My son is home on leave, and we’ve been enjoying this time together, and as a family, and seeing friends. In the middle of it all, I took him up into Oklahoma to see a friend and excellent firearms instructor, so my son could get some specific training. I highly recommend this, by the way, even if you are thinking “I’m just a writer, I don’t need…” If you plan to write about shooting and weapons, get some training. Learn how they feel, how they work, and what’s going to happen when someone gets shot (that last will all be book learning!) and you’ll be able to craft a better story. There’s been some talk about organizing a writer’s weaponry workshop in OK, so shout out if you would be interested in such a thing and what you’d want to learn. I can then pass that on to the people designing the course so they can best give writers what they need.
The title of this article, though, comes from a conversation with my son while we were driving and had a few hours to talk. He was describing video game story mechanics, and told me he prefers games which have ‘lore drip.’ I immediately figured out what he meant. The world isn’t described all upfront for the player to sit through before they can start in on the action and adventure of the game. It’s dripped in just before the player needs it, or as they do. It’s not flooded over them, drowning them in information they will be expected to remember later (in some games, hours later). A little here, a little there, and the mechanics of the world are revealed slowly like a dinosaur’s bones in a dig.
This is, I told him, what a good writer tries to do in a story. It is more of a challenge in a short story, of course. You risk not dripping in enough, and having your readers confused when they don’t recognize what you’d thought were perfectly visible breadcrumbs leading them to the conclusion. Of you drip in too much and the reader is bored because they figured it out right away and what do you mean I have to read twenty more pages of this now? Worse, three pages of exposition at the open of a short story kills the momentum and reader interest dead and they put the book down and wander away looking for something more exciting to read.
Lore drip in a novel is also essential. If you drop information in just before your readers need it, you don’t slow down the pace of the reader. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a time and place for descriptions of the world, lyrical language, and exposition: in moderation. You do not need nor want pages and pages of this. Now, as Blake wrote about a day or two ago, a character-driven plot may be differently constructed than a world built, then populated by characters. The latter, I suspect, is the source of more lore-flood reader slogs than the former. Don’t bog your reader down with muddy overshoes trying to get through your lovely world-building, because more often than not, that’s not why the reader has picked up the book. They came for the plot, not the scenery.
The other thing with a drip in a novel, is that you really should repeat it. Hang a lampshade on it, as it were. Which makes me think of that really slow tar drip which takes years to fall… now, there’s something you could do with lore, have it take a long time to pay off (like Chekov’s Gun) but in that case you really must mention it more than once or you risk a non-zero number of readers missing out on it, and being outraged when they are surprised at the payoff because for them, it comes out of the blue. Confused readers are not happy readers. Put that lampshade on your drips to make them stand out enough to be caught by the worst skimmer, and you’ll know where you need to put that when the beta readers point at the denouement and ask ‘where did that come from?!’
Finally, if you want to appeal to the younger readers, take a look at video games. You don’t have to play them yourself, there are a ton of videos where a gamer plays and you can ride along on his shoulder, so to speak. Look at the story. Some games don’t have much story, sure. Others have really solid ones, and it’s worth researching what is popular, and why, and how they can be incorporated into your storytelling. I’m increasingly convinced that this kind of market research is necessary if you want to write books which appeal to the younger readers. I’m not saying the stories need to be dumbed down – if you do the research, you’ll find the opposite is actually true – I’m saying that if you’ve read novels which date back to the 17th century up through the modern era, you’ll see that styles change, sometimes in the span of mere decades they change radically. Pay attention to what the readers want. Pay attention to how to structure your lore – because I think most of them want it on a drip, not a flood up front they have to wade through before anything actually happens in the story. Just like playing the game, they might have to figure something out on the fly, but that adds to their sense of mystery and adventure. Feeding it all to them takes away the tension and interest. Give them a puzzle, make sure it’s not confusing, and step back and watch them enjoy reading again.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Lore Drip”
The worst thing a writer can do to the reader is bore you, gotta keep things moving.
I’m in OKC, I’d go to that writer’s weaponry workshop if it happens.
There’s a special version of this for series writers who are writing a continuous story (vs those who just have continuing but episodic characters like a detective series, where continuity of story is minimal.) I’ve recently been assaulted in a couple of series where book 2 begins with a bald multi-page summary of characters & situations from book 1 for more-than-a-paragraph/less-than-a-chapter. And then book 3 perpetuates that tic for a combo of books 1 & 2, at similar or greater length. (You can see that the reader despairs of what would happen with, say, a hypothetical book 10.)
First of all… spare yourself the delusion that anyone normal begins a continuous story series in some later series entry and goes on from there, escaping the origin point forever. While it’s possible that they may first encounter your series by a posting/review/sales page of a later entry, if what they see of it via sample/description piques their interest, they’re going to seek out book 1 as a starting point. (The tiny number of exceptions are nothing to build a narrative plan on.) They might let that slide for a continuing character series (a new Jack Reacher book as a first sample), but not a continuing story series (The Two Towers).
As a reader, I think it’s fair if I feel a little lost when I pick up a later entry for a series I read too long ago (or never). If I’m stumped but intrigued, I’ll go back and read the earlier entries first for proper sequence.
Yes, you need to remind readers a little bit about prior events/characters/situations, but that’s better dripped in via little pieces, or given a natural source for bulk (one character explaining to another) not rendered as an authorial narrative without some sort of real structural need.
“Just in time” clues are the best. (“why is this fellow trying to escape the attention of my trainer?” (thinks the new junior character near the start of a later series entry). (“Oh, it’s because she expects better of him because she saved his life,” explains someone else, to the level of detail appropriate to someone who read the prior entry (a reminder) or maybe a little more detail (in case of someone who read the prior entry never, or perhaps too long ago).
If you feel you must explain the gravitational requirements of the peculiar planetary systems or the cultural taboos of the intersecting populations that are central to all the books of the series (looking at the Liaden universe’s 60-ish books), or why this obvious malefactor on the page isn’t already in jail, it had better get shorter and more spread out across the pages in each entry. If you really think it’s necessary, I urge you to consider appendices or companion volumes, and stick the bulk there.
Better if the reader doesn’t recognize the professional manipulations and just naturally encounters what he needs to know not to be lost in the story. He can get deeper into the backstory later for better appreciation, if he wants to.
There used to be a mantra for comic book creators (since ignored by the industry, alas): Every issue is somebody’s first issue.
This did not mean “rehash the entire series and characters’ histories up to this point in a wall o’ text at the beginning of each issue.”
It did mean “you must give new readers enough context to know who is who and what is what without annoying regular readers by doing it.”
In fact, I just did an editorial letter for a second book in a series, and one of my (very few) notes was “You referred to this thing you established in the first book, but didn’t explain it for new readers, or readers who read the first book fifty books ago and might need reminding. Add a sentence or two explaining it, or have Character give a quick precis of it to New Character.” I noted that it was entirely optional on the author’s part, but he thanked me for pointing it out and added the explanation.
There are ways to do it subtly and gracefully, and the author should never assume “ah, they read book 2, so I don’t have to explain it in book 20.”
Watching the Battle Angel Alita movie last night, I liked its handling of lore drip. Admittedly it had the advantage of an amnesiac main character whose cyborg nature puts her right in the middle of a lot of the lore stuff, but I still felt like it was fairly well-done.
Not exactly, precisely on point, but this more-than-decade old video about good worldbuilding in video games seems apt nevertheless.
Chunks of exposition can be managed IF the reader is curious about the information, or IF the narrative voice is strong enough to carry the reader through.
Both of which are tricky to pull off.