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One of the many things I adore about my honey is how he loves a good challenge. Persistence is Khashayar’s middle name, when it comes to puzzles and games of strategy. I’m trying to learn from that, given that novel writing demands (more about my books here) heaps of patience and problem solving.
This morning he totally nailed a New York Times crossword puzzle (they offer printable freebies) — in ink, no less!
Back when I was sixteen, I was so frustrated by one of their crosswords that I concluded they were just too hard for me. More recently, though, as I quietly spied over Khashayar’s shoulder, I realized that growing older has bestowed upon me experience and random data that makes puzzles a heck of a lot easier. That reminds me of how, as a kid, I was told that one is might be born a great artist, but one can never learn to be one. Hah! Now I know better, that some of us bloom late, and if we learn a few rules about our chosen craft, we’re good to go…
Today’s guest, Mara Lynn Johnstone, blogs from California. She’s published poetry, books, short stories, science fiction, and fantasy.
Here she explains a great rule for making stories more compelling…
Avoiding Infodumps in Fiction by Mara Lynn Johnstone
When you’re making up a world for a story, particularly a novel-length story, it’s easy to disappear down a rabbit hole of research and planning. Some authors never emerge, spending all their time figuring out just what cultural festivals their aliens have, and how merfolk light their homes. Not you, though. You’ll make it back out, armed with a glorious cornucopia of brilliant ideas to use! You’re ready to dive into writing.
The problem now is how to hold back, and not dump all that oh-so-cool information on the reader right away.
Of course they’ll be interested in the layout of the city that was designed when teleporters replaced cars — there are no highways, only footpaths for walking, and bike paths for exercise, and some of the biggest mansions don’t even have doors, though they have to give teleporting permission for the housecleaners, and… Whoa, there. Rein it in. You’ve got time to take things slow.
But no need to feel glum! You don’t have to put away the toys; you get to take a clever sleuthing approach instead. Drop hints about your worldbuilding. Leave clues and choice tidbits, letting the readers fit together the puzzle on their own. That will be much more of an exciting read.
Sure, you could dump a few paragraphs about the technology level of the city, and the moral compass of the main character … or you could throw out hints on the fly. Make your first line something like “Mac jumped on the hoverbike and blasted through traffic, rapidly realizing three things: he didn’t know his way around town as well as he thought, the bike was running out of fuel, and the bike’s real owner had jet boots.”
And there’s also the fact that the point-of-view character may not even know how everything works. They don’t need to! The average person nowadays would be hard-pressed to explain a car’s engine in rigorous detail; there’s no reason for everyone in the future to be experts on warp drives. You’re well within rights to throw out descriptions like “And then the pilot pushed buttons and turned dials and whacked something that looked like a space bar, and appropriately enough, we rocketed off into space. I’m pretty sure the ship left a trail of glitter behind it.”
You can have a lot of fun with your main character, deciding which of the many things in your notes they fully understand and which they don’t. Maybe they get to learn some of that during the course of the story, and the reader learns with them. Maybe they have spicy opinions about it all. That sounds like a good time for everybody; much better than the textbook approach.
Because really, the reader will enjoy rooting for a main character more than they’ll enjoy an explanation of the world. Those details are there to add a lush backdrop to the action — a glorious soundtrack, backup dancers, the unseen orchestra enhancing the drama that’s happening on center stage. The characters are the focus.
This isn’t an informative essay; it’s a story.
What happens next? Do they make it?
Do you have a favorite crossword or other puzzle?
Discover more from Happiness Between Tales (and Tails) by da-AL
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Un petit bonjour, de mes vacances ensoleillées
De mon séjour à AIX LES BAINS
Ici le repos a été garanti
Entouré de montagnes et son joli lac
Le paysage, est très joli
Le bleu du lac et du ciel aussi
Je me suis fait des amis
Ils sont formidables
L’après-midi petite randonnée en montagne
Ou une balade le long du lac du Bourget
Mais avant partir, après chaque diner
Petite sieste journalière
J’espère que le soir ne pas revenir avec des douleurs
Nous verrons cela prochainement
Et toi de ton coté, en as-tu bien profité
En attente reçois une bise amicale ton ami Bernard
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Merci!
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Great advice on info dumps! A wise author once said that world building is like an iceberg. Authors should have extensive knowledge about how their world works in quite intricate detail but readers only really need to see the top of the iceberg when they read the story and only see the essentials. But you still have to create the bottom half of the iceberg because readers should at least get the feeling that it’s there. My favourite puzzles are probably Flow Free’s colour puzzles. Thanks so much for sharing!
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What a lovely surprise to have you visit, Simone! for anyone reading this comments section, I highly urge them to visit your site as well as check out the great guest blog post you did here: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eKl — I would absolutely love if you’d do another one any time you’d like ❤
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Thank you 😊 Yes, I returned to blogging after moving to London and sort of ‘re-inventing’ myself. Sounds great, I’d love to! I have no idea what I’d write about through. 😅
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Anything you like. Something you can reblog back to your site afterwards or perhaps something you’d like to share but that you don’t think is right for your site?
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Let me ruminate on it a little and I’ll get back to you 😊
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❤
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I think a fictional world always feels more real when the reader senses that there is much more detail to it than has been actually given in the story. You can show bits and pieces of the way things are, without “infodumping” every detail you worked out in your head, but the fact that you did work it out at least means your world should be free of logical inconsistencies. And in some cases things can be made obvious. If your private detective teleports to the home of a person to interview, and is buzzed into another teleporter instead of knocking on a door, the reader will understand why houses don’t have doors. It won’t even be necessary to specifically mention that they don’t have them, much less why.
Then, too, if you made the effort to create a detailed and consistent world in your head, even if you didn’t explicitly describe a lot of it in your story — then if the story is popular enough that you write another one set in the same world, you’ll already know how things are supposed to be, instead of making up a lot of new details on the fly and desperately trying to make sure nothing conflicts with what you established in the first story.
A few things like warp drives, teleportation, time travel, and invisibility are now well-enough established in science fiction that you need only mention them and the writer will accept them with no technical explanation at all — which is handy, since those things are almost certainly impossible. Thus in some of the oldest science fiction, such as Wells’s great The Invisible Man with its interminable detailed explanation of exactly how to become invisible, that particular passage seems oddly clunky today, especially in the middle of a generally brisk and amusing story.
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it’s funny how these imaginary words have become common – I need to put the invisible man on my reading list, given what a commentary it is on our culture
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I’m more a jigsaw puzzle person but I love the random knowledge you need for crosswords!
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you need a big table for those & maybe a whole extra room lol
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I totally agree with Mara Lynn, the characters are the most important, and too much information kills the story. Actually, Dan Brown did that in his book “Angels and demons”.
I must admit that puzzles annoy me, I see them as work, a task given to me by an unknown person. I’d rather read a book. 😉
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it depends on the puzzle – I like doing them with my husband, together, when he’s stumped ❤
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