Apologies in advance if this is the wrong place to post this, I'm notoriously bad at that.
It seems that, over the last few years, writing forums and blogs have adopted the idea that info dumping (describing in great detail a character, backstory, setting, or something, and using several paragraphs to do it) is a bad, bad idea. They say this makes the reader get bored or disinterested really fast and is a way to turn off basically everyone.
However, all of the classic authors I've been reading over the last few years have done info dumps - Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Mary Shelley, all of them - and some would even go on for pages. Mark Twain & Charles D. Warner spent three pages describing Washington, D.C. in The Gilded Age, and I wasn't bored at all.
So, that made me wonder if info dumps are actually more useful than people say, if used well. What do you think? Do you use info dumps, and if you do, how do you use them?
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