INFO-DUMP
It stopped everything cold. It lasted only a page or so, during which time the author filled us in on the history of the world that had brought the protagonist to this moment in time. But for me, it killed the scene. I wish the author had let us find out organically, as the plot unfolded, how the world had come to be.That, to me, is the definition of an info-dump. Providing information isn't bad in itself; in fact, providing information is precisely what novels do. But when the information appears grafted onto the plot, or distracts from it, or reeks of "my readers might not know what's going on, so I'd better tell them," it's an info-dump, and it's generally a bad idea.
To give a personal example, here's a draft of a scene I wrote for a novel titled Ecosystem. This scene occurs early in the novel--maybe ten pages in--and I tried to insert the information more "naturally" into the story by presenting it as someone's speech to an audience. But I still think it's an info-dump.
***
I am first of the Sensors to return. Not surprisingly, as my circuit was by far
the shortest, my track the safest. A
hundred rods into the forest beyond the sward, a quick kill, the same distance
back. The others will have gone deep
into the Ecosystem, to places of which I have only heard, places I can only
imagine. In time, if I’m successful, I
will seek out those places as well, where the game is thickest and the dangers
greatest. In time, if I live to Aaron’s
age, I will train the next generation of Sensors to plunge into the Ecosystem’s
everchanging maze.
But today, I will celebrate.
The village will
celebrate. They will celebrate me.
They will meet as always in the great hall, the entire
community gathered as one, with the exception of those few assigned this day to
ward the periphery. In the flagstone
hearth they will light the fire that is the Ecosystem’s chief grievance against
the village, that and the cutting tools with which the threshers keep the
greensward from encroaching on the pavilion of stone. The Sensors will step forward to be
acknowledged, to bask in the village’s thankfulness for the risks they take on
the commoners’ behalf. In their
identical uniforms of close-fitting brown fur, cut short to expose muscled arms
and long legs, the Sensors will stand in a line, aloof, imperturbable, their
Sense of the Ecosystem removing them always from the community they are pledged
to serve. And for the first time,
wearing the same uniform as they, I will stand among them.
Then Chief Warden Daniel will deliver the customary address,
rehearsing our history, reminding the populace of how the Sensors came to
be. He will talk of the old days, when
humans were numerous and powerful, when their cities stretched for miles across
a landscape subdued by machines. He will
speak of species driven to extinction by the hand of man, of habitats
despoiled, life’s essence corrupted. For
us who have known only the Ecosystem these past thousand generations, such a picture
will seem fanciful, but none of us will laugh.
And then he will tell of the rise of the Ecosystem, how unseen and
undreamed of by those who thought they had secured Earth’s domination, the
innumerable threads of life and will knitted themselves into one, sentience
burgeoning from dim, disparate signals to full roaring consciousness. He will speak of cities overwhelmed by
jungle, of food sources turned to deadly poisons and others to deadly
predators, of virulent pathogens borne by vermin and birds and insects and
cultivated crops, of newly weaned livestock feasting on their owners’
blood. It was a coordinated attack, and
it succeeded. It gave birth to the world
we know, a world in which the Ecosystem rules and we who were once its masters
hide in its angry shadow.
Then Daniel will talk of the relearning, how the few who
were left discovered a Sense of the Ecosystem’s will, and in so doing found
ways not so much to fight back but simply to survive, to establish small
enclaves the Ecosystem could not breach.
These few were the first Sensors, and as they gathered the people around
them there grew the first villages of stone, the first walls and firewells, the
first masters and apprentices. But the
Sensors, Daniel will tell us, were meant not to rule but to serve, and once
they had established those first villages they willingly relinquished their
authority to become what they are today: messengers and mediums, interpreters
of the Ecosystem so finely attuned to its ways only they can pass safely through
its winding passages in the daily hunt for food, drink, and fuel. They are selfless, Daniel will say, so
selfless they have agreed to serve the communities of which they can never
fully be a part, the communities where they can never know the joys of love and
family and children. Perhaps, he will
say, his lips curling in a grateful smile, it is their selflessness that is
their Sense, their abjuring of mortal pleasures that enables them to project
themselves into the Ecosystem and know its will. Perhaps, too, it is this quality that makes
them immune to the Ecosystem’s snares: for when they enter it, they enter it
without the concentration of self that marks other humans as objects of the
Ecosystem’s rage.
When he is finished the community will applaud, and I will
glance at the other Sensors who stand silently around me, and wonder if, like
me, they doubt this portrait Daniel has drawn of our class. I’ll wonder if it is me alone who draws the
Ecosystem’s fire, who taunts it, who hates it beyond all measure for what it
has done. And I will wonder too if it
hates me with a special fury, if it knows me not just as a human, not just as a
Sensor, but as the particular concentration of self that is me.
But I will voice none of these thoughts. As the village's newest Sensor, I will step forward....
***
From "Then Chief Warden Daniel" on, the info-dump takes over, not relenting until the paragraph beginning "But I will voice none of these thoughts" returns us to the narrative. It's too much, too soon. It tells the reader so much about the history of this world, s/he might reasonably feel there's little point in reading on; what's left to discover?
It's no good, and the simple solution was to take it out (which I did) and let the reader discover the world's history through action, dialogue, and context. I kept the info-dump in a separate file in case I needed it later, but the truth is, everything I said in it emerged much more plausibly and inobtrusively elsewhere in the book, so I never needed it after all.
So, what do you think? How do you define or deal with info-dumping? Why is it so easy to fall into that trap? I'd love to hear what others think.
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