: Re: Is This a Bad Infodump? I’m kind of in a dilemma. If I was to write a prologue to a fantasy story about the history of the kingdom and the political scope of what is happening there,

@Holmes449

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It is probably still a bad infodump, at least if you intend to sell the story to a traditional publisher.

Because it is not immediate, we don't know who the main character is, and all the "action" is in the past and has nothing to do with the present.

I have been told (by a real publisher) they he wants his MC up front, page 1, and they want them interacting with other people by page 2. At least a conversation. He doesn't want a "contemplative" opening, or an "in transit" opening (somebody thinking about life, the universe and everything while on the bus to work).

My advice is to dump the reader into the middle of your MC's everyday life, give the MC some normal-life problem to solve that requires human interaction, to help reveal their character. Let the reader figure out what is going on. If the background is truly important, it should affect the actions and decisions of the MC, and the MC can "remember" those pieces as they go. It is okay to leave the reader in the dark and reveal the back story slowly. Not just okay, but better, it builds mystery, and interest.

The problem with infodumps, no matter how interesting you try to make them, is they are just a lot of information you want the reader to memorize, and readers cannot memorize much. You are saying "Remember this guy [you never heard of] wants this girl [you never heard of] but she loves this other guy [you never heard of] because ...

The reader is out. Readers remember things by following the hero they are interested in through scenes and vicariously experiencing, through their imagination, what the hero is experiencing. They remember the scenes, and the people they interacted with, and what was said. They remember what is important, so they only remember the bits of the background story that actually has an impact on the MC and what they do and say.

One thing you can do to aid that is to make some character fairly uninformed about the backstory, so your MC or other characters must explain it, or alternatively, make your MC uninformed about aspects of the backstory, so he needs to be informed about it by other characters. Or some mix like that; nobody knows everything, but due to the mission elements are discovered.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that because some best-selling or famous author got away with something, you can too. JK Rowling is the richest author in the world, but on the craft of writing she is pedestrian, at least for adults. She appeals to the middle grade, non-adult teens especially. On the imaginative front she is stellar, off the charts, very good at combining fantasy and mystery, and that is what has carried her books to #1 . After she was rejected by nearly every publisher in England, by her account. (Probably because her writing is pedestrian, and modern publishers don't read very far before pitching stories into their reject pile: Which her book was rescued from, by a publisher's child.)

JRR Tolkien is an excellent writer, also with stellar imagination. I wouldn't count on being a one-in-a-hundred-million writer. If you are, that's great, but you will still have a better chance if you avoid the obvious modern prohibitions that every publisher knows: Don't start with an infodump. Don't try to "make it work". Don't start with a prologue, or wall of text, or wall of dialogue, or a "contemplative" opening.

Open on the MC's normal world, solving their normal world issues, interacting with their culture and other people. Figure out what is actually necessary from the backstory to justify the MC's actions and those of others, and incorporate that as you go. Thousands of best-sellers do it, thousands of good movies do it, you can do it too.

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