A fellow author and generally wise human being I respect directed me to a link about the need for integrity, and the price for its lapses, in the intelligence community. Further down the rabbit hole, I encountered this:
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/What-I-Learned-40.pdf
I recommend you read that even if you’re not building intelligence services into your world, because it’s quite broadly applicable to many things. For example, how to actually make an infodump that the readers don’t notice, and find really interesting.
An excerpt follows:
“Third, good analysis makes the complex comprehensible, which is not the same as simple.
The key to making the complex comprehensible is having in mind a specific audience and a very precise intelligence question for the analysis to tackle. Data dumps and murky analysis almost always are rooted in trying to write about a development without first asking, “Who is my audience and what specific question does it need answered?”
It is that difference between “we need a piece on the rioting in Athens” and “we need a piece on the government’s options for addressing the underlying cause of the rioting.”
We do very well as a rule in responding to questions from policymakers. We come up short when we have to supply the audience and the question ourselves and we start to write before we have done all the thinking. If we think in terms of answering well defined questions, we can make complex situations comprehensible, and we also stand a better chance of making clear what we know and do not know accurately, conveying our level of confidence, and presenting a convincing basis for our judgments.”
***
I used to think I hated infodumps. I’ve come to realize, with careful line-by-line analysis of works I love and works I find mediocre, that I hate poorly-done infodumps.
What is the difference?
Relevancy, and timeliness.
Relevancy:
“Who is my audience and what specific question does it need answered?”
If my audience are current and prior military looking for a thriller, then that affects how I present the answer, as opposed to if my audience are civilian women over 40 looking for a light romance read that will not tax them by forcing them to think.
Either way, the specific question is: how does this matter to the plot and the character arcs?
There’s a reason you don’t get loving gear descriptions in the cozy book equivalent of Hallmark movies. In those books with bakeries, nobody worries about the economics of two rival bakeries in a small town, or how she’s supposed to turn a profit if she’s only putting out experimental offerings and things that are oddball favourites of the author’s. Dust masks to keep bakers from getting miller’s lung are never featured, nor are the actual bakery formulas with ratios by weight (recipes are for home cooking. When you’re baking 500 kolaches, 100 each type, minimal lossage or wastage, you’re doing it by weight not volume). Why not? Because it doesn’t matter to the central story question of how the characters get together.
(Okay, you don’t get that detail unless you’re Alma Boykin writing the Familiars Generations books with Jude. But Alma is a delightful and refreshing change who writes in urban fantasy, as that level of detail would make most romance readers twitch.)
But even in thrillers, where the audience enjoys the deep dive into the specs on the submarine, or the loadout someone’s carrying, they only enjoy it if it’s useful to the story.
Timeliness:
The information cannot merely be relevant five chapters later – it must introduced either right as the gear comes up, or when the character who has already been established as having in / riding on / being in this piece of gear needs to know.
If you’re very good, you can drop a small infodump on a bit of foreshadowing (or a red herring), and the audience will stick with you, assuming that this is also critical foreshadowing.
“Wait here, toots, while I clear the building.” I pulled out my Inver-Johnson .38 S&W revolver before I stepped out of the car. This one was a new cylinder with 7 bullets loaded, instead of the normal six. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use all seven… truth to tell, I hoped I wouldn’t have to use any at all. That wasn’t the way my luck had been going, so I had a spare cylinder in my left pocket.
You can bet that the audience is reading this, and expecting it to be relevant very soon. They’re going to be counting shots, and possibly muttering “Well, do you feel lucky, punk?” If you clear the building with no shots fired, or fail to make the number of shots matter by the end of the story, then your audience is going to be disappointed, and bored.
In conclusion, don’t worry about this too much when you’re in the throes of writing… but when you comes back through, look at any data dump, and see if it’s timely and relevant, answering the story questions and promises… or just an awkward infodump that can be cut.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Excellent info on infodumping well”
That’s the problem. It seems I have them, but I’m not sure. In the current edit, I sprinkle back story in dialog to indicate the impetus for the story isn’t quite what it seems. Maybe if someone reads it, they can tell me if it’s working or not.
There’s a scene in my WIP that’s about the hero needing specialized ammo (frangible silver rounds) for where he’s going next, and getting stuck with a loaner weapon because the armorer doesn’t stock it in the caliber for his preferred weapon. He suspects it’s being done to delay him from reaching the airship he’s supposed to ride on, and eventually finds out that his chief of intelligence was behind the delays, in order to block the hero’s love interest from taking up the cabin reserved for her.
Good info-dump is invisible, which is why we all hate info-dumping: we don’t notice it until it’s bad.
But take Syndrome’s monologuing in The Incredibles. No one notices he’s monologuing until he points it out because it’s exactly what he would say, and immensely relevant and dramatic.
While my muse studied under Clancy and Weber, I am not either of those worthy gentlemen. So I try to keep my infodumps in the actual story short and relevant, using the appendix for the hard-core nerdery.
I like the timeliness example because it does the thing I think a lot of beginners miss (myself until the past couple.of years very much included): filter the info through the POV character’s opinions and emotions. I think that a key to the invisibility Mary mentions above.
That was supposed to be a reply to the post in general.
Word Press delendia est.
An infodump should convey necessary information to the reader, when it’s needed, that can’t be worked into the story in a less obtrusive way. What does the reader need to know to properly understand the next piece of action and/or dialogue?
Incidentally, Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is interesting on narrators who speak to the audience directly.