This is a public service announcement to all fiction writers. Today's topic, info dumping and calling it story telling. Remember everyone, info dumps are not the way to tell a story. I don't care how big or small, I don't care for your excuses, I don't care for "clever" ideas such as putting it in a book and having the character read it to themselves, do not make characters recite word for word the thing you want to convey. It is unnatural, lazy, and uncreative. Work the things you want to say into the narrative. An example... Bad Story Telling "She and mom didn't get along. Ever since she took up her mother career and became an escort like her, things have been bad between them. They would fight, my mom would get angry and try to take my sisters cosmetics from her, my sister would get angry and scream at my mother. And then my mother would need to go retrieve my father from the bar, where he drunk himself into a stupor. Then my sister would sneak out anyway." Good Story Telling " "I didn't save up my whole life and move out of the slums just to have you go back into them and do what I did!" My mother shouted. "I'm not a cheap whore like you were! I attend powerful people, connected people! If I can-" My sister bit back a bit forcefully while applying foundation to her face. "I don't care if your attending the King himself! I'm trying to give you a chance to have a life better than the one I had!" My mother, who was thoughly tired of being ignored, had ripped the brush out of my sisters hand. "Your not going out tonight! Go your room!" "You can't ground me!" "Go to your room! NOW I have to get your father from the bar. When we come back, you had better be here. Do not set him off again tonight." " I spent 2-3 minutes writing this scene, when I could have taken the 10 seconds to pen out a quick paragraph explaining everything without telling any actual story. If you have eyes and can read, the difference in quality is clear. In the good example, the characters feel real, they feel like people who would spite each other because they love each other. That's what a real character should be like. The point, is that it's always worth it to write a story like this, instead of just vomiting up information and treating it like it's character development. Character development only happens if you SHOW IT HAPPENS! So stop using info dumps to tell a story, I'm tired of reading trashy novels written like that. So fix it so I can enjoy a story with a premise that I was interested in enough to pickup the book. Thank You, and have a good day.
PSA - If u want to write LitRpg, simplify your stat and abilities. Rarely anyone will read full stat and abilities description after first few times it come out. Those thing also ruin immersion when overdone. Remember, story first.
Exactly, stats should be a supporting element. Not a main one. If I wanted to read meaningless numbers, I would watch atmospheric pressure levels on a google spreadsheet. It's supposed to be a story, so write! If you ever have to use a calculator to write a novel, please delete your novel and start over.
Never write a word in only big in a story. I've seen ppl do that, cuz they wanted to express the character shouting.... Just write character shouted. The worst was when I went to a bookstore and looked for English story books. There were no paragraphs... they were all glued together. And especially those brackets, (for eg. this as info filling that's separated from the sentence.), and they are everywhere.
Except that's not the advice most published writers give. Most of them will point to their own writing and where they used tell and why they used it. There are valid reasons to use it to tell transitions and time passages for example. Show should be used during drama and action. Edit: Btw, this is part of a transition from novels before visual media to the current way we envision entertainment. Dickens, Steinbeck and many other novelists used narrators and other longer forms of telling. Now most novelists use short bits here and there for specific purposes. It's a transition that you can clearly see if you look at the top rated books from each decade over the last hundred years.
If I ever get serious about writing a web novel I'm so gonna be hitting you up with PMs lol I find many authors don't flesh out the structure of their world/powers well enough and often break their own defined structure any time it is convenient or easier than writing within it. Anything that breaks immersion writing wise is a big no no in my opinion especially things that can easily be avoided with a little planning and outlining.
I'm actually stuck in the begining phases of planning my own novel, building a usable world map. Problem is, for some of my idea to work I need to build my own map, and it's hard...I can't get it to look real enough. Not enough tectonic plate realism I think.
I never understood the idea of never using fonts to add to a line. Used sparingly, it can enhance a story, or so is my opinion. And yeah, whoever wrote those stories in that book store apperantly doesn't know what a paragraph is.
I would be very interested in having a conversation with you about the changes of writing style over the decades.
You have any advice for someone like me who somehow always focuses too much on the setting (factions and world building), parameters (abilities and terminology), but not on the story itself or its characters? Like I made a solid world and dynamic system, but now I'm dried out in creating characters or detailed events involving dialogue or action.
Throw away your story if it's not too big, if it is, pack it away in a box somewhere you can reach it or see it. There's a website called World Anvil. Go there, build a world so detailed it could rival Middle Earth. You will have inspiration while building it. DONT FOLLOW THAT INSPIRATION YET! Save it in a note and build the places you think the story will go first. Then go and write your tale. Once you get your world maps, factions and sects, religions and cults all sorted out, then begin your story. Write short stories that are exactly 3 chapters long first. About small things, a child turned slave and what happened to him/her, a special shield from a fallen warrior and what happens to it after it is left on the battle field, a Kings rendezvou with a lover. This sort of thing. Re-write them as many times as necessary to achieve perfection. Then if you want to or can, go back and read your story you saved in a box. Edit it, re-write it, and see what happens.
The Grandmaster Strategist is a good example on proper info dumps. Infodumps are a way to tell a story. There are multiple ways on storytelling, there's foreshadowing, plottwists, ellipsis, dialogue, etc. It just depends on how good you execute it. Also, who the hell writes the dialogue as an infodump. Stuff like those are meant to be narrated.
But sometimes, infodumps not being a story is a good thing. Especially if you want to move the story along, part of being an author is pick and choosing which story you wish to tell and which ones you dont. Info dumping information here and there is fine as long as you do so in moderation. I have seen many stories which have reached mid to end story and become nothing more than infodumps which gets boring. But infodump as a wrap up of your boring day in town is fine. Infodump of basicd of magic system(like basic elements) and geography, sure, why not.
And yet I could make it medevil with an abusive alcoholic father coming home drunk with a bottle of corn spirits and the sister sneaking out to meet with the prince. And that s just scratching the surface of what I could make.
I'm fond of the approach of just never giving info dumps. How often in the real world in your own life do you have conversations that describe the general activities of the world around you? You don't. Characters in a story that just act on the knowledge they have, leaving it up to the reader to piece together the setting and mechanics is an engaging style of writing that lets me have something to think about in the back of my mind while I'm reading the story.
I disagree on all points. A boring day in town is never boring. If it was, why is it in the story in the first place. And if It's boring, why don't I shift perspectives to a would be theif looking to pick pocket our main character who is having a boring day in town( I find it ironic no one ever tells a story about the pick pockets. There's so much potential there for a good short story.). I ESPECIALLY disagree about info dumping the magic system and geography. Magic is best left mysterious, not known to all. If it was known to all, then the reader would ask "So why hasn't anyone improved it if everything is known about magic? Why is the MC the only one able to do this?". You could build a story around this, maybe an anti-magic society where mages are hunted like that of Demacia or Camelot from the Merlin TV show. But even in those settings, magic, is not all known. Geography, there are certain tricks you play with to make your readers say "Wait what?". For example, Cartography is not Satallite Photography. With this little tidbit of info, you could screw with a readers head by releasing a fake map that doesn't have all the information on it, or its plain wrong. And then make a huge plot around said false information being true. For example, releasing a map of a battlefield and having the enemy army take a route through tunnels made by giant digger worms that wasn't present in the notes of the map and surprising the good guys army, causing the battle to be lost. From there you could write a story about a soldier turned deserter turned father. I will say it again, info dumps do not tell stories!
I 99% agree with you, but I do think there are moments where 'telling' would serve the purpose better than 'showing'. Don't limit yourself to writting in only one way, there is no one 'right' way to wright.