: Re: Avoiding info-dumps when writing about amnesiacs In the story I'm writing one character suffers from amnesia as a result of an accident. I want another character, with whom they were in love,

@Kevin153

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In a sense, you're trying to fight your own structure here. Long, one-sided dialogues are built into the concept of one person telling a shared history to another. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In a movie, there's a big difference between someone telling a story, and the movie showing you the story, visually. But in a book, all "showing" is really telling. What you're really looking at here is starting with a frame story, and then your non-amnesiac character becomes the new first-person narrator of the portions of the book that take place in the past.

Many books are structured this way. The Way Through Doors is a series of stories told to a woman in a coma, by a would-be suitor who invents a fantastic narrative for them to share. The Arabian Nights is presented as a series of stories invented by a woman to placate her murderous spouse. There are numerous other examples. The way to keep it from being just an info-dump is to make the internal stories interesting and complete narratives in their own right.

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