What a difference a day makes. I just wrote about 1,200 words this morning - unfortunately it was nearly all synopsis. But that's fine. I need to know exactly what I want the next few scenes to do so I can set my brain to fleshing them out. The story is moving along wonderfully, even if the actual writing of it is behind schedule.
Since I'm behind on my Writing Notes column for this month, I'll add a mini one here as a hold-over. It's about info-dumping, and one way to get away with it.
In my current story, I've opened with an action sequence. That's fine, and it should draw the reader into the story far enough to hook them for the duration. Immediatly after the action, I have "earned" a pause in which I need to give lots of info the reader. Now, there are three ways to do this. One is good, one works, and one should be avoided at all costs.
The one to avoid is the easiest - just blurt out all the info the reader needs. In my story the reader needs to know how humanity bumped into the Evil Aliens, how the war began, what the aliens are like, how they and we fight, and what the expectations are for humanity's future. Sure, I could just go through the whole thing like a history lesson: First this happened, then this, then this, etc. This can work, but rarely, because there is no personality involved in such a pure info-dump, which is why the term has become a dirty word. It's just a bunch of facts thrown at the reader.
The second method is the same as the first, only you restrain yourself as a writer and give only what absolutely needs to be present. And you write it as tightly and concisely as you can. "After the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's forces were decimated, and his dream for conquest evaporated." You don't have to go into all the troop movements, the reasons for the war, how close Napoleon almost came to winning, how the English felt about the defeat, or anything else but the facts the reader absolutely needs. Doing this usually means you have to give more info later in the story, but that's fine as long as the reader gets what he needs when he needs it.
The third is hiding the info-dump in a scene. Ideally, you want to spread the dissemination of information throughout the whole piece in little bits that the reader never notices. That's not always possible because you often need to give the reader a good deal of info, usually in the beginning, that is necessary for them to know in order to continue in the story. So you need to info-dump. In my story I need to info-dump a good amount of stuff on the reader, but rather than bore the reader, I'm creating a scene (actually, two) that will dramatize the info I need to get across. This doesn't mean I have to show the actual space battles to get the info about them to the reader, because I need some characterization-dumping at this point as well. So, we put the two together.
In Under the Graying Sea, I used flashbacks to show not only the history behind building the wormhole, but the main character's connection to it. Each flashback did three things - showed the relationship between the protagonist and her father, showed her relationship to the wormhole project, and dumped info about the history and function of the wormhole project.
I'm doing it again now, having my main character think about where he was when humanity first encountered the aliens. He's with his two sisters, who are the other main characters, and the reader will get to see how they react to the event, and the reader will learn more about their relationships. In this way, I've got a scene that is interesting drama as we watch the characters interact, but at the same time I'm sprinkling in my info-dump, and the reader will care because it directly relates to the characters. Readers like to pick up a book for its ideas, but they like to keep reading for the characters.
Hope that's helpful. Just look at what info you need to give the reader, then think of a way your characters can relate and react to that info and create a scene out of it. You end up using more words than a regular info-dump, but you will keep your readers' interest, and develop your characters at the same time.
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