: Re: How to avoid the 'magic explanation' info dump in Fantasy novels In the second book of his Inheritence Cycle, Christopher Paolini makes the grievous error of landing his main character in the

@Goswami879

Vote Up Vote Down

I'm not a fan of info dumps. They can get boring and cause the story to drag. Also, I think readers like to make their own speculations and guesses about things. With an info dump, they lose the opportunity to do this. Also, I don't think characters really want to sit down and be told pages and pages worth of information. They might glaze over and get bored themselves.

I'm not sure if it would be possible in your situation, but I faced a massive info dump in my current story. Instead of laying it all out, I leaked it out very gradually with several different characters having short conversations throughout the entire story at different times for different reasons.

It helps my story because I made mages in my fantasy story chronically immature. They get bored easily if not working on their magic. If they had to be subjected to an info dump, they'd wander off or just stop listening after a few minutes. So I broke things up. Different characters knew different bits of information for different reasons and had different motivations for giving the information.

Here is an example. Part of my info dump had to include the true nature of the divine -- or God in their world. Instead of a wise sage doling out the truth, I have one character making fun of another one because he believes that the God he worships is a real person who sits on a real throne in a real castle in the clouds. While he tries to explain things, several other characters start asking their own questions and showing their confusion on the subject. It only takes a few paragraphs. It doesn't nearly go into explaining everything, but it's enough for the characters to get the general idea and the possible future readers could speculate and make their own theories.

Throughout the story this subject comes up over and over. Sometimes there's just a sentence or two alluding to the subject and giving more information. Many times the discussions happen between two minor characters and the protagonist overhears them.

(0)

Login to post a comment!