Long Tale Press

Use this thread to discuss the excerpt The Good Old Boy by Jan.

Others may not have read this excerpt yet, so please use [spoiler][/spoiler] tags where appropriate.

Fhoyt was more encouraging

What can I say. I'm a tough grader, and everybody's entitled to their opinions.

Infodumps are those times when narrators dump information about backstory or setting into the narrative or (worse) in dialogue in ways that aren't natural to what the particular scene needs to convey. Infodumps are what happens when the writer can't (or hasn't bothered) to find a subtle and natural way to convey the information. Once you know what they are, you can spot 'em a mile away.

Infodumps can vary in size from just a few ill-placed words, to whole long passages of dialogue or narrative background. Here are the first several of yours in The Good Old Boy:

Clement Snudder, a young boy on the Planet Thear, slept fitfully that night so that when his pet rooster woke him with a blood-curdling crow at a splinter of dawn, he threw the covers over his head and groaned.

In the first sentence (and I'm amazed at how often writers try to pull this stunt in the FIRST SENTENCE of their novels, so you're in good company), the phrase "on the planet Thear" is definitely an infodump. The sentence is about a boy being woken up by his pet rooster. What planet he happens to be on is really not related to the sentence's core theme. It's an infodump. Arguably, "a young boy" is also infodumpish, but to a lesser extent. I would encourage you to strip these sentences down to their core and find elsewhere to convey the other information.

In the next sentence, however, you do a nice bit of scene setting:

He was waking to the day he’d been both excited for and worried over for the past eighty-nine years of his young life, which is why he’d hardly slept at all the year before.

The "past eighty-nine years of his young life" is good because it's a surprise and is different from life on earth. The first sentence sets us up for believing that maybe this is a person living on a farm. But then the second sentence re-adjusts our understanding and, with that one fact, tell us that we're not in Kansas anymore. Now, we don't know where we are. And at this point we wouldn't even be sure what species Clement is. But we'd know something was different here and we'd have our minds prepared to receive the information about WHAT is different whenever it comes along.

So you don't need the planet Thear stuff in the first sentence. You don't even need "a young boy" in it, because "of his young life" does the same job in a better way by being juxtaposed against "eight-nine years". Next up:

In a few hours, he would be embarking on his first voyage beyond the galaxy Futuria, and a boy’s first voyage into deep space, if he lived to tell of it—was his right of passage.

"Beyond the galaxy Futuria" rings my alarm bells, because "embarking on his first voyage into deep space" would do the job just as nicely. Dangling the exotic soundings words "galaxy" and "Futuria" at us is like you're trying to call attention to how exotic you want your setting to be. It's like when a little kid is squealing "look at meeeee!" because they want you to see how silly they are for putting a pancake on their head or whatever--you're not blind, you can see the pancake, and there's really no need for them to point it out to you. If you do a good job of conveying the nature of your setting in an organic manner, the reader will spot the differences from boring old Earth and they'll know it's an exotic locale. You don't need to wave a red flag at them about it.

The bit about Gizzard's yodeling talents starts to stray into infodump land, but honestly strikes me as more of a needless diversion than a true infodump. Still, worth pointing out. Let us have a little bit of detail about Gizzard (the first bit about the blue tail feathers and scarlet comb is nice) but you don't have to tell us the rooster's whole life story all at once. Next:

Clement had wanted to pack him along on his voyage to Earth. “My rooster would be good company,” he said to Twal Sidney, venerated leader of Thear. “Since his transplant, during which he received the larynx of a cockatiel, he can speak three hundred and forty-two words; and his embedded brain chip enables him to understand almost half of them, which makes him a very clever rooster indeed.”

Are you spotting the pattern? Here, what does and doesn't count as infodump relates to what Twal can be expected to already know about Gizzard. Given the context, it would appear that cross-species transplants and cyborg pet modification are reasonably common occurances in your world, in which case Twal certainly knows that. So to have Clement explain about that stuff is unnatural. Not something he'd really say. It would be like the two of us walking into a New York high-rise building for a meeting with our publisher on the 33rd floor, and me saying "Let's take the elevator, which rises quickly through a vertical shaft in the building on cables pulled by powerful winches and will take us to the 33rd floor much quicker and with less effort than if we took the stairs." Because, of course, you already know how an elevator works and what the benefits of it are. I just wouldn't say that unless I had some kind of mental problem or unless I thought you were a complete moron. I'd just say "There's the elevator" and we'd both walk over in that direction. By extension, we either have to conclude that Clement has some sort of mental problem, or else he's treating the venerated leader of his world like a moron--neither of which are plausible and that leave one last option: that the writer thinks the readers are morons and won't be able to figure it out on their own. Which is just insulting. Don't insult your readers.

It seems reasonable that Clement would say "he can speak 342 words since his transplant, and understand about half of them!" and Twal would know what that meant. True, the reader wouldn't know, but that's ok. It's actually a GOOD thing, because it leaves the reader with a question--why can the rooster speak. Readers keep reading, they keep turning pages, in order to learn the answers to questions that the writer has planted in their mind. IMHO, the fastest way to kill the momentum and "draw" of your story is to answer every question the reader might have before the reader even knows there's something to wonder about. Infodumps are a powerful tool (for evil) in that regard. Also, since we already know this isn't boring old Earth we're dealing with, leaving readers with a question gives them a clue about the nature of this word without beating them over the head with it.

Next up:

But Twal wouldn’t have it. “You can’t afford any distractions from that pesky bird during this voyage. You must commit your total concentration to the task at hand, which is to find and collect a compatible form of DNA. This is an extremely important, and I might add, dangerous mission; and your mother has lost one son already. We wouldn’t want her to lose another.”

Now we have Twal doing the same thing, explaining the point of Clement's voyage. Surely Clement already knows why he's going and what his mission is? We know Clement understands the danger since the earlier narration told us so. So does Twal have a mental problem, does he think Clement is a moron, or again is the author talking down to the audience? If it's a story about two mental defectives trying to struggle their way through a plot, I don't want to read any more. I suppose there's a place in the world for movies like "Dumb and Dumber" but they sure aren't MY cup of tea. And if the author thinks I'm an idiot, well, that doesn't earn the story many points in my book either.

Anyway, you get the gist. I know that sounds like a harsh assessment, but it's reality. Too many authors think that the secret to writing for YA or middle-grade readers is to talk down to them, and presume that they're idiots just because they're kids. Kids hate that. When I was a kid, I absolutely hated being treated with less respect for my opinions and sensibilities just because of my age. Didn't you?

Most of my writing (at least the novels) is aimed at YA and middle-grade readers. I respect the hell out of my audience, as I think any author should no matter who they write for. So when I see this kind of writing aimed at a MY audience, I take it kind of personally. I think kids deserve better. They rise to the expectations we put on them, so to the degree that we give them fiction which expects nothing of their imaginations or their intellect, we do them a tremendous disservice.

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I think it might be important for you not to jump to the conclusion that someone has just dumped something on this site for the heck of it. That wasn't constructive. It was hurtful. I simply wouldn't do that--submit something that I didn't think was finished. I'm sorry you felt it wasn't good enough for this site, but I think there are better ways for you to say that. Also, I could have learned something about info dumps without the little snide asides. Maybe you just don't realize how you come across sometimes, Cloister. It was my first stab at YA, but I did think it was finished. Sorry for being such an idiot!

Jan--

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying at all to be snide. You asked me to show you where the infodumps were, so I did. Because you indicated that you weren't clear on what infodumps were and why they were a problem, it seemed like it would be helpful to try to give some insight into what a reader is likely to perceive and how they're going to respond emotionally--not just to the story but to the AUTHOR--when they run across one.

I mean, you want people to respond emotionally to the story (as long as it's the emotion you intended, anyway), but I doubt very much that any author really wants the reader to be thinking about them while reading their story. We want readers immersed in the world we've created for them, rather than being aware of the writer as an intermediary between them and the story. (Well, not for fiction, we don't; obviously biographies and memoirs are just the opposite).

Certainly not ALL readers will have the same reactions as I do to an infodump. Some will, and the rest probably won't notice all that much. But then again, I've never heard anyone say that infodumps represent a really effective mechanism for storytelling so I guess better safe than sorry, right?

I have thought about writing books about writing, but I think that's a task for a far distant time when I am myself a better writer and have, you know, publishing credits to my name so people might take me seriously as a writing coach. But thanks for the vote of confidence. That's really nice of you to say so. And someday, if I get some time to go back and work on it (NaNoWriMo is such a harsh mistress!) I'll replace the excerpt with a revised chapter 2 that incorporates the useful parts of chapter 1.

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