Info Dumps Are Uninformative

So you’ve got some information that you want to convey to the reader (in writer speak, this information is referred to as exposition—sounds like some kind of medical affliction, doesn’t it?). Maybe you want to explain to them that magic works by consuming eldritch walrus blubber, storing that blubber, and then undergoing a complex biochemical transduction process to convert the stored blubber into malleable mana. Maybe you want to illuminate the reader about how a band of ragtag heroes from the eastern coast of West Westville assembled five hundred and thirty-six years ago to overthrow the Bramble King and seal away his spirit in a jar of mystical honey. Maybe you want to tell your reader that Jenny has auburn hair done up in a ponytail, has hazel eyes with little flecks of gold, and dresses like an emo ninja; Bobby has eyelid piercings, has neon green hair, and dresses like an emo ninja; and Harvey the gerbil has silk-soft white fur, has a stubby tail that wiggles whenever he smells peanut butter, and dresses like an emo ninja.

How does one go about conveying this information to the reader? Well, you’re a writer, so why not just… you know, write it? Cue the wall of text. The thought process is as follows: let’s provide the reader with all the knowledge they’re going to need up front so that they are well-equipped to process the rest of the story. It’s no surprise either that writers have a natural inclination toward info-dumping. After all, most of us were fed through an education system that forced us to trudge through textbooks (the term textbook is in fact a euphemism for “six-hundred-and-fifty-page-long info dump”).

But there’s a big problem with info dumps—a book-breaking problem, in fact. Info dumps… don’t work. Think about it. The goal of an info dump is to convey a piece (or, let’s be real, several pieces) of exposition to the reader and to have the reader commit that exposition to memory. But if you introduce said exposition by means of an info dump, more likely than not, that information will go in one eye and out the other. Meaning you’ve wasted your time, you’ve wasted the reader’s time, and—worst of all—you’ve wasted precious page space.

Now, you’re probably thinking that it’d take a pretty darn lazy reader to fail to internalize the fascinating morsels of worldbuilding and backstory you are so generously gracing the page with. But the aversion readers have to info dumps isn’t just rooted in laziness; it’s rooted in psychology. Before we get into that, though, yes, let’s address the magic flying elephant in the room.

Info dumps are boring. How many of your high school textbooks would you describe as riveting reads? As page turners? As unputdownable? I’m going to wager none. Dry information is, well… dry. Fortunately, humans have a built-in coping mechanism for encounters with dry text. This dastardly technique—a real marvel of our cognitive evolution—is called skimming.

Skimming can be a valuable technique when employed in an academic context, where writing often adheres to a strict formula and it may very well be possible to glean the gist of an article by reading only the first and last sentence of every paragraph and glazing over everything in between. But fiction writers have a tendency to hide little nuggets of crucial information in the middle of dense paragraphs. If you induce your reader to skim, they’re going to miss out on those intricate details you’re seeding into the narration. And then, when they get to chapter twelve, they’re going to say, “Hey, wait a minute—you never established that eldritch walrus blubber grants people the ability to sprout tusks in the heat of battle!”

Even on the off chance that your reader has the discipline not to skim, it’s unlikely that they’ll retain the information you present to them. Time to get a bit technical. Info dumps engage in the mass practice method of committing information to long-term memory—this method is also known as cramming. Cramming is when a person attempts to memorize a hefty clump of information in a short period of time through rehearsal or repetition. This is how we learn from textbooks; we make notes and go over the key points again and again until they’ve stuck. That repetition is crucial for retention. Now ask yourself: do you really expect your reader to read through your info dump over and over and over again until they’ve committed it to memory? And that’s not even touching on the fact that cramming is an ineffective method for retaining information over the long term.

Also, recall what I said earlier about burying nuggets in the middle of dense paragraphs. Memory is also subject to the primacy effect, where a person is more likely to remember an item at the beginning of a list, and the recency effect, where a person is more likely to remember an item at the end of the list. Notice how there is no middle-of-the-paragraph effect. The exposition that resides there will, more likely than not, be forgotten.

Much more effective than the rehearsal method is committing information to memory by focusing on the meaning. Meaningful information is much easier to retain than meaningless information. And, nine times out of ten, exposition conveyed through info dumps is meaningless. For information to have meaning to the reader, it has to have some personal relevance to them. And since narratives are fictional and therefore have no consequence on the reader’s actual life, the only way to make information meaningful them is to tie it to their emotional investment in the narrative. Simply put, the stronger the emotional reaction a reader has to a piece of exposition, the more likely they are to be able to recall it at a later point.

To use our blubber example, imagine a scene in which the main character has depleted their store of magic and is therefore forced to hunt and kill an eldritch walrus and then consume its blubber raw, battling their nausea and squeamishness all the while. The knowledge that blubber equals magic will now be paired with two strong emotions: fear (eldritch walruses are scary) and disgust (eating raw blubber is gross). Those emotions will burn that bit of exposition into the reader’s memory the same way a haunting image might be burned into a character’s memory.

Meaningful associations also aid recall. Memory is interconnected—thinking about one piece of information will trigger a number of associated pieces of information that were encoded (converted into long-term memory) along with it. This is why if you do your studying at a café, the smell of coffee during an exam might just spark your memory. And herein lies the other issue with info dumps: they usually provide information prematurely and removed from their proper context.

Can you remember the specifics surrounding the defeat of the Bramble King that I mentioned at the start of this blog post? Probably not. Because I provided you that information out of context. But say I’ve demonstrated that characters in my story are superstitious about the number five-hundred and thirty-six. Say the characters have travelled to the eastern coast of West Westville, where honey jars are considered sacred objects, and our main character winds up in a bit of a pickle for accidentally breaking one. Now that you have all of these meaningful incidents and context clues to encode along with the legend of the Bramble King, thinking about any one of these things (five hundred and thirty-six, West Westville, or honey jars) will also cause associated neurons to fire (this process is called priming), making you more likely to recall the Bramble King as well.

Now that we’ve wandered far enough down the Psych 101 rabbit hole, let’s recap what we’ve learned. If you shovel-feed your reader exposition through an infodump, they won’t have the necessary contextual associations to tie that new information to things they already know, nor will they have enough of an emotional reaction to what you’re telling them for it to leave a significant impression on them. They may even skim through your info dump, which will result in even less retention. If the whole point of an info dump is for a reader to retain information, and an info dump actually serves as an obstacle to retention, doesn’t that kind of defeat the whole purpose? On top of all that, info dumps have a tendency to induce boredom—the absolute worst emotional response a reader could have. Boredom reduces emotional investment in a story, which will make it all the more difficult for the reader to retain information in the future. So not only is your info dump not helping; it’s hurting!

So there you have it: a somewhat scientific argument for why info dumps just simply do not work. I’ve barely scratched the surface here in regards to the psychology of memory—I highly encourage you to do a little research on your own to figure out the most effective techniques for getting a reader to retain information. One such technique is called distributed practice, where the rehearsal of a fact is spread out over time (so if there’s a key fact you want your reader to remember, try slipping in a mention of it every three or four chapters to remind them). But whatever you do, try to avoid resorting to info dumping. Because, as we’ve learned here today, info dumps are uninformative, at best.