James Michner was the king of info-dump, but most of us can't get away with it to that extent.

Everyone's different, both reader and writer, so what works for one won't work for another. Ultimately, you need to do it in the rigght way for your particular story.

Oh, and I forgot one other way - disguise the infodump as a story within a story. Don't tell the dry facts of how your spacedrive works - tell about the quirky way it was accidentally discovered.

The problem is that good readers tend to be fast readers. Personally, my eyes tend to glide swiftly over the pages and I do not rivet my attention on each and every sentence. I need to be flagged a couple of times if it's an important detail.

I just got done writing an infodump into my WIP (beware, those of you in my critique group...it's coming up next.) I'm not sure how successful it will be, but it was crucial information I've been hinting at and now, in Chapter Twenty, needed to be told in full. As recommended, it's told as a story within a story, so I hope my readers will get through it with their interest intact.

I enjoyed reading James Mitchner, but his infodumps were horrific. Seriously, the book "Centennial" opened with an infodump that was literally a HUNDRED PAGES long. I remember looking at it at the time, thinking, "You must be joking!" By page 20 I had enough of the minutia of the geological formation of the Rockies, and gave up and skipped forward to the first chapter I could find with dialog in it. From there it was a pretty good story. All I remember about the book "Hawaii" was his infodump about the formation of the islands and how birds flying over the islands pooped, dropped the seeds that started the exotic island plantlife. I'm sure there must have been more to the story than that, but it's been over 20 years since I read it. I also remember sitting next to a stranger in the San Francisco airport. He was reading the book "Space." I asked him, "So, did Mitchner start that book out with the Big Bang?" He laughed. We both recognized Mitchner's tendency to write infodumps, even if I didn't know at the time that was what it's called.

Of his other novels...well, I read "Centennial" and didn't like it---loved the miniseries, hated the book, though it did fill in some background. I can't recall reading any of the others, though I must have looked through a couple or two..."Tales of the South Pacific" was one I always meant to get around to but haven't yet (seen the movie, wasn't thrilled with it.)

On the non-fiction side, I've done a little better---I read, and liked, "Sports in America," "Kent State," and a volume of his memoirs from late in his life, the title of which escapes me. Liked 'em all---somehow, the info dump in non-fiction works better than in fiction, at least for me.

The memoir volume had a lot of fascinating stuff, like, say, a comparatively brief bit on the horsetrading and politicking that goes into how American postage stamps are selected. And there was a longish story about some rather grim escapades during World War Two that he left out of "Tales of the South Pacific"...one of the reasons why I always wanted to pick up that volume.

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So just how do you info dump in an engaging way? Like everything else, there must be a trick to it.

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The first trick of infodump: know thy audience.

Card talks about four types of story: setting, idea, character, and plot (I paraphrase -- don't have the book about.) Knowing which of those four elements your audience is going to be most attracted to also tells you which element you'll need to focus your infodumping on. People reading for the engineering geekery aren't tolerant of long character histories any more than the reverse. By the same token, people who picked up the book because of the nifty socio-political setting are going to be disappointed if a lot of time isn't spent exploring it, just as people reading for plot will be annoyed by a dearth of same. You won't be able to please everyone, but you can at least figure out where your main focus must be.

The second trick of infodump: Vary thy methods.

Seriously. All the no-nos of infodumping came about because people saw them too often. If you use one or two techniques to infodump, especially in a novel-length work, people will very quickly spot the pattern, no matter what method you're using. Read that bit again, please. It doesn't matter how clever a way you've found of nuggetting in information; if you use it repetitively, it will annoy your readers as much as the most blatant as-you-know-Bob. Use as many methods as you can and people will hardly notice you're dumping.

Methods that I've seen or used:

1) Extra-narrative infodumps. The most common form is to insert bits of text at the beginning of chapters, from the pithy epigram to the fake news articles seen in Tad Williams's Otherland or David Brin's Earth all the way to appendices a la Tolkien or Cherryh. This is a risky method, because about half your readers will skim or ignore the articles in favor of the story; on the other hand, the readers who really *want* more detail will read them, and so it may be a way of satisfying the nitpickers without boring the plot-hungry. Only good for infodumps which, while they may inform the story, aren't absolutely necessary to understand the story (half the readers, at most, remember, are going to bother with these.)

2) Narrative-interrupt infodumps. Only possible in loose or omnicient POVs. Basically the story stops so that the writer can explain something to the uninformed reader. These are common in older science fiction but have fallen out of fashion right alongside omniscient, and for much the same reason: too distant and too easily abused. They can be done well -- Tolkien, for example, or Cordwainer Smith -- but it requires great self-control and the development of a narrative voice so compelling that the reader will happily leave the main character just to listen to it (ever heard someone say "I'd listen to Actor X read the phonebook?" That's the kind of voice you need for this technique.) The attitude of most users of the interrupt infodump, unfortunately, can be summed up with "You mean I can just tell them?! OMG! Easy!" Thus, not in fashion.

3) Introspective infodumps. Used in tighter POVs. The character goes into a brief (or not-so-brief) fugue and describes X bit of history, technology, or personal hangup to the reader. This is an immensely useful technique, which means that it's overused and used badly on a daily basis. One problem is that it's too often a disguised used to fit a #2 infodump into a tight POV, leaving the impression that the character has quietly gone to sleep for a bit and left the writer to use him as an educational sock-puppet. The other problem is that it's frequently hammered into the narrative: there's no real reason for the character to be thinking about all this save for writer and reader convenience, the writing equivelent to letting the audience see the man behind the curtain. Using this technique effectively requires a reasonable lead-up to the infodump that ties it to the narrative and the delivery of the infodump from the character's perspective, not the writer's. Sometimes this means that the reader does not get all the information that the writer wanted them to. Tough. You're much better off working the missing info in somewhere else than risking the integrity of the curtain.

4) Active description. Whatever is being infodumped happens in the character's view, and she describes it happening. The main problems with this technique are its limitations -- it can't describe history or intangibles very well -- and that writers will occasionally go through the most incredible gyrations to put a character in a place there is no reason he should be just to observe something they want to describe (Star Trek was terrible for this.) Once again: mind your curtain. The other problem with this technique is that it's usually passive, meaning that if it's overused the reader may come to view characters as boring people who mostly walk around looking at stuff and never DO anything.

5) Informative dialogue. One character explains something to another. The big drawback here, as before, is falling out of character. Obvious setups are annoying; characters asking about things they shouldn't care about, listening to things they couldn't conceivably be interested in, or talking about things that they would not normally discuss require careful handling or the reader will realize they are being set up.

6) Non-informative dialogue. Characters tell each other things both already know: the infamous "As You Know Bob" technique. This can be pulled off, despite its bad reputation; the important thing to remember is, as always, stay in character. Examples: characters running through a checklist, characters joking, a nervous character repeating himself. AYKBs are so infamous, though, that they have to be handled with extreme care and careful application of the other tricks of infodump.

The third trick of infodump: Be brief.

Most infamous infodumps are very, very, VERY long. An infodump, by its very nature, interrupts the flow of the story and makes the reader wait. Readers, like small children, sometimes need to wait, but like children they are best not made to wait *too* long, lest they go find something less parentish to read.

The vast majority of infodumps in a story should be one or two lines. Every so often, you'll find something that requires a paragraph or two paragraphs. I use straight infodumps of longer than a page once per book, if that. If you have to leave out large chunks of information, do it. My technique for this is to write the story with the absolute bare minimum of information that I think is necessary to understand the plot, with practically no infodumps longer than three or four lines. Then I give it to a few first readers and see what they scream for. It's easier, in general, for readers to tell you what you've left out than where you've put too much in.

The fourth trick of infodump: Pace yourself.

The flow of a bad infodump goes something like this: question-answer-question-answer-question-answer. Or, worse, answer-answer-answer. This is a bad technique because it doesn't give the reader time to absorb each answer before moving on to the next. The reader ends up confused, frustrated, and skimming.

Timing is always a tricky beast, but I find a few patterns that work well. As with the infodump techniques, you must vary the patterns. Use one all the time and people will quickly grow bored.

1) Answer. Simple delivery of information. Takes little effort or foreshadowing; on the downside, you're answering a question before the reader had a chance to ask it, which will quickly annoy.

2) Question-pause-answer. A question is posed by the narrative, then left alone for a while in favor of other things, then answered. This gives the reader ample time to get curious, which is good, because it means they're far more likely to be interested in the answer. The drawbacks are that if you wait too long or use the technique too often, the reader will get frustrated and feel you are withholding information.

3) Question-answer. The narrative poses a question through one of the techniques I outlined above, and the question is immediately answered. This gets around the problems with the other techniques, but you loose some of the advantages too, and when it's used too often the narrative becomes choppy as it continually asks then pauses for the answer, asks and pauses for the answer.

The other thing to keep in mind with timing is that you don't have to explain something all at once. In fact, it's usually better to break it up. Remember also that in any story, you are still looking at those same four elements -- setting, idea, character, plot -- and you will need to infodump for each of them. Don't therefore dump all one kind of information at once. Vary it: talk about an idea, then a character, then a bit of the setting, then the idea again. Small bites are more digestible, and variation in the meal makes it even easier to swallow.

Edited to say:
Actually, I MEANT "What Katfeete said..."

I thought KatFeete's comments were spot-on.

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somehow, the info dump in non-fiction works better than in fiction

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What Survivor said...

Edited to say:
Actually, I MEANT "What Katfeete said..."

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In Donadson's Forbidden Space series (also known as the Gap series) some of the books had interstitials entitled "Ancillary Documentation" giving background info on various elements in the series.

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I was thinking on a smaller scale, within the 13 lines. How to pull it off and start with a maximum amount of back story and still get the reader to turn the page.

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Well, the short answer is don't. It's a lot of effort and a huge risk, and why bother when you can get the information in later, when the reader cares?

The longer answer... narrative voice, as Survivor so astutely pointed out, can work. Filter the backstory through a set of eyes rather than make it an indigestable lump, make it part of the way you're telling the reader about the character, and you can maybe pull it off.

Plot can sometimes work as well; if there's a sense of urgency attached to the backstory it becomes more interesting. If a backstory moves, if it has action, rather than sitting there like a brick wall, than you can maybe pull it off.