Not the political kind. Most of us have had enough of that for a while.

To be clear, this train of thought started with politics; I was thinking about information silos during the American election this week- how could people have such wildly disparate views of their favored candidate, their disfavored candidates, the issues at stake, and their hopes and fears for the future? If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if each side and the middle all came from different planets.

But the problem itself isn’t inherently political, and it’s one that writers confront all the time, in-story and on a meta level. What does each character know? How did they acquire that information? How does it affect their interactions with other characters?

The specific definition varies depending the source, but essentially, an information silo is a situation where information is compartmentalized and not easily shared. It can be a formal system to keep company or government secrets, well, secret- the ‘need to know basis’ designation creates an information silo- or it can be more informal, which is the type I’m mostly referring to. Maybe one character is interested in a subject, and knows a lot about it, and another is ignorant because they lack interest in that subject. The knowledge gap between the characters can be used to reveal something about them, their world, or the plot.

The plot of a mystery or thriller is often driven by information silos and knowledge gaps. In this context, the more formal, ‘don’t talk to the police; they’re on the Other Side,’ can be used opposite to or alongside the less-formal, ‘oops, I didn’t think to mention X because I didn’t know it was relevant,’ which results in a mad scramble when one of the characters realizes that X was the key to everything.

It also works in romance novels, if done right. I’m currently re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and Austen’s use of information silos is integral to the plot. All of the plots, really. The culture of the time insisted that respectable young women did not correspond with respectable young men, so Jane can’t tell Mr. Bingley when she’s in London and might be able to meet with him and Lizzy can’t tell Darcy that her feelings have changed and she’d like to meet with him. A simple, ‘I’m going to be in town; here’s my address,’ would have settled the business of the first couple, and Lizzy and Darcy’s situation is only slightly more complex- if they’d been allowed to correspond freely. Since they’re not, the information remains siloed, and both couples have to work a little harder to get their happy endings.

(Now I’m wondering if Regency romances are so popular with writers because they can use this type of information siloing, which is a very easy trope to default to, and they won’t catch much flack from readers who understand the culture.)

The same phenomenon, on a lesser scale, is part of a character’s voice in the narrative, right down to the idioms they use and the way they think about the events and people around them. I’m making a lot of use of this in the time travel WIP, where a character who’s masquerading as a fairly ordinary teenager has to work hard to conceal an adult’s knowledge and experience of the world. Thus there’s a massive gap, in content and vocabulary, between her internal voice and what actually comes out of her mouth, with the inevitable slip-ups.

In real life, a person- a modern one, anyway- has access to so much information that no one bats an eye at a city-slicker knowing all about deer hunting or the climate of the Gobi Desert, or a country bumpkin who’s also an expert on the workings of Wall Street. A fictional character who reveals such unexpected knowledge should have a reason for knowing it. I solve this problem by making most of my characters highly literate or upper-class, which gives them access to information they wouldn’t have otherwise. Oddball characters are also useful, because no one’s surprised when they know a lot about a weird subject. But they have to be set up carefully by the writer if they’re to be believable.

I think that’s the key. A writer can silo information as much or as little as he wants, but it has to make sense, and be relevant to the characters, world-building, or plot. Preferably all three.

Give me some recommendations, lades and gents. Have you read any egregious examples of, ‘this character has no reason to know this!’ Any that were really well-done? Have you ever written a concerted effort to keep a character in the dark, while everyone else seems to be operating in a completely different reality? Whose reality was the correct one, in the end?