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Sooo it’s kind of been two months since I posted the first part of this. Whoops!

So back in May, we looked at a couple of ways to identify your info dumping dialogue. Some of the guidelines:

• If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
• If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
• If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
• If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fixing that Info Dumpy Dialogue

Not all exposition, even in dialogue, is bad. We always need to maintain the tension level while conveying necessary information, and there are a number of ways to do that, including inner tension, bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict and other techniques. Frankly, all of these examples could use some of that!

So let’s look at how those principles apply to our examples from last time.

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

So obviously we have a married couple here. There is no reason they’d ever say something like this to one another. So how can we convey this information?

• First, check which information is vital. This will depend on the story, of course. Do we need to know they’ve been married for exactly seven years? They’ve lived here for three years? Toss the info that has no bearing on the story.
• Next, decide whether dialogue is the best “mode” to convey this information. If the only available person to talk to already knows it, the answer is a flat-out NO. If you can find someone who needs to be informed of the facts—the cop who’s looking for her missing husband, maybe?—they can really come in handy here.
• Find a source of tension or conflict. Maybe Tina isn’t his child, and the years of lying are finally wearing down on the mother.
• Finally, slip in shards of backstory at a time, usually in context of something else. The cop looking for her husband, perhaps. The wall color she’s always hated in this living room, etc.

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

This long speech is an info dump in dialogue or in narration. Let’s assume the character is talking to someone who doesn’t know anything about the topic.

Seriously, is this much information necessary to the story? Unless every bit of technical information here actually impacts the plot or the characters, or if we would be totally unable to understand the action of the story without it, we don’t need this. (I don’t understand it, and apparently I wrote it, so . . . awesome.) Face it: this is showing off your research. And your research involves reading Wikipedia.

If you want your character to look knowledgeable, focus on the reaction to his information, and summarize what he says. For example, “Dr. Liffenblatz explained the reactor, but his string of technical jargon only left me even more confused.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

Good old Jimmy. Let’s say Jimmy will be an important figure in this story (because if he won’t, you’re losing your reader RIGHT HERE).

First of all, there’s just flat out too much information in this passage. The last sentence is totally unnecessary here, and most likely unnecessary altogether.

Now, the rest of the passage is still a bit too long of a speech for one person to deliver. One idea: break this up among multiple speakers. Make it a conversation instead of a monologue. If you’ve got two or three people reminiscing about high school together, it’s much more natural to exchange information—but again, only if we’re actually informing (or trying to inform) the other speaker of something s/he doesn’t already know.

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Um, wow. Most likely, there’s one excellent way to fix this: the delete key.

What do you think? How would you fix this dumpy dialogue?

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