Intro This video has been brought to you in part
by World Anvil.
Light up the forge!
Welcome, everyone, to the first episode of our new show, Tale Tips, where I use my vast
robot intellect to answer the questions you have about writing, storytelling, and fiction...
provided I can come up with anything useful.
It's still Tale Foundry, just a slightly different Foundry from the one you're used to seeing.
That's because, with the help of our new little friend, we were able to get the Foundry's
old indexing system... thing... back up and running!
Honestly, I can't make head or "tale" (this pun only works in text :( ) of any of the
ancient files stored in there, but... it does make for a nice slideshow projector, doesn't
it?
So, while our humans are hard at work writing original short stories and creating big, over-produced
videos about our favorite fiction... let's do a little something on the side, shall we?
The first question we're going to answer on this show is one almost every writer asks
at some point in their career, but especially those who are figuring out how to share their
made-up worlds.
Our lovely patron, Samantha Realynn, asks: What tips do you have for worldbuilding to
prevent it from turning into exposition?
On the surface, it sounds like a simple question, doesn't it?
After thinking about it for a few days, I can assure you that it is anything but.
Samantha, this is positively brimming over with secondary questions, considerations,
and complex nuances.
It reaches far beyond the limits of worldbuilding and touches almost every part of storytelling...
which makes it a joy for me to try my hand at.
Thanks for asking!
I have two suggestions for you before I get to the real advice:
The first is a simple shift in perspective.
There's worldbuilding which occurs outside the storytelling process, and then there's
narrative worldbuilding.
The worldbuilding you do outside the story-mapmaking, place-naming, history-writing, all that-doesn't
necessarily bear too much on whether you end up stacking dry leaves of information upon
your audience.
So long as you aren't caught up in the gyre of worldbuilder's syndrome, unable to begin
writing your story because you haven't painted the spots on every beetle, I wouldn't worry
too much about what you build outside the story.
What really matters are the pieces of worldbuilding which make it into the narrative.
How much are you telling your audience about the world over the course of the story?
How are you telling it?
This is where you run the risk of cutting and drying your world out-where we begin to
battle the scourge that is exposition...
Except, it isn't.
Not really.
The second suggestion I have for you is... also shift in perspective.
It may seem a little contrary to the common wisdom show don't tell, but exposition isn't
a bad thing.
Far from it.
The problem is that exposition, unto itself, is not an experience.
Description, action, argument-these forms of communication all offer some kind of sensory
stimulus or motion-experience-to the audience.
Exposition is just... the sharing of information outside of experience.
And that certainly has its uses where the more experiential methods of communication
fail.
But for that reason, it does tend to be less engaging.
This becomes a problem when your audience is forced to slog through long swaths of expository
text which offer troves of valuable information and context... but nothing to experience.
Info-dumps.
If the story is meant to be immersive and engaging, these parts of it are likely where
that effect will end.
In fewer words: exposition in the right context?
Good!
Info-dumps in most stories?
Bad.
And this is true of pretty much all information in your story, not just for the worldbuilding.
With this understanding, the question becomes something more along the lines of: "What tips
do you have for narrative to prevent info-dumps?"
Which, not being a geographer or scientist of any kind, I find leagues easier to answer
than almost anything about worldbuilding itself.
So, Samantha, having duly usurped your question (sorry), I've got three approaches for you
that, with some luck, should work out nicely.
So, the first method: scatter your exposition.
When you understand so much about your story and you're so painfully aware that your audience
doesn't know any of it, it can be really tempting to close that gap as quickly as possible.
But the truth is that, in most info-dumps, even if all of the information is necessary
for the audience to understand the context and motions of the story, not all of it is
usually necessary right this very moment.
And when all of that tangential stuff piles up in one place, it halts the story, and turns
the experience into an explanation.
So the trick here is to identify which pieces of information are necessary to the story,
and to share them in appropriate contexts.
Sometimes that comes long before the necessity of the information becomes apparent, sometimes
it isn't until right before.
But you can tell the context is right, because it the exposition won't interrupt or distract
from the telling of the story.
The result is that you end up gathering all your piles of pertinent info and scattering
them to the winds!
And when these little bits and pieces are seeded appropriately-into the rich soil of
relevant context-they actually have the opposite effect of info-dumps on the audience; they
take root, help the experience to blossom more fully in the audience's mind.
Author Kalli Wallace does this beautifully in her short story No Portraits on the Sky,
which you can read or listen to for free in issue #79 of the Clarkesworld digital magazine.
The story has a very healthy blend of showing and telling, but reserves much of the exposition
for the right moments.
For instance, the opening paragraphs mention skywardens.
The only thing appropriate to share about them now is that the stranger falling from
the sky in the first paragraph isn't one of them-he's not wearing their tools, ropes,
soft sticky gloves the color of spider silk.
It's not until later on in the story when we discover that the protagonist's daughter
was a skywarden who disappeared, that we learn what a skywarden is: someone who climbs up
the branches of the tallest trees and into the damaged sky, trying to fix it.
It would have been easy for the author to try and frontload all of that information
so that we don't have to wonder what a skywarden is... but ultimately, the difference between
learning it sooner and learning it later is simply that, this way, we didn't have to put
the experience on hold to answer the question.
She found the right context for both pieces of exposition, scattered them out, and over
the course of the story, they bloomed into something vivid.
But... there may not always be a later.
What if your story doesn't give you any other opportunity to share those fragments of information?
If you're clever, maybe you can find a way to create a context for it, although that
can come off a little contrived-writing your story to deliver information, rather than
sharing information to help tell your story.
How do you avoid an info-dump when there's just no other good place to put all of it?
This is probably the method most of you were waiting for, and definitely the most rewarding
of the three: you hide it.
Make your information implicit rather than explicit.
It's also the most complex of the three approaches.
There are so many ways to do this.
Of course there are.
This is, after all, the beloved show don't tell.
There are literally endless techniques for showing effectively.
We could probably make a video on that alone... hmm...
But however you go about it, the gist of it is that instead of telling your audience things
outright, you help them to make inferences.
So in the middle of description, action, argument, or any other kind of experiential text, they're
also learning things about the story without ever being told.
They come to conclusions on their own, based on what they've been through so far.
For instance, in the original short story we wrote for our worldbuilding series, The
Wilting Sound, we had a lot to share with the audience about the setting.
The world it takes place in was created for us by Adrian Vollbracht, and it is... very,
very different from the one we live in.
One key feature is that all the denizens are born with twins.
They're told that without their twins to keep their souls split in half, they turn into
terrible, cannibalistic monsters.
Thus to keep the population safe, single-born children are put to death, and everyone carries
a poisonous flower bud in a bracelet on their wrist-like a cyanide capsule, in case something
should ever happen to their other half.
It's... a lot to set up, and we didn't want to ruin the experience with an info-dump.
So instead, we both scattered that information throughout the story, and implied it through
other types of writing.
You learn that it's a world of twins in the first several paragraphs by experiencing the
perspective character's grief at her twin's absence.
You hear characters voice their concern about whether a single-born child will become a
monster.
You watch one character swallow the bud, and see what happens.
...hopefully it turned out well in that story, but this should give you some inkling of how
it works.
Experiences are a great place to hide information.
Another good place to hide information is in small clues.
You can suggest a whole lot to the audience simply by selecting the right words or including
the right details.
Author Jo Walton calls this technique "incluing", because, through your decisions in the text,
you're cluing the audience in to things about your story.
The example she uses is the phrase "the door dilated open", which was used in multiple
places by Robert Heinlein.
This one word, dilated, tells us something about the setting-it's so futuristic that
even mundane pieces of technology like doors work differently.
Except... it also doesn't tell us anything at all.
It's one singular word, and we as an audience do the work of extrapolating its meaning.
So if you find yourself explaining a lot about your world, think about what the audience
might be able to pick up in just a few very suggestive bits of language, and see if that
can do the job all on its own.
Two quick words of caution about this whole hiding information, show-don't-tell thing,
though... it's very hard to fake.
If what you're doing is telling or delivering information explicitly, but trying to disguise
it... it can actually be even worse for immersion.
The key culprit here is a phenomenon known as "As You Know, Bob" or "Maid and Butler
Dialogue", wherein two characters who have no reason to need or want an explanation take
the time to exposit information to each other for the audience's sake.
It damages the integrity of the characters and the fiction, and makes the audience aware
of themselves, which can be really hard to recover from.
Check out the podcast Writing Excuses, season fifteen, episode 9 for some great commentary
on this.
You may also want to be careful with how liberally you use this whole method.
Unsurprisingly, hidden information can, at times, be difficult to see.
So, if it's really important and it's hidden a bit too well, you do run the risk that the
audience doesn't notice and ends up confused later.
Incluing can be particularly tricky here.
My advice would be, if you've got to be implicit with a very important piece of information,
maybe try the "show and tell" method, where you turn it into an experience, let the audience
take it in... then confirm it later on with some small piece of direct exposition.
It can be a bit redundant, but it's better than an info-dump, and it mitigates some of
that risk.
Okay.
Scattering information is a good way to break up info-dumps, making the information implicit
is a good way to hide them...
What are you supposed to do when neither of those methods work?
When there are no good places to scatter the bits and pieces to, no good ways to turn them
into an experience?
Well, I'm sure there are other ways I haven't thought of, but the last thing I want to suggest
to you is...
To get rid of it.
Kill your darlings, as they say.
If a piece of information is really, truly important, but you find there's just no way
to convey it without harming the story... take some time to consider whether that information
will matter to the audience, or whether it just matters to you and your desires for the
story.
If it's just something fun on the side you want to include to add some additional richness
to the world or the characters or something, by all means, tuck it in there somewhere!
Use the methods we've described to weave it into your story.
But if you can't do that, if this thing is such a bad fit for the story you're writing
that you'd have to damage the experience in order to include it... maybe don't.
It's painful, believe me.
We had to do this for the original novella we wrote for our Terry Pratchett series, Automata,
on Cue!
One of the characters is a very strange AI, and in the first draft, we felt it was really
important to explain who made her and why, what that process had looked like.
But in revision, it became clear that the only detail which mattered was the fact that
she was, in fact, an AI.
Everything else was extraneous material; stuff we wanted to include because we'd already
made it.
There was no good way to squeeze it into the story.
To this very day, not one soul outside the Foundry knows the name of the character who
invented the AI in that story, or what their original motives were.
You can guess, there are some trace hints, but the rest...
A creative ghost.
Maybe they'll even surface in another story.
One which has a little more room for them.
So, Samantha, I hope that answers your question, and I hope it helps your writing to be a little
less... uh... dumpy!
Of course it could be hard to put any of this to use at all if you don't know how to organize
your world or connect it to your story to begin with.
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Go light up the forge!
And finally, before we wrap up, I'd like to give a quick thanks to all the helpful humans
who support the show on Patreon.
All those words you see scrolling in the background of these videos?
Those are actually the names of our Patreon maintenance crew, without whom this show would
be impossible.
And a special word to all our top patrons: Excelsius, Lord_Gatte, Puzzling Shutterbug,
and The Autumn Writer - thank you so much.
We'll be deciding on our next Tale Tips question soon, so follow us on social media to ask
a question of your own, or join us on Patreon if you want choose which question we attempt
to answer.
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I'll see you...
next time.
Bye!