Craft Of Writing

Tips for Writing Action Scenes

March 18, 2022 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

When I first started writing, action scenes were among the weakest aspects of my craft. To my chagrin, I had critique partners tell me my duels and battles moved slowly, lacked impact, and (worse still) confused them. Some of the issues with my prose quality were just that: inexperienced line editing, head hopping, etc. But even as I cleaned up my writing, my struggle with action scenes persisted.

What was it about these scenes that made it so difficult for me to keep readers at the edge of their seats? My critique partners couldn’t put their thumbs on it, either. (In fairness to them, we were all newish writers back then, so plz don’t judge them for failing to have the editorial knowledge I’ve since gained.) As far as we could tell, I didn’t have problems with characterization, structure, concept, setting, or any of the myriad other reasons a scene just doesn’t work. At one point, I line edited a scene for wordiness four? five? times, and while edits tightened the prose, readers still felt disconnected from the action.

It wasn’t until I stumbled across an article on Motivation-Reaction Units that I realized I wasn’t wrestling with a story problem, but a logical thinking problem.

What are Motivation-Reaction Units?

Motivation-Reaction Units, or MRUs, take the cause-and-effect chain of writing and reduce it to a micro level. They break each character’s actions and reactions down into a logical sequence of input, deliberation, and output. MRUs connect the reader to the action by allowing them to experience the scene through the POV character’s eyes. They help writers avoid the dreaded traps of ‘telling,’ clunky action, and blow-for-blow fistfights.

The most important thing to keep in mind: MRUs don’t operate at the scene-level, they operate at the paragraph level. In a snappy action sequence, each one might last only a few phrases. Longer ones could stretch for multiple paragraphs. They’re the missing link between sentences and scenes, and their power lies in the invisible organizational structure they provide for readers.

How do I build an MRU?

Good news: this part is way, way easier than you’d think.

I conceive of MRUs as a five-step process. The full five steps aren’t always necessary — sometimes one character’s action/reaction sequence gets interrupted by another one — but they should hit the page in order. For the sake of this example, let’s say our character, Sam, inadvertently gets into a bar fight.

Input

An external event happens to catalyze this five-step process. In this case, a drunken patron takes a swing at Sam. For direct, physical action, it’s best to keep this description short and sweet. ‘The big drunk on the left took a swing at Sam’s head.’

Instinctual/Flinch Response

Now, the character’s hindbrain kicks in. Think: pulling a hand off a hot stove. This is an automatic, unconscious response to a stimulus. In this case, we could write ‘Sam ducked.’ If Sam doesn’t duck, I consider the pain response a subset of this category. ‘His fist connected with Sam’s ear, hard enough to set it ringing.’ Here’s the place to describe the pain, too, since it’s what the character will process after their flinch response.*

*Sometimes the injury is so severe and the pain so intense that there’s a delayed response, and the character processes what happened before the pain hits them. This is certainly true to life, but I’d recommend using it only for serious, serious injury, the gravity of which is already implied to the reader.

Conscious Response

Here’s the first time we get conscious processing from the character. This is usually expressed through internalization, though sometimes an exclamatory phrase will work. (ie: in the case of the stove top, “OW that was hot!”)

Our buddy Sam, having thankfully ducked the punch, might think, ‘Hell, that idiot tried to hit him!’

Deliberation

After mentally processing what happened, now our character can make an observation, deliberate, and decide upon a next step. In an elaborate fight scene, this is where a character could eye an escape route, plan a trap, or weigh the consequences of a crazy scheme. Sam’s line of thinking is simpler, but apt: ‘The bar erupted into chaos. A woman with a full sleeve of tattoos swung a chair at another patron’s head. Nope, nope, nope, he wanted absolutely no part in this. Time to go.’

Reaction

Finally, reaction. A character might go to the sink to run their hand under cool water, enact their dastardly plan, or in Sam’s case: ‘Sam grabbed his wallet and bolted for the door.’

Now that we’ve filled in the steps of our MRU, it reads like this:

The big drunk on the left took a swing at Sam’s head.
Sam ducked. Hell, that idiot tried to hit him!
The bar erupted into chaos. A woman with a full sleeve of tattoos swung a chair at another patron’s head. Nope, nope, nope, he wanted absolutely no part in this. Time to go. Sam grabbed his wallet and bolted for the door.

While not the most sparkling recount of a bar fight, it illustrates how the logical sequence grounds us in the scene alongside the character. I’m convinced that playing fast and loose with logical sequencing forces the reader to concentrate harder in order to understand what’s going on. This concentration slows the reading pace and distances the reader from the narrative because they’re working so hard to block the scene in their head. In the same way head hopping, filter words, and dense infodumps can pull the reader out of the story, so too can broken logic sequences in action scenes.

Check this out:

The big drunk on the left took a swing at Sam’s head.
Hell, that idiot tried to hit him! Sam ducked.
Nope, nope, nope, he wanted absolutely no part in this. Time to go. The bar erupted into chaos. A woman with a full sleeve of tattoos swung a chair at another patron’s head. Sam grabbed his wallet and bolted for the door.

I’ll allow that part of the reason this excerpt sounds ‘off’ is because of changes in the rhythm of the prose. That said, it also doesn’t work as well from a logical perspective. In my opinion, it requires greater concentration to follow the action, Sam’s surroundings, and Sam’s decision-making process. In other words, it asks the reader to do more work.

Keeping MRUs in mind while writing takes that burden off of readers’ shoulders.

The only rule is: There are no rules

I’m not a fan of prescriptive writing rules, so I’ll add this caveat: prose is complicated, MRUs aren’t infallible, and rules can all be broken. The most important thing is that the writing works. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

MRUs will get more complicated with interrupting action that leaves the POV character no time for processing. You can manipulate this idea to give the illusion of a fast-paced, chaotic battle. On the flip side, taking more time to go through the steps in completion could work well for a high-stakes poker game or a sex scene. MRUs can and should be tweaked and refined to suit your story.

While I’m never a proponent of literal faithfulness to any writing rule, MRUs are a great template to have in your writing toolbox. Keep them in mind while you write your next action scene (or action scene, wink wink) and see if they help you better organize your writing. They might identify areas were you tend to skip steps or get ideas out of order. At the very least, they can serve as a post-drafting diagnostic to help you figure out why your pacing is rushing or dragging.

For my part, MRUs taught me how infrequently I had characters internalize during a fight. When I did include internalization, I used to put a paragraph of it between action fragments. These chonks of poorly integrated thought plummeted my tension and slowed my pacing. Figuring out how to integrate internalization in snappy action sequences was a breakthrough moment for me; hopefully you’ll learn something useful, too!

(Even if that useful thing is that you’re already doing it right ;)).

And remember, MRUs are one tool among many for great writing. If they don’t work for you, that’s okay, too.

Let’s talk MRUs in the comments!

Have you ever used MRUs? Do you like them? Dislike them?
If you haven’t, how do you structure your action scenes?
Do you have any tips or questions for fellow writers? Let us know in the comments!

Enjoying TheAuthorShip? Support the blog on Patreon!

Whiteboard Scenes

February 4, 2022 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

Whiteboard scenes (also occasionally called ‘gather the troops’ scenes) bring characters together to discuss a plan or strategy. They typically precede a major action sequence and provide context, clarify logical flow, and raise the stakes of the action to follow.

A well-written whiteboard scene is a blueprint the reader can follow through the action sequence, allowing them to digest a rapidly evolving series of events alongside the character without confusion.

But not all action sequences need a whiteboard scene to precede them.

Man in front of whiteboard with lots of papers and lines, gesturing wildly.

When I need whiteboards scenes… and when I don’t

When I was a new writer, I overused whiteboard scenes to a fault. For the most part, I was able to identify places where they were absolutely necessary: before battles or climactic fights during which I couldn’t afford to slow down to give the reader contextual explanations. They helped me craft a blueprint for the reader to follow so they could know, at all times, whether the protagonist was winning or losing their fight.

Because of my association between whiteboard scenes and fight/confrontation scenes, however, I started using them everywhere. Whenever a character prepared for a major battle—whether literal or metaphorical—I’d have them plan their every move beforehand. This was a mistake. I ended up with whiteboard scenes for everything from council meetings, to interrogations, to epic battles.

In some cases, my readers ended up slogging through the same scene twice: once, imagined in my character’s head, and a second time, acted out in ‘real life’.

Over time, I came to realize that the nature of the action determines whether I need a whiteboard scene.

The questions I ask myself before putting in a whiteboard scene are:

How much contextual knowledge of the plan does the reader need in order to understand what happens in the action scene?
Is the action scene so fast-paced that I can’t work in the steps of the plan throughout that scene without ruining the tension and pacing?
Does the plan fail?

If I can answer yes to any of those questions, I need to include a whiteboard scene.

What a good whiteboard scene should achieve

A well-written whiteboard scene provides a blueprint for the coming action, one the reader can use as reference when the fists start flying. Here’s a checklist for all of the components I try to include in my whiteboard scenes and why they’re so important.

Whiteboard scenes should:

Clarify action with logic

Use whiteboard scenes to explore the internal motivations of your characters. What do they seek to gain from the action scene? Is it a heist scene where they’re stealing a precious artifact? A fact-finding mission where they’re extracting a file folder from a mad scientist’s office? A battle they need to win to stave off the legions of the damned?

Why are they getting themselves into this situation—and why is action the best option?

Why is victory important to them, and what do they hope to achieve at the end of the scene?

By answering these questions, we identify our protagonist’s direction and purpose, which gives the reader a goal to keep their eye on throughout the action sequence. Moreover, it ties the internal character arc to the external, demonstrating how the character believes winning will get them what they think they need to solve their larger, story-wide problem.

Without clarifying logic, the action sequence loses its meaning.

Set the stakes

Setting the stakes is the partner to clarifying logic. Here, we identify what the protagonist loses if they fail. What will happen to them and their team? What’s the worst-case scenario? Humiliation? Imprisonment? Death?

This part of the whiteboard scene can also introduce goals that raise the stakes. Does the rollerdome team need to score a certain number of points to make it to the finals? Is the SWAT team competing with a ticking clock? Does the defense of the Great Keep need to hold out against zombies until sunrise? Whatever the case, adding a timeline or metric for success—or failure—will further add context to the action sequence.

Identify obstacles

We can further raise tension by identifying the challenges and difficulties the protagonist expects to encounter during the action sequence. Named challenges make it clear to the reader how much the protagonist must risk in order to get their reward. Moreover, these challenges, laid out in sequence, provide the heart of the action sequence’s blueprint.

By detailing challenges, we tell the reader what to expect throughout the action sequence. This lays out the path the protagonist plans to take through the sequence and why they believe it will result in success.

That way, when unforeseen obstacles pop up, the reader is as surprised as the character—and the reader understands the possible repercussions of these unforeseen obstacles without the need for spur-of-the-moment explanation.

Without a whiteboard scene detailing expected challenges, the unforeseen would be neither tense nor surprising, because when everything in a scene is a surprise, nothing is.

By clarifying logic, stakes, and obstacles, we build solid whiteboard scenes with which to springboard our protagonists into the heart of the action.

But wait! There’s more:

The plan must go awry

If I were to distill the importance of the whiteboard scene into a single sentence, I’d say this:

Whiteboard scenes help reader experience dread and panic alongside the protagonist when the action sequence invariably goes sideways.

In other words, a good whiteboard scene sets up a twist—one that results in the character failing to meet their goal.

Whether big or small, something must happen during the action sequence to set back your protagonist. On a large scale, this might mean losing a crucial battle. On a smaller scale, your protagonist might find the artifact they were searching for only to realize the artifact isn’t what they need to break their curse. In the middle of those two extremes is the pyrrhic victory; your protagonist gets what they wanted, but the cost is so great their win becomes a loss.

Without the blueprint provided by a well-crafted whiteboard scene, these twists lose their meaning and fail to elicit a strong emotional response from a reader.

Though whiteboard scenes aren’t always necessary, they’re a crucial tool in every writer’s toolbox. Whiteboard scenes provide grounding logic for busy action scenes, raising the stakes and giving the reader a guideline through which they can experience the same tension, surprise, and dread as the protagonist when things inevitably go awry.

Let’s talk whiteboard scenes in the comments!

Do you include whiteboard scenes in your own writing?
How do you know when and where to add them?
Do you have any other tips for crafting whiteboard scenes? Let me know in the comments!

Enjoying TheAuthorShip? Support the blog on Patreon!

Said-bookisms are crutches…right?

December 22, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

“I just read an article about writing dialogue and it said the only tags you should use should be said, replied, or asked. Anything else makes you look like an amateur. Do you agree with this?”

Pause.

Rewind.

There are two vitally important things we should recognize when reading a question like this on the bird app:

By virtue of being on the bird app, the question is snappy to the point it loses its utility. No, of course an author won’t look like an amateur for using a single ‘shouted’ tag in an 80k novel.
Always/never writing advice is reductive to the point of absurdity.

So, do I ‘agree with this’ statement? Yes. But also no.

Let me explain.

What are said-bookisms?

Said-bookisms are dialogue tags that identify the speaker and, usually, how the speaker delivers their line. Compare this with standard dialogue tags, which exist only to clarify the identity of the speaker.

To define said-bookisms, however, it’s easier to list what they’re not. While there’s some debate about whether only ‘said’ is an acceptable tag, I think the following three tags fall outside the said-bookism category:

said + asked + replied

In other words, said-bookisms are alternatives to the three most common dialogue tags, ‘said’ in particular. Writers often feel pressure to write anything other than said, either because ‘said’ becomes repetitive in the text, or because they’ve made the rounds on writers’ blogs and read somewhere the ‘said is dead’. Thus, they reach for more interesting alternatives to avoid using the same tag over, and over, and over again.

Here are some common examples of said-bookisms:

100 Colorful Words to use in place of "said". The chart includes words such as: advised, agreed, bragged, bawled, denied, fretted, barked, hissed, muttered, lied, and wondered.

What’s wrong with said-bookisms?

Many said-bookisms are considered a type of purple prose. When overused, they describe the stage directions in our writing with too much detail or melodrama. Writers who hear that ‘said is dead’ or fear they’re overusing ‘said’ as a dialogue tag tend to lean too much on said-bookisms as a solution. But the truth is, said bookisms don’t solve our dialogue tagging problems. They create different problems.

Let me first add a caveat:

There will be times when a writer will, consciously and intentionally, choose a said-bookism for a particular line of dialogue. This is fine. As with all things, it’s the overuse of said-bookisms that weakens our writing. Too many, and our readers focus more on our tags than our dialogue.

“Said-bookisms tell the reader it’s vital they pay attention to how lines of dialogue are delivered—and thus, their inclusion can pull the reader out of the story.”

Said-bookisms distract and detract from the prose.

More often than not, said-bookisms detract from the prose instead of adding to it. Words like ‘said/asked/replied’ are invisible cues—they tell the reader who spoke and help the reader keep track of what’s going on without intruding into the story. Said-bookisms, on the other hand, draw the reader’s attention to the author’s word choice. They tell the reader it’s vital they pay attention to how lines of dialogue are delivered—and thus, their inclusion can pull the reader out of the story.

Said-bookisms will always catch a reader’s eye. Thus, their overuse breaks immersion—the ultimate kiss of death for a writer.

But wait, doesn’t using said, said, said break immersion, too?

It can.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Then what did you mean?” he asked.
“Now you’re being a jerk. You never trust me,” she said.
“I never trust you? Maybe because you always lie to me,” he said.

^That is objectively terrible dialogue. But the overuse of ‘said’ isn’t the disease; the structure of the dialogue itself is. Changing out ‘said’ for less repetitive words doesn’t cure a structural issue. Instead, it adds a second problem into the mix.

“That’s not what I meant!” she exclaimed.
“Oh yeah? Then what did you mean?” he demanded.
“Now you’re being a jerk. You never trust me,” she cried.
“I never trust you? Maybe because you always lie to me,” he hissed.

While there’s more visual interest to these lines and said-bookisms do give the reader cues re: tone and delivery, this is the equivalent of slapping a colorful band-aid on a gaping flesh wound. It’s distracting, but it won’t stop the bleeding.

If ‘said’ feels dead in our prose, it’s because our prose is the problem.

So when are said-bookisms appropriate?

There are going to be times when we as writers really want to use “shouted/growled/hissed” for stylistic purposes. How do we know when leaning on said-bookisms is appropriate? First, let’s get on the same page by identifying scenarios in which a said-bookism is almost always a poor choice.

The image reads: Ron ejaculated loudly. "Ron!" Hermione moaned.

Need I say more?

Look, I’m aware that most writers aren’t quite so egregious offenders and stick with words like “commanded, whispered, spat”. (Most writers also aren’t TERFs who weaponize their massive platforms to further their bigoted ends, either). That said, these two lines of dialogue do a fine job of showing us several Nos of said-bookism use.

For me, inappropriate said-bookism use falls into one of four categories:

The thesaurus

Why use a fancy synonym (ejaculated) when a much simpler one would do? Whenever we’re tempted to pick up a thesaurus for a better way to say ‘said/asked/replied’, we ought to ask ourselves why.

Do we feel the need to Elevate Our Prose? This isn’t the way to do it—not when the end result is confusing, or when the full meaning of the word doesn’t quite fit the situation. Worse still, nothing pulls the reader out of the narrative quite like ‘ejaculated’.

Are we concerned about overusing simpler dialogue tags? Remember, dialogue problems require structural solutions (we’ll get to them)—not a double-down with an out-there tag.

Adverbial tags

JKR used an adverbial tag with “ejaculated loudly,” which… no.

But let’s say she didn’t reach for the thesaurus and used a much more reasonable adverbial tag like “said loudly.” Why not show the reader how the line is delivered instead of telling them? Ron can slam a door, pound his fist on the table, stand bolt upright with jaw agape.

While I don’t think we should strike all adverbs from our writing, their use should raise a yellow flag for our editorial brains. Did we use the adverb where a stronger verb would do? If so, let’s make the switch.

Just… don’t switch it to ‘ejaculate,’ please.

That word. It does not mean what you think it means.

Here’s the thing about said-bookisms: verbs tend to have secondary meanings or colloquial usage that will confuse readers.

“Ron,” Hermione moaned.

…interesting choice.

As readers, we logically know JKR meant ‘complained,’ which she’d use far more commonly than an American English speaker. That said, words like moan, groan, and ejaculate have unintended consequences when used for dialogue tags. Unless the situation and delivery are ultra-clear, they do nothing but muddy our prose.

Remember: a dialogue tag’s primary purpose is to add clarity. Some said-bookisms do anything but.

How is that even possible?

One of the biggest editorial complaints about said-bookisms lies in their physical impossibility. This includes common tags like ‘wept, fumed, smiled’ and more inventive ones like ‘husked’.

What’s wrong with those?

How do you weep words? How do you fume them? What is this, a séance?

You can’t smile words, either, though you can smile while speaking. And holy wow, don’t get me started on husked. What are we, shucking corn for the clam bake? No.

If our characters perform these actions while speaking, that’s fine. Including them in our prose is great, even! But we must do so with action tags, not dialogue tags. An example:

No

“You look more and more like your mother every day,” her father smiled.

Yes

“You look more and more like your mother every day.” Her father smiled.
“You look more and more like your mother every day,” her father said, smiling.

See the difference? Remember: a dialogue tag’s purpose is to clarify the speaker—not to tell the reader what the speaker is doing while delivering that line of dialogue. Those tags must be kept separate.

Despite this, the ‘said-is-dead’ community lives on.

At this point, I hope we’ve established that new writers ought to treat said-bookisms like adverbs. They’re crutch words that prevent us from developing our prose to a higher level, which is why the writing community cautions beginners to avoid them until they’re more comfortable tagging dialogue.

I’ve also seen editors bat statistics around and claim said-bookisms and other non-standard dialogue tags should account for less than 20% of all tags. (Read: tags, not dialogue as a whole.) Granted, if you quote that rule of thumb on the internet, someone will hop into your mentions to inform you that “YOU MUST HATE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THEN” to which I’d like to make the following point:

Literary conventions change with time. This is one of the conventions that has changed. There are many incredible classics that wouldn’t be published today because of stylistic change over time, and that’s okay. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. Time to move on.

Authors of the past, present, and future can, have, and will overuse said-bookisms. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

While preparing to write this blog post, I also encountered a twitter comment thread that started: “BUT MY SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER SAID—”

Yes, I’m sure their sixth-grade teacher did. But their teacher aimed to help a middle-schooler write within the conventions of the genre and age category they read at the time. Middle Grade, YA, and Adult fiction all have different stylistic standards. Ditto Romance and Literary Fiction. Said-bookisms are way, way more tolerated in MG than Adult SFF. As writers, we must know our audience.

My least-favorite argument in favor of said-bookism usage is: “BUT I JUST READ AN ADULT ROMANCE ON AMAZON LAST YEAR THAT—”

Was the book self-published, or trad-published?

I’m a banner-waving, card-carrying fan of self-publishing, but let’s not call a spade anything but a spade: self-publishing is expensive, and many authors skip stages of editing that trad-published books always go through. Sometimes, skipping editing comes around to bite them—but not always. An author who hits the market with a fabulous idea at just the right time can do well in self-publishing without professional copy or line editing.

Some authors are pretty darn good at proofing their own work, so this doesn’t necessarily mean the aforementioned Adult Romance was littered with errors. However, I think it’s safe to say that said-bookisms are only ‘making a stylistic comeback’ in spheres where books aren’t required to go through rigorous rounds of edits before showing up for public consumption.

“There are few hard-and-fast rules in tagging dialogue, and even fewer ‘this always works’ or ‘this never works’.”

Alternatives to said-bookisms

Whenever a segment of dialogue gives me trouble, I break down my potential ‘fixes’ into four different options. These are structural options at their heart, and being able to flip between them with facility gives dialogue the depth, breadth, and contributes to the veneer of realism we chase with our writing.

Why do I think in terms of structural options instead of rules? As I mentioned earlier in this post, there are few hard-and-fast rules in tagging dialogue, and even fewer “this always works” or “this never works”.

(Aside from ‘ejaculate’. For the love of god, let’s stop using ‘ejaculate’.)

Redundant tags and crutch words in dialogue are structural issues—thus, I try to think in terms of structural solutions when I’m writing. The standard advice when issues crop up is to leave dialogue untagged. Sometimes, simplicity is the way to go! Yet for me, a white-room-syndrome writer, untagged dialogue isn’t always the answer.

Let’s say our character has stormed across the room, positively seething, to ask the POV character, “did you just call me a liar?”

Here are four ways to structure this line of dialogue:

“Did you just call me a liar?”
- No tag. Context already implies the identity of the speaker.
“Did you just call me a liar?” he asked.
- Simple dialogue tag identifies the speaker.
“Did you just call me a liar?” he demanded.
- Said-bookism, but not an outlandish one. It identifies the speaker and how the line was delivered.
A vein pulsed in his temple. “Did you just call me a liar?”
- Action tag replaces a dialogue tag to identify the speaker, provide information on the delivery of the line, and give a visual cue.

Depending on the lines preceding and following the dialogue, some of these options are better than others. In this case, I’d actually say the standard dialogue tag of ‘asked’ is the weakest given the character’s emotional state. Now, if he were miffed rather than truly raging, ‘asked’ would work better than ‘demanded’. In this case, however, ‘demanded’ is fine—providing said-bookisms aren’t overpowering the rest of the scene.

The other options—no tag, action tag—are also strong candidates. Which of the four we pick, however, is all about context. What does the POV character see? What is the speaking character trying to express? What do we want to communicate to the reader? What do we absolutely need to communicate to the reader?

Depending on the beats surrounding the dialogue, the action tag might prove unnecessary. Or, perhaps there aren’t enough action tags/descriptions in the surrounding lines, and “A vein pulsed in his temple” brings visual interest to an otherwise sparse scene. Here lies the structural fix to the repetitive use of said—and a far more nuanced one than simply replacing ‘said’ with more colorful verbs, or striking every single said-bookism from our writing.

Said is not dead

In conclusion, no, said isn’t dead. Yet deviating from the standard tags ‘said, asked, replied’ won’t necessarily stamp our work as amateur. As with all things fiction writing, balance is paramount.

Do our word choices suit the needs of the story? That is the question we must ask when tagging our dialogue. Anything else simply feeds into a sensationalist social media cycle meant not to stimulate nuanced discussion, but to garner likes and retweets.

How do you tag your dialogue? Do you think ‘said is dead’? Let me know in the comments!

Epithets in Fiction

July 3, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 1 Comment

Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve casually worked on a challenge called 100daysofwriting, posted daily by @the-wip-project on Tumblr. I don’t do the challenge daily–I dip in and out, occasionally answering prompts on my Pillowfort account–but one of their questions really got me.

What’s a pet peeve you have, that you try to do differently in your own work?

Um. EPITHETS, folks. Epithets.

There are loads of things I focus on when I’m writing, and to be fair, this doesn’t quite answer the question properly (because I no longer have to focus keeping epithets out of my writing, though I did at one time). But a “pet peeve” is by definition a small thing, not a big one, so I don’t want to throw down one of my Top Three like 1) pacing or 2) overwriting or 3) believable ethical conflicts.

No. It’s the epithets for me today.

Whatever kind of fiction you write, if you’ve ever ended up with two same-gendered characters in the same room and struggled to figure out how to let the reader know who you’re referring to every time you write ‘she said,’ this one’s for you.

Wait, so what are epithets?

For anyone unaware of what I mean when I say epithets: I mean the title / descriptor by which a character is known — one that doesn’t involve their name, often preceded by the article “the”.

ie: “the soldier” / “the young man” / “the doctor” / “the tall girl”

Obviously, there are characters who will only go by epithets, and that’s okay in certain circumstances, like when the POV character doesn’t know their name, or wouldn’t feel comfortable calling them by their name. This is often the case with royalty, doctors, people of high rank… epithets are super useful when they cue the reader into a power imbalance or other unique interpersonal dynamic.

Why the hate on epithets, then?

Because the place epithets are most commonly BUT SHOULD NEVER be used…

…is to escape the Gay Pronoun Problem.

Have two dudes in a scene together? Don’t want to call them by their given names (let’s say Dan and Josh) for 2k straight words? “He” isn’t clear enough because both of them ID as male? Just refer to them by other attributes! Dan is “the blonde,” “the wizard,” “the taller man,” and Josh is “the brunette,” “the soldier,” “the stocky man.”

What could go wrong?

What goes wrong is this: at no point in your life have you ever thought of one of your friends as “the stocky man” in your head, nor would you ever narrate a conversation with one of your friends that way.

So if we’re in Josh’s POV and all of Dan’s dialogue is tagged ‘said the blonde’ and ‘the wizard replied’ and ‘the taller man shouted’… instead of telling me something important about the relationship dynamic between Josh and Dan, the narrative does the exact opposite. It tells me Josh is so unfamiliar with Dan that he won’t refer to Dan by either his 1) given name or 2) his simple pronoun. Which is untrue, out of character, and (honestly?) weird.

Epithets break immersion and do the story a disservice.

And don’t even get me started on when they’re used in sex scenes.

Solving the Gay Pronoun Problem

There are a few technical solutions to the GPP. Clarity of prose is a craft-level skill, which is why I suspect epithets are a crutch used primarily by new writers (I certainly used them when I first started writing!). This kind of clarity has also become a subconscious habit in the intervening years. That said, I do have a handful of tips for making it clear who we’re writing about when there are two (or more) same-gender characters in a scene.

(These tips should also be helpful when writing characters who use they/them pronouns, which can get weedy in certain narrative contexts.)

I continue using their name or pronoun, even though I’ve been using it a lot.

Readers ignore names and pronouns (especially pronouns) more than you’d think. Unless the rhythm of the sentence results in a heavy prose echo, “he/she/they” is an invisible word, much the way “said” is when tagging dialogue.

If there’s a prose echo, I either rephrase the sentence, or delete it entirely. (I’m a stubborn overwriter, but years of beating my head against narrative walls has eventually helped me realize that, when something is impossible to phrase without sounding terrible, it usually means I don’t need to keep it in the story.)

I use paragraph breaks when I switch the focus to a different character.

In one paragraph, I’m talking about what Josh is thinking. Josh, therefore, is the subject of that paragraph, and “he” will refer to Josh. When I switch from internalizing to externalizing, and Josh starts describing what Dan is doing, I’ll use a paragraph break to make it clear that “he” could now refer to a different character in the room.

There’s only one ‘he’ in a scene.

Especially when two same-gender characters are interacting (ie: the scenario that puts the Gay in the Gay Pronoun Problem), I’ll call the POV character by their pronoun and the other character by their name. Obviously this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. It’s not foolproof, and I don’t stick to it the whole time, but it does help the reader figure out who’s talking (or doing) by associating a shared pronoun with a single character.

tldr:

Epithets are for tombstones. Let’s keep it that way.

Looking for more content? Find me on Patreon!

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Devil’s in the Detail

June 3, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

Welcome back to my series on Worldbuilder’s Disease! If you’re looking for the other parts in the series, you can check out the first, second, third, or fourth posts right here on the AuthorShip.

Part five is all about how to incorporate worldbuilding details to enhance (rather than detract from!) our stories. Those of us with Worldbuilder’s Disease have often spent long, long tracts of time dreaming up everything about our world. Some of us have story bibles with thousands of words inside. The hardest thing for us to remember when getting started on the actual writing, however, is that these details don’t tell a story in and of themselves.

Worldbuilding =/= plot:

Setting isn’t plot. Or: epic worldbuilding does not a story make.

Setting doesn’t drive plot, either. Setting drives character, which drives plot. Our world isn’t the main attraction. Our characters are.

When readers open our books, they don’t have a reason to care about the mountain range we’ve built, or how that range is actually the spine of an ancient sleeping dragon.

I mean, that’s a super cool detail, but how does it impact the characters?

Beware irrelevant worldbuilding details

If the sleeping mountain dragon doesn’t impact the plot, but is a cool idea we really want to mention in-story, a little yellow flag should wave somewhere in the back of our minds. While there is wiggle room for irrelevant, but cool in SFF, only so many of these details can make it onto the page before we stop enriching our setting and start detracting from our story.

The most important rule of irrelevant-but-cool is:

The more we describe something on-page, the more readers will think it’s an important part of our plot. Over-described but irrelevant details will ultimately frustrate our readers. They spend time learning and conceptualizing these details, expecting them to connect first to our characters, and then to the plot. If we never deliver on those connections, they’ll begin to lose faith in our ability as storytellers. This could have two possible outcomes:

Our readers succumb to information overload

Information overload—or an ultra-steep learning curve—is a common issue for SFF writers (and one I’m constantly grappling with, myself). Adding in too many irrelevant details will make it difficult for the reader to keep track of what’s going on. Frustrated, they may simply shut the book and walk away before reaching the “good parts”. And that’s the worst case scenario for a writer, isn’t it?

Our readers can’t see the forest for the trees

Even if readers stick with us through information overload, scatter-shotting our description across too many irrelevant details will make it hard for them to hold onto all of that information. At that point, they’ll start missing out on important details, too.

Failing to draw the reader’s eye to the plot-important worldbuilding details will create a foreshadowing problem. When the plot-twist comes, it will fail to hit, because we gave the reader too much irrelevant information for them to follow the main track of the plot.

How do we avoid these unfortunate outcomes? By limiting the number of irrelevant-but-cool details, and limiting the amount of time we spend describing those details. We ought to use our narrative space to draw the reader’s eye to the most important parts of our story: bits and pieces that will become increasingly relevant as time goes by.

So—how do we draw the reader’s eye to important worldbuilding details?

When worldbuilding impacts character

Let’s return to the example of the sleeping mountain dragon. Let’s say this mountain dragon will directly impact the protagonist—it’ll wake up and torch the protagonist’s village, killing most of their loved ones, and driving them on a vengeance quest.

Now we’re talking.

This is a major story event in which a worldbuilding/setting detail drives the character, which in turn drives the plot. This major story event will require setup/foreshadowing, but most of the specifics (where did the mountain dragon come from? Why did it come back to life now?) will only interest the reader after the protagonist’s village burns.

Thus, we must balance the worldbuilding details and how we distribute them to the reader. A handful of mentions of the mountain dragon range can come before the dragon returns to life. Think of these most important details as, again, the tip of our narrative iceberg. Everything under the surface can be discovered by the protagonist after the village burns, or, after the reader has skin in the game and wants to know more about the monster that killed our protagonist’s family.

To prologue, or not to prologue?

SFF writers often try to get around the infodump problem by including the history of the sleeping mountain dragon in a prologue. But prologues are an iffy choice.

While they often do an adequate job of foreshadowing and laying out the story’s main conflict, they also attach the reader to the wrong character—a character who is often long-dead by the time the real story starts. It shows too much detail. It crosses way past that iceberg boundary and explains history to the reader in a way that won’t matter to them until the protagonist’s town burns down, which doesn’t happen until chapter four.

The Great War that happened 1,000 years prior doesn’t matter until its legacy directly impacts our protagonist.

We must filter our details in order to expose what’s necessary, and use only the Necessary to motivate our characters and drive the current plot.

What are Necessary detals?

Worldbuilding is a bit like sending Indiana Jones into a booby-trapped ancient temple.

We understand what the ancient temple is. We have just enough backstory on the temple to know why Indy is going into it, and suspect that Bad Things Will Happen in the temple. What we don’t know is where all of the booby traps are, and what they’ll be like—until Indy trips over them.

In fact, none of those booby traps (read: worldbuilding details) are shown on-paper until Indy activates them.

If we were to write an Indiana Jones novel, we wouldn’t start the temple scene by writing “there’s a giant rolling ball, a pit of snakes, death knives, and poison spray between Indy and the Object He’s Looking For. There are also spiky gates, alligators, and a team of death-cult guards, but Indy won’t see any of those because he takes a different tunnel.”

For one thing, that’ll suck the tension right out of our story. For another, why does the reader care about the booby-traps Indy doesn’t encounter?

We find out about the booby-traps—aka, the worldbuilding details—because Indy sets them off, then has to wrangle his way out of them.

That’s what good worldbuilding looks like. We may have a story bible full of backstory, history, and magic, but the reader ought to only see what the protagonist steps on. Doing this creates the illusion, the knowledge, that we’re standing on the tip of a very large iceberg. We don’t need to see the rest of the iceberg to believe it’s there.

It also lets us reveal relevant details as they come up instead of throwing them at the reader all at once and hoping some of it sticks.

But how do we incorporate major worldbuilding details without infodumping?

Let’s return (again) to the dragon-mountain-range detail.

There are loads of plausible ways this sleeping dragon mountain range could impact our characters, and therefore impact our plot—and it doesn’t have to be the most dramatic (dragon burns the town down). I’ve picked the three most likely off the top of my head—three different reasons we decide the mountain range must be mentioned in-story:

We’ve already mentioned this one: the ancient sleeping mountain dragon is a legend, and one day this mountain dragon is going to awake.

In this case, we need to foreshadow that the dragon will awake. In order to decide how to spread our worldbuilding details, this is the question we must ask ourselves: prior to the dragon awakening, what does the reader need to understand?

There is a legend that the mountain range overlooking the village is actually a sleeping dragon.
At some indeterminate time in the past, that dragon rained fiery terror over the land.
People may or may not believe in and fear this legend.
In the days/weeks leading up to the dragon awakening, things aren’t quite right in the surrounding lands.

How can we expose those worldbuilding details without infodumping?

The protagonist or one of their relatives can tell a younger sibling to behave, or the mountain dragon will come to eat them.
A religious service could give a sacrifice to the sleeping dragon to appease it and keep it from raining fiery terror upon the land.
An older sibling looks at the dragon-shaped mountain range, scoffs, and says “that doesn’t even look like a dragon, that’s stupid”, but the protagonist feels icky about talking smack about the dragon.
Animals have started acting strange. There are sightings of dark things in the forests. Smoke has begun to rise from the place where the dragon’s nostrils would be.

The above examples are all ways that the dragon slowly coming back to life can be foreshadowed. Worldbuilding details are peeled away piece-by-piece in a way that compels and interests the reader, because these worldbuilding details are viewed through the protagonist’s eyes and delivered in a way that impacts the character personally.

These details also give just enough context that when the protagonist wakes in the middle of the night to screaming and their village lighting on fire, the reader knows immediately what happened. The reader might not understand why the dragon awoke, what the dragon wants, or how the protagonist will defeat it—and that’s okay. But we’ve drip-fed the reader enough information that they understand the protagonist’s terror and fear when they wake to an ancient mountain dragon’s attack.

We’ve walked the delicate balance between giving away too much information (thus boring and overwhelming the reader) and not giving away enough information (thus preventing the reader from understanding the context and stakes).

The ancient sleeping mountain dragon will never awake, but the range itself is a hint that dragons exist in this world.

In this case, the mountain range itself is foreshadowing for a plot-relevant event. Perhaps, in this case, the protagonist is fated to become a great dragon rider.

This is foreshadowing of a different kind, but the mechanics of foreshadowing would be very similar. This mountain is very important, these dragons are important, and they’ll be mentioned in passing multiple times.

Here, the mountain itself is the foreshadowing. We’re using the mountain to:

Put the idea of dragons in front of the reader.
Transmit lore about dragons or dragon riders.
Foreshadow that something big is about to happen to the protagonist.

How can we do that without infodumping?

The protagonist’s village celebrates a holiday honoring the Dragon Mother—the mountain from which all dragons were born.
The protagonist sneaks away from the village to get a closer look at the mountain and has a close encounter with a baby dragon.
The protagonist sees or senses something about the mountain that none of the other villagers can perceive.

These examples don’t foreshadow that the mountain itself is about to come back to life, but can transmit information about the world and foreshadow that something dragon-related is about to happen to the protagonist—which is why we’d include the detail of the dragon mountain in the first place. In this scenario, the dragon mountain drives the characters—to celebrate, to sneak away from the village, to question their reality. Thus, setting drives character, which drives plot.

The ancient sleeping mountain dragon will never awake, and dragons aren’t real, but the characters in this story superstitiously (or religiously) believe in dragons

This could be plot-relevant—especially if these belief systems get called into question, or cause conflict further on in the story. Why might we include mention of such a belief system?

To enrich our world by showing characters with a diversity of religious beliefs.
To create a storytelling tradition that allows characters to orally pass on pieces of their history and culture to young members (and thus, the reader).
To build a cultural or ideological conflict between characters.

And how might we show this diversity of belief?

The most important question we need to ask ourselves: does this diversity of belief directly impact the plot, or is it meant only to flesh out our setting and characters?

If the first is true, we’ll spend far more time ensuring our readers have an intimate understanding of how this belief system works—because knowledge of the system will help them understand the tension and stakes in future religious conflict. If the second is true, explanation becomes less important than passing description to build a vivid setting.

For example, if the practice of dragon-worship is plot relevant, we could explore it by:

Showing a religious ceremony.
Getting a window into our character’s religious life or holy studies.
Show an argument between our protagonist and someone with different beliefs.
Show a greater conflict that has taken on sociopolitical dimensions (ie: the hanging of a heretic in the square, discrimination against a minority population, etc.).

A plot-relevant practice of dragon worship would also touch on some of the following examples, which will enrich our setting and worldbuilding to make it feel real and unique. In other words, if dragon worship is plot relevant, we’ll use both types of examples, above and below. If it isn’t, we’d focus only on the examples below rather than the ones up ^there.

How to enrich our setting? (a handful of ideas)

Show a character praying.
Show how a character’s religion impacts their diet, clothing choice, and vocabulary.
Have the character interact with artwork or architecture reflective of society’s religious beliefs.
Show relics or items of worship in the character’s home.

Most importantly: we shouldn’t describe all of these at once. A world develops its richness when the reader experiences the character’s repeated interactions with their setting—not through hearing about these worldbuilding details as part of a long litany of descriptions in chapter one.

Remember Shroedinger’s Wyvern from previous posts? Readers will care about rituals of prayer, celebration, food, art, clothing, etc. inasmuch as they influence the daily life of our characters. Even if a protagonist’s religious beliefs don’t have much of a bearing upon our overall plot, they will show up as part of our character’s day-to-day life. Occasional mentions of time spent at prayer, in-universe swear words, or even introspective questioning of faith during difficult times are all ways for us to inject worldbuilding into our stories.

We can mention these setting-enriching details as our characters encounter them, but must resist the temptation to dump a page-long explanation of their religious beliefs when they first appear on the screen—an explanation that reads more like an encyclopedia entry than a story.

In conclusion

Those of us with worldbuilder’s disease have an incredibly broad and deep world to draw from as we write. The hardest thing for us, at a craft level, is editing—picking and choosing which details make it through to the page.

Our goal isn’t to shoehorn the entirety of our story bible into our narrative. Rather, our goal is to select which details to focus our readers’ attention upon in order to build the illusion of an immersive, real world.

This takes time (and practice!). It’s extremely rare to strike the right balance during the first draft. But in order to keep improving our craft, we must go through successive drafts with a critical eye and a creative mind, looking for ways to ground our worldbuilding details in the protagonist’s POV and show them to readers as part of an immersive setting—and not a laundry list of details they have no reason to care about.

Thanks for sticking through the whole of the series, friends! If you’re looking for more posts where I write about writing, you can check out the Craft of Writing category in the sidebar, or follow me on Patreon where I’ve begun the #100daysofwriting challenge. You can find all of those challenge posts right here.

Read more on Patreon! Find full novels, flash fiction, merch, artwork, livestreams, extended posts, and more by clicking this image or going to patreon.com/ceemtaylor .

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Infodumps

May 21, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor Leave a Comment

Welcome back to my series on Worldbuilder’s Disease! If you’re looking for the other parts in the series, you can check out the first, second, or third posts right here on the AuthorShip.

Part four is all about What Comes Next after we’ve pushed past Worldbuilder’s Disease and gotten to drafting. Science Fiction & Fantasy writers with WBD face a particular set of problems when we finally put pen to paper. This post is dedicated to looking out for and troubleshooting those issues as they arise.

Most of our worldbuilding-related drafting problems can be boiled down to a single root cause:

We worldbuilders love our infodumps.

We’ve spent ages building a lush, interesting world. Now we want to show the whole thing to readers, and wow is it hard to resist the impulse to throw the story bible at their heads.

In my experience, there are two kind of infodumps:

The irrelevant exposition and backstory dump
The very-important-information drop that still somehow manages to be boring

And they’re often presented in one of several ways:

A fourth-wall breaking chunk of text from the narrator describing a thousand years of history
A tremendously boring story or lecture from a mentor or authority figure
Awkward “as-you-know” dialogue

Look, getting this information on the page is difficult—and ensuring readers have enough context to understand the story is critical, so SFF writers tend to walk a thin line between too-much and too-little exposition. I struggle to find that balance when writing my early chapters. It’s tempting to sneak in a paragraph here, a lecture there, an occasional “as-you-know”. But it helps me to remember that I take an enormous risk every time I incorporate worldbuilding information using any of the aforementioned techniques. A poorly-hidden infodump is one of writing’s cardinal sins. Why?

Because infodumps break immersion for the reader.

Thus, our goal is to figure out a crafty way of incorporating worldbuilding information on a need-to-know basis that doesn’t involve clobbering the reader with our story bible.

Why infodumping isn’t the answer

If this is the first time you’ve encountered this concept, lemme quickly get us all on the same page.

According to TvTropes:

“Infodumping is a type of exposition that is particularly long or wordy. Intensive infodumping about the world itself is most commonly used […] where the reader cannot necessarily make assumptions about the way the fictional universe works. […] most infodumps are obvious, intrusive, patronizing, and sometimes downright boring.”

In other words, this is not how to hook a reader.

This is hard to hear, because we think our worlds are amazing! Fascinating! And of course they are—otherwise we wouldn’t have put so much time and effort into building them. We know everything about these worlds and want to share them with our readers. So why aren’t readers interested?

Good in-story worldbuilding comes down to two major factors:

What we choose to share, and
How we choose to share it.

Get choosy with your worldbuilding integration

Here’s one of the most important worldbuilding lessons I’ve learned: readers tend to care only about the parts of our world that impact our characters.

The information in our story bible is irrelevant to the reader unless a character encounters it, or unless the reader believes that piece of information will soon become important to the story.

In other words: no one ever wants to sit through two pages of explanation about rainbow wyvern physiology… but readers are far more likely to tolerate a paragraph of it when the protagonist encounters a rainbow wyvern in the wild.

Think of it as Schroedinger’s Wyvern. The reader doesn’t care what exists inside the box until the character opens it.

Or, another silly metaphor:

If a bear is pooping in the woods and none of your characters are there to see it (and the bear poop has no bearing on the plot)…

The reader doesn’t need to know about the bear. If we’re getting choosy with worldbuilding integration, the bear won’t make the cut.

What does that mean for us?

What does Schroedinger’s Wyvern mean for us and our worldbuilding? Alas, it means that a heaping ton of it stays inside the box, only seeing the light of day in extras, deleted scenes, or companion books.

If readers don’t care as much about the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, then we can only (or mostly) show them what our characters encounter in-story. Characters may come across lore, wisdom, and history … but we need to use these bits and pieces of our story bibles sparingly, and only for the sake of advancing one of the Big Three: setting, character, or plot.

That’s not to say worldbuilding is unimportant. Fleshing out our worldbuilding is vital – it adds depth to our story, it makes drafting easier, it creates the toolkit we use to craft our arcs. But. Storytelling isn’t about finding a way to cram the entirety of our story bible into narrative form.

Think of it this way: if the world we’ve built in our heads is an iceberg, the tiny tip above water is all our readers ever see. That means most of the details we spent ages crafting will never make it out of our story notes. And that’s okay.

If we dream of being the next GRRM and having our readers keep wikis of our worlds—the iceberg in all its glory—we must first write a compelling story. We must fascinate our readers—enough so that they read our book and crave a look beneath the water’s surface.

Make no mistake: their curiosity comes not from the rainbow wyvern itself, but from the story we told with it. Readers want to see what lies beneath the surface because they sense there are more stories waiting to be told. They say, ‘hey, I heard the matriarch of the Blurgity line slayed a rainbow wyvern barehanded when she was fourteen—let’s have that story next, plz.’ They don’t say ‘hey, I just wanna know the name of every female heir of the Blurgity house for ish and giggles.’

(I mean, okay, maybe a few people do, but—they aren’t our majority audience.)

Most readers aren’t looking for facts.

They’re looking for more stories.

They’ll start sniffing around our world for more stories only when our primary plot and characters are so compelling that they, on good faith, assume everything else about our world must be that interesting, too.

But we can’t acquire this level of faith from our readers unless we tell a good story first—and alas, a good story isn’t an encyclopedia of the history of our world, no matter how cool it is.

It’s not just about what we share, but how we share it.

Let’s talk about guiding readers through our worlds—and the worldbuilding information they need to know in order for the story to work. For the rest of this post, we’ll look at what not to do, expanding on the worldbuilding pitfalls I listed in the intro. My next (and final, I promise) post in this series will break down tips on how to incorporate worldbuilding without infodumping.

This is by no means an exhaustive no-no list, but it should give us a good starting point for how our love of our rainbow wyverns could come around to bite us in the drafting phase.

A big fat caveat:

Sometimes, when we’re working on early drafts, the best (only?) way to get words on the page is to let it all hang out in an infodump to rival the Titanic AU fanfiction I wrote when I was ten years old. This is a totally fine and absolutely normal thing to do in our rough drafts.

We can throw all of that information at the paper to get it out of our systems. I do it every single time I start a new story! But if we’re going to infodump in a first draft, we must remember most of that information will be pruned out, rewritten, or rephrased during the editing process. Infodumping can be used as a crutch while drafting, but it ought never make it into the final manuscript.

Onward!

Here are a few examples of what not to do: ie: ways we might break reader immersion via infodumping when describing our rainbow wyverns:

By having the narrator explain everything about rainbow wyverns long before we encounter the first one on-page.

This tends to be a prologue or intro chapter problem. We, as authors, know the book will be about rainbow wyverns, so we want to give the reader full context on what wyverns are and how they came to be before the story even starts.

Problem? The story is what makes the reader care about the wyverns, not the other way around. A prologue or early-story infodump about wyvern history will make readers scratch their head the same way Bilbo Baggins’ 111^th birthday party made all of us headdesk repeatedly during our first reading of The Fellowship of the Ring.

They will look at the prologue and say “why do I care?”

That is the absolute last thing we want our readers to ask.

And yes, there are absolutely writers who are the exception to this rule. Fantasy published in Tolkien’s time was famous (infamous?) for it. Some of today’s writers manage to do it and yet still hold their readers’ attention. These writers are not the norm. Until we’ve honed our craft and built a devoted reader following, it’s best not to play fast and loose with infodumping, and structure our stories accordingly.

Video game infodumping, and/or a lecture from an authority figure.

Our protagonist has encountered their first rainbow wyvern in the wild! Big! Scary!

But instead of jumping into the fight, we end up with two pages of solid text in which the full history and physiology of wyverns gets dumped onto the page either by the narrator, or through the story/lecture of a mentor figure. Oop! This is like seeing a Pokemon pop out of the grass and, instead of getting straight to the fight, cutting to Professor Oak reading a super-detailed entry out of the Pokedex. Boring.

Again: there are ways to use the mentor/neophyte trope to get information across to both our POV characters and the reader—but the volume of information and when that information gets dispensed is vitally important to consider.

Information transfers like ^that will immensely slow our pacing. This might work well after the fight with the wyvern to allow the reader (and protagonist!) time to process and recover from what just happened. A lecture immediately prior to the fight, however, will trainwreck the pacing and tension we’ve tried so hard to ratchet up in the pages leading up to it. Readers are smart! If we drop enough contextual clues, they’ll be able to follow along with the fight, hovering at the edge of their seat, until the fight is done and a broader explanation of What The Heck That Colorful Dragon Thing Was surfaces.

The dreaded “as-you-know” dialogue.

Hear me out: this is the mansplaining of the fictional world.

In “as-you-know” dialogue, the POV character and at least one other character explain the history and physiology of rainbow wyverns through dialogue. This seems like an immersive way to get around the infodumping rule, but it’s a trap. Why?

Because “as-you-know” implies just that: one character is telling the other something they know the other character already understands. Imagine a bunch of knights standing around and mansplaining rainbow wyverns to one another—

“Well, Bob, as you know, the rainbow wyverns have a variety of scale colors.”

“Yes, Bill, and as you’ve experienced, their venom is highly toxic.”

People NEVER talk like this—unless, of course, they’re condescending jerks. It’s as obnoxious in fiction as it is in real life. Unless our characters are inveterate mansplainers, why would they tell one another things they already know?

Because the author is trying to find a way to convey information to the reader without using either of the two ^above methods of infodumping. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work either. It breaks 1) immersion, 2) characterization, and 3) maybe even the fourth wall. Why? Because our characters aren’t talking to each other—they’re talking to the reader.

This is eye-roll inducing. Don’t do it.

So how do we get important worldbuilding information across to the reader?

Join us next time for tips on how to properly incorporate worldbuilding details!

This post was all about what not to do when translating worldbuilding onto the page and why. Next week, we’ll look at:

How to tell when a worldbuilding tidbit should make it into the story, and
Examples of how to include that information based on why we want the reader to know it.

I look forward to seeing you there! Until then, you can check out my Morning Pages or, if you enjoyed the content, support the blog on ko-fi or find more of my writing Patreon. I’d appreciate it a great deal!