I would add--consider whether what you want to explain needs to be explained at all. I think Isaac Asimov said "The door dilated open" to explain that it was not a regular door. He didn't explain that it was a circular door and it rotated in a way that opened the aperture--it "dilated", which is an idea most people already understand intuitively.
That way the thing you need to explain becomes *experienced* rather than *said*. If it's complex or philosophical, sometimes leaving it unstated can be better for the reader, and let the reader fill it in.
There's a lot of tricks you can do with non-visual storytelling. I once listened to a podcast called "Sparks nevada, marshal on mars" and they did lots of clever things like having an "inside out ray" that turned people inside out. The imagination fills in all the blanks and neither the ray nor how the person is inside out needs to be explained.
This all depends on what you're explaining though.
Yes! Great point and good example. In my book 'A Day of Faces', the lead character is a sort of reptile-ish human. At one point when someone makes a rude comment at her, I stated that kay "nictitated at him" in a dismissive manner. Didn't explain it or go into detail, but it made the point that her eyes were different.
It was slightly complicated by 'nictitated' not being a commonly-known term, but that aside...
Some of my writing is done in a metafiction style, where it's a text from another world that's merely been translated into English. So I include footnotes that outright explain things because it fits into the feeling I want, that being something similar to reading an old epic or saga where you have footnotes giving cultural context.
Battles Beneath the Stars is framed like a fighting game guide/wakthrough, so I can use exposition tools that video games have. Such as dedicated profiles for each major character going into detail on their backstory, and NPC dialogue I can use to give worldbuilding details without having to exposit it in a major scene. With the 'NPC' dialogue I try to make sure they all have clear opinions on the information they give readers. And sometimes the opinion is the information.
A funny thing with exposition is that there's one video game series where I really like the expo dumps. The Zero Escape trilogy often has long tangents on pseudoscience and weird theories/events that aren't always relevant, but for me it's part of the appeal and I really like them. I guess it's because the concepts themselves are interesting to me.
Looking at other mediums, genres and cultures is really important. I've recently started watching anime with my son, and it's an area I've always been largely ignorant of. Anime's approach to world building and exposition is REALLY interesting, in that the writers are quite comfortable having a 5-10 minute aside to explain a complex (fictional) ninja concept or magic system. Characters frequently monologue to themselves, to explicitly describe their feelings and motivations.
It gave me a bit of whiplash at first, because it's so different to what I'm used to. But it works, and is brilliant in its own way. Subtext works in a completely different way.
Ah, footnotes! There was something tickling my brain that had been overlooked in the weekend discussion and that was it! Jasper Fforde and Terry Pratchett are two writers who often drop in footnotes as well (Pratchett, not only in Discworld books) - although both of them tend towards comedic in their works, and the footnotes are also often humorous asides.
William, framing your story as a game guide sounds like an exciting and interesting choice. Almost like making the entire book a diegetic source(1).
How anime handles exposition... Simon there's a whole different post there on how countries with different cultural assumptions than the European West (and those who had European influence thrust upon them) handle storytelling, because Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and African works I've read do have quite a few structural differences.
(1) "Diegetic. " I have to look it up every time I use it as it's a word that just looks WRONG.
I don't recall if Douglas Adams used footnotes, but my brain feels like he probably did. HHGTG definitely has a footnotey feel to it - of course, he took the approach of making the entire book supposedly a guide book to the universe, and therefore could include whatever details and aside he wanted at any point.
I think Pratchett and Adams (and maybe Fforde, I haven't read his stuff) have some flexibility due to operating within comedy, and specifically within genre-bending comedy.
DNA didn't use footnotes in H2G2. As noted, he could just cut out of the narrative to a Guide entry as any time.
You'd enjoy Jasper Fforde. His earlier writing (and best known series) in the "Thursday Next" books is all very literary and clever. The namesake hero is a "Literary Detective" (tracks down false "first folio" Shakespeare forgeries, etc) who discovers she can travel into the world within books. Her Dad is Chronoguard (Time Cop) and, from there you're off into genre bending Sci-fi/fantasy. Fforde is shortly to return to that series. He left us on a cliffhanger.
Nursery Crimes is just fun.
His later writing, Shades of Grey, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit still wrap into absurdist Sf/fantasy but are more serious works exploring themes of identity, acceptance and youth rebellion. Themes Simon knows well.
Shades of Grey is EXCELLENT and has a sequel coming out this year.
Constant Rabbit was obviously cathartic to write.
And on top of that, Fforde is a lovely man with awesome fans. The two Fforde Ffiesta cons we've attended were much joy.
Highly recommended. Shades of Grey or Thursday Next.
Awesome job on this, Simon! I like that you called out speculative fiction because it can be especially difficult with vast worlds not to just dump the entire folklore. I think spreading that out makes it more exciting for the reader. It's like unraveling a mystery.
Indeed. I think some people see spec fic as being 'freeing' because you can write about 'anything you want!', but in reality it's actually quite difficult. That ability to write about anything actually applies a lot of narrative challenges and constraints, and the need to 'exposit' the world risks getting in the way of the characters and themes of the story, if it isn't done right.
As you say, sprinkling it through the story tends to work best. It's surprising how little information a reader actually needs, and it can be contextual and provided 'just in time'. In fact, withholding can be part of the fun, as you say.
Isaac Asimov - who, in case you didn't know ("As you know's" bastard half brother) - besides being a Grandmaster of sci-fi also wrote fantasy, historical, contemporary, allegorical and romantic fiction as well as non-fiction works covering every major category of the Dewey Decimal System over 500+ books and over 90,000 letters, short stories, articles and essays - once said science fiction (or, "spec-fic") was absolutely, bar none the most difficult genre to write in, solely because of the need to create everything and exposit all while entertaining the reader.
He rather arrogantly - yet probably accurately - then stated he was the only person unarguably qualified to make the assertion.
It's interesting to point out one of his most famous works, the "Foundation" stories, are literally structured as people in rooms talking about all the stuff which happened in the galaxy the reader never directly experiences. Every "Foundation" story is "100% infodump."
I’d like to extend all this to include not dumping the entire world’s/character’s/supernatural race’s entire backstory into a prologue. I’ve seen so so SO many prologues used this way and I find them both jarring and boring. Just getting smashed in the face with exposition right off the bat is not a way to keep my attention (personally), and if it’s being told to a character that’s in the past or not present all that much in the story, I get thrown off on whose story it really is. Or if it’s a high impact prologue because this cataclysmic thing set this story in motion, it causes a grinding to a halt of the story in the next chapter because that’s not the start to THIS story. It’s a hill I’ll die on.
As for what I do, I sprinkle it throughout. In my dystopian novel, PROJECT TITAN: DEFECT, my character lives in a world that used to be San Francisco, so when she’s walking somewhere, or standing somewhere, or driving somewhere, I make it a point to see through her eyes, at least a little bit. A sentence or two, maybe. When she comes in contact with a new character to a reader, but an older relationship to her, I give her some inner monologue in that moment, a flash of memory that may take a minute to read, but would only last a second for her to process. When something upends her previously conceived ideas of things, I use that to explain how she thought it was and how it looks, using other characters to fill in blanks if they’re in scene.
Ah yes, the prologue dump! See also: voiceovers and scrolling text at the start of movies.
I resisted doing a prologue for Triverse for a long time, but ultimately decided it was worth it in order to establish a couple of key aspects about the story. I worried that going straight into the first chapter cold would be too confusing. The prologue also helps new readers understand what kind of book they're getting into - all that said, though, the prologue hopefully stands on its own as a self-contained short story of sorts, rather than just a big infodump.
Overt exposition is the single biggest 4th-wall-breaker for me. I'll drop a book (and a film, because it can be just as prevalent/potent in films when exposition is done badly) if it happens too much.
There's a fine line, to be sure. It's something I'm constantly fearful of in my own writing. Great article, Simon. Thanks for posting.
Films and TV can be even worse, I think, because they often rely entirely on spoken dialogue. A book, at least, has a range of text styles tot play with.
It occurs to me that your suggestions are good, but as a reader I like the process of gradually piecing together what the background is, by inference. We don't usually need to be told.
Yeah, I like dropping world building in as asides, or tangential to the main thrust of the narrative. Sometimes the absence of something can tell you as much about the world as explicitly stating.
I did it because even supposedly good SF authors like Asimov do it. I think it's really clumsy. Your point about how the absence of something can be very informative is spot on in my opinion. It's why stories like The Dead by James Joyce are still popular IMO
Great tips. I’ve been worldbuilding a planet and thinking about how to explain the parts of the society without this info dump. Island by Aldous Huxley is an info dump, so is The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. A character asks a question and someone goes into this endless diatribe explaining all about the society. While I do find value in those stories, it’s great as a lesson of how to show who people are. You can maybe tell by their gait or build what they do for a living, that they’re spiritual or skeptical. This is a good article to come back to when I need some inspiration. Thanks.
I definitely recall reading books when I was younger - older books - that were much more overtly infodumpy, and less bothered about being so. I wonder if some of that is due to omniscient, 3rd person narration being more common in the 20th century.
No love for the epigraph? None? I'm shocked. Especially, "as you know" how I wrote more in praise of the epigraph than any other technique over the weekend.
*Shakes head* I get quoted and there's an its/it's typo which will haunt me to the grave, and a typical juxtaposition of a word like "diegetic" with a "blah-blah, etc." Heh.
I'm just going to type "diegetic" again, because I'm wondering how many times I have to type diegetic* before my phone's autocorrect finally learns the word "diegetic." Answer - the one with the asterisk.
Ironically my autocorrect never suggests "autocorrect*" when I'm trying to type autocorrect. Until the one with the asterisk.
I would add--consider whether what you want to explain needs to be explained at all. I think Isaac Asimov said "The door dilated open" to explain that it was not a regular door. He didn't explain that it was a circular door and it rotated in a way that opened the aperture--it "dilated", which is an idea most people already understand intuitively.
That way the thing you need to explain becomes *experienced* rather than *said*. If it's complex or philosophical, sometimes leaving it unstated can be better for the reader, and let the reader fill it in.
There's a lot of tricks you can do with non-visual storytelling. I once listened to a podcast called "Sparks nevada, marshal on mars" and they did lots of clever things like having an "inside out ray" that turned people inside out. The imagination fills in all the blanks and neither the ray nor how the person is inside out needs to be explained.
This all depends on what you're explaining though.
Yes! Great point and good example. In my book 'A Day of Faces', the lead character is a sort of reptile-ish human. At one point when someone makes a rude comment at her, I stated that kay "nictitated at him" in a dismissive manner. Didn't explain it or go into detail, but it made the point that her eyes were different.
It was slightly complicated by 'nictitated' not being a commonly-known term, but that aside...
How DARE you make a tween/teen grab a Dictionary app!
"The door dilated" is Heinlein. At least according to Larry Niven, who cites that example quite often in his own essays.
But, yes, the use of the
"unusual adjective" is a good point, which I don't think had come up yet.
I stand corrected--I ran into that anecdote years ago and I had a lot of Niven books lying around so it makes sense to me.
Some of my writing is done in a metafiction style, where it's a text from another world that's merely been translated into English. So I include footnotes that outright explain things because it fits into the feeling I want, that being something similar to reading an old epic or saga where you have footnotes giving cultural context.
Battles Beneath the Stars is framed like a fighting game guide/wakthrough, so I can use exposition tools that video games have. Such as dedicated profiles for each major character going into detail on their backstory, and NPC dialogue I can use to give worldbuilding details without having to exposit it in a major scene. With the 'NPC' dialogue I try to make sure they all have clear opinions on the information they give readers. And sometimes the opinion is the information.
A funny thing with exposition is that there's one video game series where I really like the expo dumps. The Zero Escape trilogy often has long tangents on pseudoscience and weird theories/events that aren't always relevant, but for me it's part of the appeal and I really like them. I guess it's because the concepts themselves are interesting to me.
Looking at other mediums, genres and cultures is really important. I've recently started watching anime with my son, and it's an area I've always been largely ignorant of. Anime's approach to world building and exposition is REALLY interesting, in that the writers are quite comfortable having a 5-10 minute aside to explain a complex (fictional) ninja concept or magic system. Characters frequently monologue to themselves, to explicitly describe their feelings and motivations.
It gave me a bit of whiplash at first, because it's so different to what I'm used to. But it works, and is brilliant in its own way. Subtext works in a completely different way.
Ah, footnotes! There was something tickling my brain that had been overlooked in the weekend discussion and that was it! Jasper Fforde and Terry Pratchett are two writers who often drop in footnotes as well (Pratchett, not only in Discworld books) - although both of them tend towards comedic in their works, and the footnotes are also often humorous asides.
William, framing your story as a game guide sounds like an exciting and interesting choice. Almost like making the entire book a diegetic source(1).
How anime handles exposition... Simon there's a whole different post there on how countries with different cultural assumptions than the European West (and those who had European influence thrust upon them) handle storytelling, because Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and African works I've read do have quite a few structural differences.
(1) "Diegetic. " I have to look it up every time I use it as it's a word that just looks WRONG.
I don't recall if Douglas Adams used footnotes, but my brain feels like he probably did. HHGTG definitely has a footnotey feel to it - of course, he took the approach of making the entire book supposedly a guide book to the universe, and therefore could include whatever details and aside he wanted at any point.
I think Pratchett and Adams (and maybe Fforde, I haven't read his stuff) have some flexibility due to operating within comedy, and specifically within genre-bending comedy.
DNA didn't use footnotes in H2G2. As noted, he could just cut out of the narrative to a Guide entry as any time.
You'd enjoy Jasper Fforde. His earlier writing (and best known series) in the "Thursday Next" books is all very literary and clever. The namesake hero is a "Literary Detective" (tracks down false "first folio" Shakespeare forgeries, etc) who discovers she can travel into the world within books. Her Dad is Chronoguard (Time Cop) and, from there you're off into genre bending Sci-fi/fantasy. Fforde is shortly to return to that series. He left us on a cliffhanger.
Nursery Crimes is just fun.
His later writing, Shades of Grey, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit still wrap into absurdist Sf/fantasy but are more serious works exploring themes of identity, acceptance and youth rebellion. Themes Simon knows well.
Shades of Grey is EXCELLENT and has a sequel coming out this year.
Constant Rabbit was obviously cathartic to write.
And on top of that, Fforde is a lovely man with awesome fans. The two Fforde Ffiesta cons we've attended were much joy.
Highly recommended. Shades of Grey or Thursday Next.
Gah! You quoted me!?! ......maybe i shouldnt have said "dump" so much 😂 LOVE the image of spinning plates - so much to keep up at one time.
Sorry! It's your own fault for saying something interesting, though. It is quite a dump-heavy observation, but still insightful. :D
At least you don't have a publicly quoted its/it's error? D'oh!
Fixed that, Mike. ;)
Most kind. 👍
Thank you so much for your help with my chapter. I’m reworking the whole thing with this advice in mind. So appreciate it!
Ah, glad to be helpful! Thanks for giving me the idea for this post. ;)
Awesome job on this, Simon! I like that you called out speculative fiction because it can be especially difficult with vast worlds not to just dump the entire folklore. I think spreading that out makes it more exciting for the reader. It's like unraveling a mystery.
Indeed. I think some people see spec fic as being 'freeing' because you can write about 'anything you want!', but in reality it's actually quite difficult. That ability to write about anything actually applies a lot of narrative challenges and constraints, and the need to 'exposit' the world risks getting in the way of the characters and themes of the story, if it isn't done right.
As you say, sprinkling it through the story tends to work best. It's surprising how little information a reader actually needs, and it can be contextual and provided 'just in time'. In fact, withholding can be part of the fun, as you say.
Isaac Asimov - who, in case you didn't know ("As you know's" bastard half brother) - besides being a Grandmaster of sci-fi also wrote fantasy, historical, contemporary, allegorical and romantic fiction as well as non-fiction works covering every major category of the Dewey Decimal System over 500+ books and over 90,000 letters, short stories, articles and essays - once said science fiction (or, "spec-fic") was absolutely, bar none the most difficult genre to write in, solely because of the need to create everything and exposit all while entertaining the reader.
He rather arrogantly - yet probably accurately - then stated he was the only person unarguably qualified to make the assertion.
It's interesting to point out one of his most famous works, the "Foundation" stories, are literally structured as people in rooms talking about all the stuff which happened in the galaxy the reader never directly experiences. Every "Foundation" story is "100% infodump."
I’d like to extend all this to include not dumping the entire world’s/character’s/supernatural race’s entire backstory into a prologue. I’ve seen so so SO many prologues used this way and I find them both jarring and boring. Just getting smashed in the face with exposition right off the bat is not a way to keep my attention (personally), and if it’s being told to a character that’s in the past or not present all that much in the story, I get thrown off on whose story it really is. Or if it’s a high impact prologue because this cataclysmic thing set this story in motion, it causes a grinding to a halt of the story in the next chapter because that’s not the start to THIS story. It’s a hill I’ll die on.
As for what I do, I sprinkle it throughout. In my dystopian novel, PROJECT TITAN: DEFECT, my character lives in a world that used to be San Francisco, so when she’s walking somewhere, or standing somewhere, or driving somewhere, I make it a point to see through her eyes, at least a little bit. A sentence or two, maybe. When she comes in contact with a new character to a reader, but an older relationship to her, I give her some inner monologue in that moment, a flash of memory that may take a minute to read, but would only last a second for her to process. When something upends her previously conceived ideas of things, I use that to explain how she thought it was and how it looks, using other characters to fill in blanks if they’re in scene.
Ah yes, the prologue dump! See also: voiceovers and scrolling text at the start of movies.
I resisted doing a prologue for Triverse for a long time, but ultimately decided it was worth it in order to establish a couple of key aspects about the story. I worried that going straight into the first chapter cold would be too confusing. The prologue also helps new readers understand what kind of book they're getting into - all that said, though, the prologue hopefully stands on its own as a self-contained short story of sorts, rather than just a big infodump.
Great roundup!
Overt exposition is the single biggest 4th-wall-breaker for me. I'll drop a book (and a film, because it can be just as prevalent/potent in films when exposition is done badly) if it happens too much.
There's a fine line, to be sure. It's something I'm constantly fearful of in my own writing. Great article, Simon. Thanks for posting.
Films and TV can be even worse, I think, because they often rely entirely on spoken dialogue. A book, at least, has a range of text styles tot play with.
In my experience the worst examples of this may be found in science fiction. There is even a word for it: infodump. I wrote a spoof example of it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/terryfreedman/p/experimenting-with-styles?utm_source=direct&r=18suih&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
It occurs to me that your suggestions are good, but as a reader I like the process of gradually piecing together what the background is, by inference. We don't usually need to be told.
Yeah, I like dropping world building in as asides, or tangential to the main thrust of the narrative. Sometimes the absence of something can tell you as much about the world as explicitly stating.
I was looking at your post and comments on my phone in bright sunlight, so I didn't notice that you actually included the term 'infodump' in the title! Sorry for appearing to teach grannie how to suck eggs. My attempt at a spoof infodump is here (incorrect link given earlier): https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/80971093/a-bang-on-the-head-in-the-style-of-a-badly-written-science-fiction-story
I did it because even supposedly good SF authors like Asimov do it. I think it's really clumsy. Your point about how the absence of something can be very informative is spot on in my opinion. It's why stories like The Dead by James Joyce are still popular IMO
Great tips. I’ve been worldbuilding a planet and thinking about how to explain the parts of the society without this info dump. Island by Aldous Huxley is an info dump, so is The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. A character asks a question and someone goes into this endless diatribe explaining all about the society. While I do find value in those stories, it’s great as a lesson of how to show who people are. You can maybe tell by their gait or build what they do for a living, that they’re spiritual or skeptical. This is a good article to come back to when I need some inspiration. Thanks.
Hi Chevanne! I have some older articles specifically on world building that might be of interest too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/simonkjones/p/world-building-for-fantasy-stories?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (this one has an interview with Kieron Gillen, who is much cleverer than I am)
https://open.substack.com/pub/simonkjones/p/building-a-multiverse?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I definitely recall reading books when I was younger - older books - that were much more overtly infodumpy, and less bothered about being so. I wonder if some of that is due to omniscient, 3rd person narration being more common in the 20th century.
Thank you!
Great "As you know, Bob." cartoon!
No love for the epigraph? None? I'm shocked. Especially, "as you know" how I wrote more in praise of the epigraph than any other technique over the weekend.
*Shakes head* I get quoted and there's an its/it's typo which will haunt me to the grave, and a typical juxtaposition of a word like "diegetic" with a "blah-blah, etc." Heh.
I'm just going to type "diegetic" again, because I'm wondering how many times I have to type diegetic* before my phone's autocorrect finally learns the word "diegetic." Answer - the one with the asterisk.
Ironically my autocorrect never suggests "autocorrect*" when I'm trying to type autocorrect. Until the one with the asterisk.
Thanks Simon. You help me teach an AI.
Excellent, Simon. Thank you.