Avoiding the Information Dump

Here are two scenes, both expressing the exact same exchange, same place, same time, etc.

#1:

“Hey,” Donald Williams said to the cashier without pausing in his efforts to unload the cart’s contents onto the conveyer belt.

Why was he even here? It was a Friday night, and he was thirty years old, raised in the booming metropolis of New York City, and single. And pathetic man that he was, he was buying Doritos and goldfish food at nine o’clock. Of course, he wouldn’t be out grocery shopping alone if Aileen hadn’t left, but really, that had been months ago. One would think by now he’d be over that, ready to get back in the game so to speak. But the only game he played lately was Scrabble. On the computer. By himself.

It was nothing like when he used to play Scrabble with his younger twin sisters. Those were the times. All three would sit around the scarred oak table chortling over someone’s attempt to convince the others that “jafflequ” was indeed a word. But that had been before both Isabel had gotten married and Roxanne had run off to Archeology school. Their parents still didn’t like to talk about it. But since the divorce the fourteen years ago, they didn’t like to talk about anything.

He ran his hand through his sandy brown hair, looking up in surprise as the bagger asked, “Paper or Plastic, sir?”


#2

“Hey,” he said to the cashier without pausing in his efforts to unload the cart’s contents onto the conveyer belt. And he tried to ignore the inescapable lameness of being a single man in the grocery store on Friday night.

As he lobbed the Doritos onto belt, his mind wandered, tossing up images of happier, less lonely times to torment him. He was so lost in his reverie that he was startled by the bagger’s voice asking, “Paper or Plastic, sir?”


Succumbing to the “Information Dump” temptation is a common mistake for both new and seasoned writers, and for those who write both fiction and nonfiction. As the ones telling the story, we think the reader needs to have every single detail right off the bat in order to appreciate the literary magic we’re working. We rationalize our back story overload by convincing ourselves that the readers will toss the book aside in disgust if they don’t find out in the first paragraph that the protagonist is 6 feet tall with a learning disability.

Many publishing professionals will tell aspiring authors that there should be absolutely no trace of back story in the first chapter. Others will disagree, seeing the near impossibility of having an entire chapter free of any mention of the past. I think there is a happy medium.

As writers, we need to trust that our audience will “get it” if we’ve done the rest of our job correctly. They’ll wait patiently for several chapters, maybe even half the book, to find out what drives the characters and makes them tick. We can drop bits of information here and there without overloading the reader and confusing him with too much too soon.

So, the best way to avoid the temptation to drop an entire biography of the character into your reader’s lap is to choose your words carefully. Consider the relationship between the reader and your character to be as fragile as the interaction between two people on a blind date. Neither needs to know initially that one snores in his sleep and the other has a foot fungus that won’t go away even after exhaustive treatment. A little mystery can be nice.

Essential, even.

--Mandy