Weave the background in with the forward action...but weave it in we must, particularly when it flows from the action. When a person sees a friend they have not seen in years it might be a good time to devote a paragraph to explaining how they had parted, if it is important.

I'm ranting now...really I am, but I don't care.

I'll grant you that a page of forced information is a bad thing, but a paragraph or two of information that flows from what the POV character is doing or thinking is necessary if you don't want the reader to ask Huh?

It is my experience that there are times when each is appropriate, but I wouldn't say that show is always better than tell.

Some things have to be told. For example, in the writing class, OSC talks about how character motivation can't be shown and has to told.

Something else that I think affects it, story length. If your goal is to write a short story, you will probably try summing up certain events rather than spelling them out.

In some cases, show vs tell comes down to personal writing style. Some people like to write scenes that show you every little detail of an event, others prefer to tell their readers the characters are in a room in a castle.

Show/tell, is a bit like POV: it can shift from one to the other. When it is done properly, everything flows and you don't even realize that the author has taken you off on a tangent. However, when it isn't done properly, it jolts you.

Show vs tell often makes me think about Shakespeare (okay, just about everything makes me think about Shakespeare ). I don't think there is a single play that doesn't contain at least one soliloquy. And what do soliloquys do -- they tell instead of show. Do we hate these telly passages or descry the author for putting them in? Probably not. In fact, the argument could probably be made that most Shakespearean soliloquy contain some of the most moving prose in all English literature!

If the action of a scene continues smoothly so that we are following along with a character as the information is imparted, if the information is artfully folded into the narrative flow so that you do not notice it, i.e., no "pause" button effect, then you have achieved fantasy & sci-fi greatness. Have a cookie.

It's not an easy thing for a writer to perfect. It's stinking hard to keep that narrator constantly in the background--especially when giving background. But it is the true masters who always accomplish it.

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Do you have one aas an info dump and the same one 'fixed'? Other than just cutting it out, I mean.

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This could be a good learning moment for all of us.

So, an assignment: Everyone who reads this thread, watch out as you read for excellent instances of information presented in the least info-dumpish way possible.

The frustrated screen-writer type will see everything that doesn't belong in a screen-play as info-dumping or purple prose or whatnot.

But to tell if someone really has a point, you can always ask for a short rewrite (a paragraph or two) as an illustration.

Gotta say, I just watched The Twilight Samurai, and it is chock-full of background information that has to be explained. But there isn't even a moment in which you feel like the exposition is anything but natural. Part of that is because the film is "framed" as a narrative by the young daughter of the main character. But her voice over doesn't tell us any of the "background" information. We get all that from the characters as they discuss how they are going to resolve their immediate problems.

Of course, exposition through dialogue is unnecessary in written narratives. It should usually be avoided. But characters are always going to be thinking about stuff when they need to make important decisions.

Basically, when you do exposition, you need a character reason for the exposition to take place, that is to say, the audience should have no trouble believing that the character would be thinking about the subject in the detail described. You also need a story reason for the information to come out at that point in the narrative, so that the audience recognizes that this isn't the equivalent of spending four pages describing your main character's sleep/toilet/recreation habits.

The problem can be caused by a lack of either. If there is no story reason for the information to be revealed at that point in the narrative, then the audience will not care about the information itself, even if it seems plausible that the character would be musing it over. If your main character is an accountant, don't spend twelve pages following her thoughts as she works on her company's records. We can easily believe that she is thinking about all the finacial transactions by her supervisor in the last six months, but we can't see why we should be therefore expected to read about it. Wait till there is some reason for us to care about those accounts.

Likewise, even though the reader has learned that some bit of information would be good to know, don't just stop the story and tell us ("She doesn't get eaten, you know."). Wait till the character would plausibly both know and recall the information.

The third danger is letting that critical moment go past. People do this all the time when setting up a "denouement" of some kind. The main character realizes the critical information (the identity of the killer or whatnot) and then the author steps in to hide this information from us so that the final confrontation scene can play out. This is acceptable in Sherlock Holmes because Holmes isn't and never was the POV character. We are invited to identify with Watson, who admires Holmes from the outside and never knows what that "great mind" is thinking till the horse speaks. But too many people fail to understand this point, so they end up following a character till the critical point of the story, at which point they break off identification with the main character without providing any other identification character.

Ok, I'm just as guilty as most. I have done the same thing, and couldn't figure out why all my effort at creating all this information would be boring. Well, it was. Sometimes a paragraph of background is easily justified, and can work well. I will agree that relating it to the current situation give a reader a reason to be interested.