Thou Shalt Not Infodump

I want to share my pain.

Several years back I read book 1 of a series. It was a good book. The main flaw was that there were no pauses for the reader to catch a breath. It was non-stop action. The result was reader fatigue. By the end I was on overload. The action wasn't affecting me any more. I just wanted to get to the last page. Nevertheless, it was well written otherwise. I was interested in the next book. Instead of doing one, the author started putting out other books. I had this idea that he would learn about writing doing those and there would be pauses in the sequel. It would be great. Finally, after years of waiting book 2 came out recently. I was going to buy it immediately but didn't. The day I checked again, it turned out to be Amazon Prime day, and I got it for $2.99.

Roughly the first 25% of the book was a massive infodump. By page two my eyes had glazed over at the flow of background information. This was two Kindle pages, which would be roughly one or so paperback pages. After non-stop action in book 1, basically nothing happened in the beginning of book 2. There were, I believe, two things relevant to the end of the book that were peacefully inserted into the flow. The rest of it was infodumping, setting and background information.

The book is set in the future, partly in the real world and partly in a virtual reality video game. There's background and history for both worlds. This automatically doubles the mind-numbing flow of information. Like a sucker I expected the story to begin on the next page. For 25% of a 400+ page book I kept expecting the info to stop and the action to begin. It didn't happen.

At 25% the story starting moving very slowly forward. The main character was finally doing something no matter how insignificant. At 43% the story picked up where book 1 ended. Imagine you get to the end of book 1, wait years for book 2, and the story doesn't start again until 43% of the way into book 2. Arrrrrgh! It was almost like the first part of the book was a prologue. One of the reasons for the infodumping, which slowed but never really stopped, was that the author kept inventing new elements for the world. Every time something new was introduced, background information was dumped into the text.

Would you like to hear the worst part? Almost none of the infodump was relevant to the story. It bogged things down. It was annoying, more annoying than the undisguised, science fiction references. The main character is named after a comic book/movie hero. Other characters were named after real people. After four or five of these references it became irritating. Every time it happened, it took me out of the story and made me think about Star Trek, Star Wars, Planet of the Apes or whatever work the name or situation referred to. Sometimes a reference was a quote from a movie or a scene from a movie rather than a name.

If you're a writer, infodumping is a necessity. Readers need to know things. The correct way to do it is to insert the information in small pieces along the way. Blend it into the text. Put it in dialogue. Make it relevant to the story. If it doesn't affect the outcome, is it really necessary? Some things are there for flavor alone, but they can't bog the story down. Brandon Sanderson puts it something like this. There has to be forward momentum. The reader has to feel like the story is progressing. Massive infodumps do not progress the story.

But there's also good news. This summer has been very cool, very rainy but cool. Normally, the temperature would be around 100F(37.78C) during July. It's barely broken 90F(32.2C). Last night it dropped to 61F(16.1C), when it should be in the 70s(21-24ish C). Would you like to hear the best part? There's a cool front coming down from Canada next week. Not only will it be cooler. The humidity should plummet as well. I can't wait! We're a little over four weeks from September, the time the temperatures start to get better and the humidity starts to drop. This cool front will get me that much closer to autumn and the end of the high temperatures and massive humidity. The humidity is the real problem. Dry heat is much easier to deal with than sticky, sauna heat.

Have a great weekend.