Young Writers Society

This is something I have been wondering about for a while so I thought I would put it out to the rest of the world and gather opinions... is there any such thing as an acceptable infodump? I notice professional writer's doing it, and though I know it is an infodump, the write them so well they're masked in beauty and so not bothersome...but is this still a fault of the writer, one that should not be repeated by me, or is it acceptable if you can mask the dump?

Here is an example from Ian McEwan's Atonment...

She lit up [her cigarette] as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home/ He had prcise ideas about where and when a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any other public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply--notions as self-evident to him as natural justirce. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with the courage to confront him. .... In fact, being at odds with her father about anything at all, even an insignificant domestic detail, made her uncomfortable, and nothing that great literature might have done to modify her sensibilities, none of the lessons of practical criticism, could quite deliver her from obedience.

Pardon any funny typos, I was copying straight from the book.

This is all telling, and an infodump, but it is so well written and makes for great characterization, but it is also an argument against show-don't-tell. It could be shown that she is uncomfortable confronting her father simply by having him jump out at her as she walks through the halls (haha, sounds funny!) so, why then, is it alright for him to tell it? Is there any point where telling is OK, and when is it, and when am I allowed to do so....? Does anyone see how I am so confused?

All rules can be broken, so long as you understand the rule and what is to be risked in doing so.

I second Sureal. Generally infodumps are to be avoided, but the fathers of fiction used them quite often, didn't they? And we still generally accept them to be masters of the craft. It's all in how effectively it's used, and how little you irritate your audience, I think.

In any event, I'd barely qualify the example you gave as an infodump--from what I've seen, an infodump is more along the lines of, "She walked into the room, the long hair that she hadn't cut for years flowing down over her back. How long had it been since she'd cut it? It had been before her mother's death, certainly--her grief had been too strong afterward for that..."

Yes, yes, I know that that's atrocious writing. The point is, an infodump, as far as I'm concerned, is generally something worked in to spell something out to the audience. The example you gave doesn't come across as that, but more like a reflection--one almost gets the feeling that's she's smirking self-deprecatingly and wondering why her education didn't better prepare her. It comes across as an internal dialogue made external.

Info dumps are to be avoided and I would class the example given as one but sometimes the occasional spill of information is necessary. I think then that they're acceptable.

Info dumps are, of course, bad. Except when they're helpful. In the above example, the author segued from an action into a related memory. Yes, it's telling, but it's not so much the classic infodump where the story begins "Hi my name is Jenny Smith and this is every detail you ever wanted to know about my family". In that instance, the information comes out of nowhere; it's jarringly irrelevant in context. But the Atonement quote seems more like a thought process, more like a natural digression than a straight infodump.

Maybe it's like cliche ideas; it's the execution, not the intent, that ends up being poorly done.

This is showing because, instead of saying, "her father had precise ideas about cigarettes," it is describing his ideas about it, and so on. So, even though the narrative is not in real time in a tangible sense, it's in real time if you look at her thoughts and she is "showing" something about the way she thinks by giving these examples.

Also, an info dump is saying something that is probably not going to be important later, but telling it anyway, just to fill up space. This isn't an info dump by any stretch because it's actually useful because it describes the character and why she is doing something.