Dumping, With STYLE!
Info-dumping, done right
I’ve talked about info-dumping some.
I think I shall dump the info about the pure state. When you do not grind the knowledge fine and spread it throughout, but throw a chunk in.
In a movie, or even in a comic book, you often have resort to such mischief as having people talk about something they have no real motive to talk about, even about things they both know.1 Or resort to a voice-over.
In prose, you have the advantage -- so to speak -- that you can just do it. Slap that knowledge into a sentence, a paragraph, a page or six -- and slap that structure on the manuscript, to face the reader.
The disadvantage is, of course, that it results in a lump of pure knowledge sitting in front of the reader. He may skim it. Or skip it. Or put the book away and never come back. Especially if it, as it often does, diverge from the tone and manner of the narrative about it.
One technique is to slip into epistolary2 and slap a document with the information on the page, with the document having, of course, to conform to a reasonable style for such a document. Readers cut more slack when the knowledge is presented as such -- though not unbounded. In his first Ciaiphas Cain novel, Sandy Mitchell had the in-world editor put in brief excerpts from a work on the same war that explained things that Cain’s writings did not. It was rather purple prose. In later novels, the excerpts were less purple, and the in-universe editor apologized for them.
Another technique, which still requires style, is curiosity. The reader wants to know what the lump explains. In Poul Anderson’s Mirkheim, war is looming. Two major characters, familiar with us from the earlier works in the series, brood over the cause of the war, and the work glides from their thinking to an explanation of the island of stability -- a group of transuranium elements with unusual stability, still purely theoretic in our time, but the supply being the root of the trouble in the story -- and then back to their thoughts.
The style lies in the smooth and elegant way where he slips from their thoughts to explaining the elements and back. As gracefully as a swam sliding over a lake, from sunshine into a shadow and back out into the sunlight. Part of it was that the viewpoint was not very tight. The tighter the viewpoint, the more the dumping must be in the form of the character’s very thoughts to avoid any jolt.
It is the jolt that does much to turn them into “dumps” because it make them discordant in the story.
A third technique, one that can be used from the very beginning of the story, is voice. The voice is interesting to listen to, and we expect to hear witty, or charming, or sardonic -- or, in short, interesting things as we listen.
Hence Lord Dunsany can open a story with
The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.
And Jane Austen can begin a novel with
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
This will, of course, only be attractive to those who like the voice, but then -- what story hook will draw in every reader?
Later on, in the thick of the story, the voice can draw us on into the info-dump with its charm again, and with the added advantage of our having come to trust the narrator, to know what we need to know. There’s a comic passage in a Jeeves story where Bertie Wooster pauses to explain to those who read the book before that he has to explain the backstory to the new readers, and does so, with the added charms of the Wodehouse wit.
It is similar to the curiosity-driven lump in that you want the voice to not change. The narrator should speak in a recognizably similar manner whether recounting the carriage ride to the sea, explaining that the sailing season had just begun because the weather was too terrible before, and recounting securing passage and setting sail. Both knowledge and narrative should flow with the ease of water pouring from a jug in a steady hand.
They’re not an easy technique to use well, but it can be done.