Outlining Tips 2 – Secrets

Infodumps are Bad

An infodump can be as obvious as a 30 page dissertation on the history of your world, to as subtle (yet still boring) as a character beginning a lecture with, “As you know, Bob –”

The difficult thing about infodumps isn’t necessarily spotting them? It’s finding a way to break that mountain down into pebbles and feed the information to the reader ever-so-slowly.

This is true not just of worldbuilding things (history and culture) but also of your plot.

You don’t want to be 3/4 of the way through the story without introducing the villain or giving the characters significant plot information. That’s how you end up having your characters learn all of their significant plot information out of a book or from a single conversation with someone.

It’s boring.

What’s FUN is when the reader reaches that 3/4 mark and they think they know what’s going on, only for you to turn everything on its head and make them go “AH! I should have known!”

Try reading Steelheart for a wonderful example of a story that trickles plot information to you ever-so-slowly while still holding a full hand of cards to its chest. Fun, fun book.

The way you do this is by knowing your secrets.

Secrets are Good

Let’s say you’re writing a murder mystery. You’ve got a pretty obvious big secret there — whodunit.

But you’ve also got secrets about WHY they dunit.

Let’s start with the secret and just start brainstorming here.

SECRET: I shot the Sheriff

- but I did not shoot the deputy

- why did I shoot the sheriff?

- why didn’t I shoot the deputy?

- why did I think I’d get away with it?

I shot the sheriff because she slept with my brother, thus causing the breakup of his marriage.
I didn’t shoot the deputy because he was my brother.
I thought I’d get away with it because nobody else knew of my motive, and because I was “camping” at the time — I’ve got boat rental receipts to prove it.

How do I get found out?

The sheriff let me in, so they must have known who I was and trusted me

I made it look like a robbery, but I didn’t steal the petty cash box — I just took money from her wallet
I’m not a very good aim, so I had to shoot the sheriff multiple times to get the job done. The deputy would have heard the ruckus, but somehow “missed the whole thing”
I was wearing high heels at the time, and slipped in the blood

etc, ad nauseum

Why am I not immediately captured?

plenty of folks with better motive than me. Heck, Sheriff got a death-threat from the McCoy’s, pissed that she’d brought in their son on a rape charge. Ruined his chance at football.

My brother helped plant evidence and lied about what happened
etc, etc

Random, I know, but you see this trail of facts and red herrings all laid out nice and neat-like.

Next thing you do? SMASH IT WITH A HAMMAH.

cough

I mean, you break it into little pieces and sprinkle evidence throughout your chapters.

This works for less obvious mystery-like stories as well. Say you’ve got a pair of archaeologists who discover a forgotten tomb in South America. That tomb has secrets.

Secret: Tomb of Doom(b)

- Tomb is hidden

- why is tomb hidden? HOW is tomb hidden?

- Tomb kills people with … um … giant spiders.

- Spider queen in the center of the tomb has been feeding on magical artifacts

we have to establish hints that the tomb was hidden for a reason — deliberate rocks over the cave mouth or something
scattered skeletons establish that people die here, violently and with no signs of weapons
Maybe heiroglyphs
spiders everywhere. A couple redshirts die unexpectedly in the middle of the night, or disappear while off investigating.

You get the idea. You can break your secrets into clues and red herrings, and shove interesting stuff into every chapter.

If your character needs to learn a fact, figure out HOW they learn it and make that a plot point. (And. Um. Try to make them ACTION plot points. Learning everything from books or flashbacks is boring and infodumpy)

See? Your outline is already starting to look better!

Related posts:

Outlining Tips 1 – Beat Sheet
Outlining Woes
NaNo2010 > Outlining Kit