Infodumps. I talk about them a lot on here. But I’ve never really explained what an infodump really is, how to identify them, and what to do instead. Let’s fix that and go all in!
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What is an infodump?
Put simply, an infodump is a huge block of exposition with no action, no dialogue, nothing other than pure information. Readers are forced to sift through the mess and figure out what is important – if they bother to stick around.
Let’s look at an infodump I have crafted specifically for this article. We do not dunk on aspiring authors by citing them as examples. Make fun of me instead.
Tara gazed out at the fertile valley of Clealan, which was sown with knee-high wheat. This wheat was imported from Mystiqua, a land across the Quoanor Sea, 45 years ago, and it had become Clealan’s staple crop.
The Clealanders would soon be out in full force to harvest these goods: about 500 farmers lived in this valley, most coalescing around the town of Blandlor. Sickles would be drawn over whetstones, most of which had been in the farmers’ homes for generations. Clealanders were a loyal people, never abandoning their valley home, not since the place had been founded 398 years ago, even though it was continually plagued with violent diseases.
After the wheat had grown to its full form, farmers and their wives would sweep their sickles across the wheat and bring it down, while their children would bundle them into sheaves and toss into a cart for transport.
They would hitch their trusty draft horses, which stood approximately 17 hands high, to heavy yokes made of padded black leather and wood, then pull the groaning carts back to their threshing rooms, where the grain was separated from the stalks with flails.
Sighing, Tara wrung her hands and wondered whether the harvest could even go on this year, given that a mysterious sickness had killed half of Clealan’s horses and disabled many others. And there was a huge war going on in Pelaam, one province over, which could lead to bloodshed in the fields.
Okay, wow. That’s a lot. It should be obvious why this is an infodump, but we’ll dissect it in a bit.
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Why do writers infodump?
Readers are generally better at identifying an infodump than writers, and there’s a good reason why: they do not have an emotional attachment to any of this information.
Writers, on the other hand, become blind to this problem because they are emotionally attached to the information they have gathered.
In fantasy and scifi, they are delighted to share what they came up with all on their lonesome, and they don’t want to let even a drop of it go to waste. For stories set in our world, writers have collected thousands of hours of research and they want to show you that they are a good, hardworking, diligent author.
All noble goals. Playing in your world is super fun; that’s why there are ten planned books and a novella in the Eirenic Verses.
But our goal with fiction writing isn’t to impress everyone with how smart we are. It is to tell a story that other people want to read.
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What are signs of an infodump?
You should see clearly why infodumps are a problem; they are exhausting to read. I got bored writing that snippet, and I’m sure your eyes glazed over about halfway through.
While my example is plain as day, some infodumps aren’t quite so glaringly obvious, so we need to look for symptoms instead. Here are just a few to consider.
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Multiple paragraphs have no action or dialogue.
If you have a full page with no action, no dialogue, nothing but information, you have a severe infodump. However, some infodumps are smaller: five or six paragraphs. Not quite as noxious, but still not great.
My Clealan example was five paragraphs, with three of those solely dedicated to harvesting. I could have gone for even longer, but I was getting sleepy.
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The text has excessive names, dates, and statistics.
The Clealan example had six unique names and four statistics. We only saw one person and one place, but we were forced to learn all the names of these places that aren’t really important.
Now, I do like to sprinkle some place names in to stories just to get a sense of a richer world. What Is Cannot Be Unwritten shares the names and short explanations of numerous countries, as this shows Mordrek has been around the block and knows what he’s doing. But I work hard to frame it in a way that shows you don’t need to remember any of these places; they are throwaway references you can mostly ignore.
With the Clealan infodump, we’re not sure how any of these places come into play, whether we need to remember them, or why they are important.
And absolutely none of those statistics matter, at all. We can eliminate every single one of them with no consequence.
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The focus is on facts, not action.
The Clealan example is very procedural; Tara is explaining to us how the harvest works. Tara doesn’t do anything about it or tell us what she thinks. In fact, we know nothing about Tara at all except that she lives near or in Clealan, is familiar with the harvest, and is worried about what will happen in Pelaam.
Moreover, we aren’t actually seeing the harvest, just being told what will happen. There’s no description of people doing this, no sense of immediacy.
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There are no sensory details.
In this example, Tara doesn’t smell anything, doesn’t touch anything but her hands, doesn’t hear anything, doesn’t feel anything in her body. We do not feel grounded in the space because Tara doesn’t do anything or experience anything for us; she’s just talking about procedures.
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Important information is hidden behind useless information.
Tara must be some sort of crop-obsessed weirdo, to be honest. There is a war going on and dozens of horses have died, but she leaves this to the very end of her narration. Apparently, war and disease are not as important as telling us exactly when Clealan acquired wheat and from where, how long Clealan has been populated, and how tall the typical horses are.
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The text is devoid of feeling.
We don’t really feel anything about Clealan or about Tara. The narrator herself doesn’t seem to feel much either. Her priority is telling you, in excruciating detail, how things are harvested, not interpreting it for you or sharing her own experiences.
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How do you fix an infodump?
Infodumps are easy to fix if you know what you’re doing. Over time, you’ll be able to identify them and rectify it before anyone else gets to see your draft. Let’s look at what to do.
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Decide what the reader needs to know right now and what can wait.
Infodumps strain the reader’s cognitive load by overwhelming them with details, which may or may not be important later.
Readers like to be drip-fed information right when it is most pertinent, because then they don’t have to remember as much at a time. They can slowly collect information, processing each part by itself before developing a coherent picture. This is why mysteries are so popular: people enjoy fitting the pieces together throughout the story.
Yes, foreshadowing is helpful. But foreshadowing isn’t just telling people information; it’s hinting at it through the way you present details.
For example, a character might walk into a room, note a weird-looking key, and then dismiss it for now. All we’ve gotten was “there is a key,” not paragraphs of what the key is or what it’s used for. Using the Chekov’s Gun principle, reader will know that the key will come into play relatively soon, and they will be thinking about it while the character does whatever they are doing.
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Break things up with action and dialogue.
This is the simplest and most obvious way to fix an infodump. Have the character do something! Make them talk to someone, or to themselves! Let them interact with the environment while musing to themselves or being told something by another character.
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Remove all but the most essential statistics.
Maybe it’s my dyscalculia, but I absolutely abhor authors who have to tell you specific dates and numbers as if I care at all.
I do not need to know that something happened exactly 1281 years ago. I do not care what year it is in your world. Unless you are writing historical fiction, you don’t need to tell us the specific date.
Additionally, I don’t need to know how tall your characters are in inches (or centimeters), I don’t need to know what the temperature is, I don’t need to know how many pounds or kilos something weighs, I don’t need to know the exact distance between settlements.
Very, very rarely will any of that matter or will anyone care. When you see a number, think long and hard about whether it’s important. If not, toss it. Be vaguer.
I would argue that even your characters do not have to have stated ages unless it is text-essential, like in my book 9 Years Yearning. I give readers the character’s age at the beginning of each chapter, but then I don’t reference it again because we should be able to feel their age through how they behave.
If you can’t estimate an age range from the narration, then I am a shitty writer and you should leave a review to complain about it.
Once we get to the second book, Pride Before a Fall, I stop giving character ages because it does not matter anymore, and ages are not referenced again throughout the series.
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Let readers fill in the blanks.
In the Eirenic Verses, we are told that things happened a long time ago: centuries, millennia, something or other. We’re told that someone is tall. The mountains are more like a long wall. The crowd is overwhelming. Something is far away because we see characters taking a long time to get there.
Why would this ambiguity work? Because it gives the readers freedom to imagine whatever feels right to them.
Your definition of tall will be different than mine; my brother is 6’2″, so I’m kind of spoiled when it comes to height. If you live in a big city, you’re going to envision thousands of people when I say somewhere is crowded, while if you live in a small town, you might see like 400 people tops.
And even peoples’ definitions of “ancient” will vary, given how other societies have unique artefacts and archaeological sites.
Readers should feel comfortable imposing their own definitions and imagery on your story. This is what provides immersion, and you can only do that by leaving things a bit vague.
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Let characters talk to one another.
When characters share important information, it lets us know what they value, what they know, and what they intend to do with the facts. This isn’t cheating; it’s dual-purpose writing, which is the best type. Readers get info and characterization all in one go.
Truly great writers will magically infuse info, characterization, mood, themes, setting, and just about everything else in only a few lines. Willa Cather is fantastic for this and it is one of the things I admire most about her.
Of course, some writers will fall in the infodump mire again by having a character share a monologue about the same information that the writer would have put in the narration otherwise. Don’t do that, please. Give characters four lines or less for each piece of dialogue.
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Infodump excavated: the revised version
So, let’s return to my Clealan example and see how we can fix things up using these lessons. This time, we’ve changed Tara to a more active protagonist, removed the extraneous information about harvesting, and put the most important context up front.
Tara dragged herself through the Clealan Valley on foot; each step made her more resentful. This tiny path through the knee-high wheat would have been so much easier to manage if her horse hadn’t died of Wastage several days before.
One hand clutched her stomach, the other a bloodied scroll. She had memorized it by now, having stared at it in the bleach-white sun as she trampled dry grass for an agonizing month. But her commander had demanded she bring back proof of the horrors beyond their borders, so she stuffed it in her pocket again with trembling hands.
Insects sang, hidden in the tawny stalks that scraped her worn-out boots. Their summer drone was far too like the whizzing fire-arrows that had almost killed her days earlier: enough to make her flinch each time a fat bug bumbled overhead. Tara silently rejoiced as the wheat fields transitioned into the stone homes she knew so well.
The singe-marks scattered across her jacket made a tired farmer pause his sickle sharpening and narrow his eyes.
“You back from Pelaam?” he asked, and Tara nodded. Another singing swipe of the sickle against the whetstone.
“Bad there?”
Talking seemed impossible – and it made her gag. A sickly stench had rolled in as the wind rose; she covered her face with one torn sleeve, but even that didn’t help. How the farmer could sit so nonchalantly was beyond her ken.
She glimpsed the rotting head of a dead horse peeking above one farmhouse, teetering atop others stacked like cordwood at the settlement’s edge.
The Wastage had preceded her. Likely brought by yet another messenger dispatched to Pelaam, where noble mounts lay tangled with their writhing masters on the battlefield.
“Glad you’re back. Rest up, girl. Harvest time soon. Need all the hands we can get.” The farmer gave his sickle one more hard swipe before lowering it carefully to the hard-packed ground.
Tara gritted her teeth and nodded, already dreading dragging in the wheat without a single horse to help.
That could wait until a long bath in the river’s brackish water, then a sober meeting with her superior at the Clealan outpost. Someone needed to know the Pelaam war was worsening – and headed for their home.
This version is far longer, but it is also far more engaging. We have eliminated all the dumb stuff about the harvest and prioritized the two conflict points: the dead horses and the Pelaam war.
There are sensory details that help immerse readers in the story, like the drone of insects and the hideous stench. Readers can better imagine what they are seeing, though not every detail is included.
A sense of urgency and danger infiltrates the text, but we also feel that the pivotal moments have passed. Tara is safe for now, though we’re not sure for how long.
Readers get the idea that this is a small, tight-knit community where everyone helps with agricultural duties, even if they have another job. The farmer seems to know Tara on sight and was aware that she had been abroad.
Most importantly, we get a far better picture of Tara. We’ve given her a job, a backstory, and emotions. Now we know she is exhausted from limping her way home from a war zone, abandoning her dead horse along the way. Her inner dialogue is included in snippets so that we understand how her mind thinks and what she prioritizes.
Important information is woven through the action and dialogue so things are revealed slowly, and only if they are crucial. While you might not have found this the most exciting text, you were likely more interested than with the first one because it feels richer.
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Almost every writer in the world has written an infodump or two. Sometimes it feels as if there is no other way to provide pertinent details, but this is typically a lack of imagination and not fact.
Our ultimate goal in fiction is to sink the reader deep into our world and characters until they feel as if they are seeing everything with their own eyes. By eliminating extraneous information and giving the details that matter most, we can get them so immersed in the narrative that they don’t want to leave your realm.
