegian history that provides background for the supernatural occurrences to come. But I don’t just transcribe his lecture text. I have students interrupt and argue with him. This allows us to get to know him better, to see what kind of man he is, even while information is being imparted. People tell me that worked pretty well.

You can always “show, don’t tell,” too. Instead of having somebody explain how your character’s grandfather came to possess the Mystic Snoose Tin of Wanamingo, you can add a vignette, perhaps (but not necessarily) at the beginning of the story, presenting that discovery as a self-contained story within the narrative.

Those are a couple of techniques for exposition that come to mind offhand. There are probably more, and I’ll share them if I think of any.

John Vorhaus writes about writing:

So that would seem to leave us with a pretty clear choice, wouldn’t it? Write, and improve; or don’t write, and don’t improve.

Why is it not that simple?

Because the forces of evil are arrayed against the desire to write. And the biggest evil of all is the need to be good. Burdened by the unrealistic expectation of all quality all the time, we often find that we just can’t write at all.