5 Ways to Avoid Information Dumping

What do we mean by information dumping? It is just what it sounds like. You have a big chunk of information about something or someone, and you write it into the story in one big lump.

Why is it a problem? Because it’s boring. People skip over those pages or, worse, they skip the entire story. Even if your style of writing is generally entertaining, info dumping is a hard sell. It’s much better to find another way to feed us that information.

When are we most likely to use info dumping? The first is when we want to explain everything about one of our characters. The second is when we have some sort of technical or historical information to impart. Yes, I understand. But there are better ways.

The Trickle Approach

You don’t have to load us up on backstory all in one lump. Let it come out in small amounts over several pages or chapters.

One of my favourite TV shows is ‘Would I Lie to You?’ on BBC. Two teams of three take turns relating events or situations that they claim to have experienced. The other team has to decide if the contestant is lying or not. One of the difficulties for the team member telling the story is that they have to read the events from a card. If the story is untrue, they have to make up the details on the fly as the other team asks questions. I bring this up because one regular contestant is comedian Chris McCausland. He is blind, so isn’t able to read the cards. He handles this by handing the card to the team captain saying, “Still blind.” The fact that it’s so succinct is why it’s so funny.

Just a tiny snippet of information that hints about an incident in a character’s past, or some obscure detail about a town or some historical event can add colour to a scene, and serve as a warning or a hint of things to come. The Daphne du Maurier novel, My Cousin Rachel, opens with this line:

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more though.

The shadow of that bleak past falls on the events of the tale that follows. No, I won’t spoil it by saying any more. Good book. Read it.

If you trickle information into chapter one about the heroine’s ‘unfortunate history’, but don’t specify anything about it, you’ve captured the reader’s attention. Maybe a few chapters later, you see her throw things in a temper tantrum. Hmm, maybe that’s why she has that reputation. And several chapters after that someone is cautioned not to trust the heroine. They don’t want to say why, but hint that it’s something terrible. Then, perhaps, a child dies and now the backstory is told: a child once died in the heroine’s care. She claims it was an accident, but you know how people talk… You really don’t need much more than that.

Can you see how this is more likely to keep the reader’s attention, rather than telling us all this back story on page one?

Data in Dialogue

One of the advantages of writing a detective novel is your detective is expected to ask questions. This is a great way of revealing information. Also, don’t forget that some information may be tainted. People forget to add important details, or may not know the whole story. Human biases also come into play.

Even other types of stories allow for information to be revealed in dialogue. “Tell me, Ted, how did you lose your arm?” Maybe Ted will answer truthfully, but perhaps he’ll tell a different whopper every time the question comes up. “I woke up one morning and it was just gone.” “A bear ate it.” “A boomerang ripped it right off…” His humour is far more interesting than the mundane facts might be.

Of course, if the details are essential to the story, you can still reveal them in the dialogue.

“Hey, Ted, why are you using the XYZ revolver? Doesn’t it have a reputation for freezing?”

“I’ve had this one a long time and it’s never let me down. Anyway, it only freezes when you don’t keep it lubed. That’s not a mistake I’ve ever made.”

And before you say it, no, I don’t know anything about firearms. You’re right. It shows. The point, though, is revealing information in dialogue can tell us as much about the speakers as about the person or issue they’re discussing.

Information in Action

Listen, you could spend three pages about how many times your character’s hair-trigger temper got him into trouble. Or you could just write a scene in which he explodes for no good reason. Likewise, you could give us a chapter on the history of sailing and explain in detail how to tie an anchor hitch. Or you might show us a sailor in action, watch him as he effortlessly ties his knots, and weave some of his character into the way he completes his tasks. Perhaps he’s old and his fingers are arthritic, but they have, as they say, lost none of their cunning.

Separating a character from your story is always something to be wary of. By this, I mean describing an event or an activity in a dispassionate manner. The kind of thing that sounds like some Public Broadcast documentary: “And now we see the blue whale gliding gracefully through the azure Pacific waves.”

Please.

The activity is fine, but we read for the characters, not for your poetic indulgences.

In my current novel, Great Warrior, a young woman is found dead on a London street. The novel opens with the police notifying the woman’s aunt, Mrs Hudson (Sherlock Holmes’s landlady). Over the next few chapters the reader learns that the dead woman, Meg, had been a nurse serving in South Africa during the Second Boer War. As the story progresses, different people offer their stories about the war and the role of nurses in it. Gradually, a picture of Meg’s life in South Africa emerges. Through it all, we see Holmes and Watson react to the information, worrying about their grief-stricken landlady, and feeling distressed by the violent death of a young woman they both knew.

Mystery writers are used to letting details bubble up to the surface at their own speed, but where we sometimes fall short is in showing the emotional connection to that information. Even something that is done automatically, driving a car, for instance, can demonstrate the character’s competence (or lack thereof) as the driver shifts gears and weaves through traffic. That information tells us something about the character, and may, in a mystery, turn out to be a clue.

Inserting News Items or Relevant Articles

One of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, A Murder is Announced, starts with a newspaper item: “A Murder is Announced’ it says, and, sure enough, a murder happens.

Some stories gain background information by including letters, diary entries, news articles, and so on. Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, includes a lot of ‘news’ items about the Carrie White events.

In Great Warrior, I used diary entries, letters, a journalist’s reports to reveal the backstory.

In addition to presenting information that the reader needs, news items and so forth also add a feeling of authenticity to the story. Furthermore, it allows the author to completely change the tone of the story to something more akin to reportage.

My only caveat with this option is that a little goes a long way. Two or three paragraphs should be sufficient. If you need more, then I’d intersperse the ‘reports’ with dialogue and comments from the characters.

Skip It

Before you try to figure out how to weave the information into the story, ask yourself this:

Does it matter?

Do your readers really need to know the weather conditions of the small town that your characters pass through? Do they need to know about your 40-something year old hero’s time in kindergarten? Or their summer holiday when they were twelve? Maybe there is some connection with the scene, but tell us the essentials. ‘John was struck by the scent of mimosa. It reminded him of his time in France when he was twelve…’ That’s enough. In fact, if the holiday is irrelevant to the story, I’d probably just have him smile at some unspoken memory. Mystery always trumps too much information.

The same goes for technical information. Yes, some authors love showing off their knowledge of computers or guns or whatever, but you’re not writing a text book. Unless there is an aspect that is pertinent to the story — say this particular weapon has a known flaw and this causes the gun to fail at a key moment — just give us the essentials that we need to understand the scene. I’ve already shown in the dialogue section how this gun issue could be handled.

PS: If ‘Would I Lie to You’ sounds like your sort of entertainment, it’s available on the BBC, and clips are on YouTube.

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