Tag Archive: Infodumping


Agents of SHIELD, the Cavalry, and Backstory

Filed under: Reviews, Writing Tips — 4 Comments
April 16, 2015

Agents of SHIELD has always been able to get me talking about writing. It’s nice that I still get that, and actual good TV now.

On the most recent episode, we finally find out why May is called “the Cavalry,” why the story is so garbled among SHIELD agents, and especially why May absolutely hates that term. As with many things in the show’s run, this didn’t need to wait so long. Half of the episodes between the premiere and the mid-season finale in December could have been cut or truncated. However, that doesn’t mean that the writers didn’t pick an excellent time to tell the story. That’s an important factor to consider when dishing out backstory.

Spoilers ahead. Continue reading →

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Addicted to Mystery

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July 18, 2014

I’m in Minnesota visiting Elizabeth and Nathan (yesterday was, incidentally, the half-anniversary of their wedding). We’ve been plotting and scheming, sometimes even about books. But our series isn’t the subject of this blog post, no. See, last night, we watched the Veronica Mars movie.  Continue reading →

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Don’t Dump

Filed under: Resources, Writing Tips — 4 Comments
March 26, 2014

One of the most common mistakes, even with professional storytellers, is to deliver a lot of exposition in a small space, or otherwise give “idiot lectures” where you have one character being a bit more dumb than usual simply so that a second character will have to explain something to him (and therefore to the audience). This is often called infodumping, and it’s often hard to avoid — but the best authors watch out for it and work around it.

Continue reading →

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Write or Wrong? Soulless, by Gail Carriger

Filed under: Characters, Wordsmithing, Worldbuilding, Writing Tips — Leave a comment
April 16, 2013

Four things you can learn about writing from Soulless:

  1. Regency/Victorian stylings. If you want the feel of 19th century England, it’s obvious where to go: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and other authors who lived in that period. Sometimes, though, it’s refreshing to look at someone taking that period and messing around with it, allowing you to see what’s essential and what isn’t. If inserting vampires, werewolves, and ghosts into everyday Victorian society isn’t “messing around with it,” I don’t know what is. 
  2. Sexual humor without vulgarity. It’s a fine line between joking about sex and being crude. There is a lot of sexual humor in this book, but it is funniest when couched in Victorian speech patterns and indirect phrasing. See what you find funniest, and ask yourself why.
  3. Floating perspective. There’s a reason why floating perspective is frowned on in modern fiction: it can get hard to keep track of which person you’re supposed to identify with. It works in Soulless mainly because the literature of the real-life period did it; but to make it work, you have to avoid getting too deep into one character’s perspective before shifting into another’s. Pay attention to where the POV shifts in the middle of a scene, and why Carriger keeps it from being jarring.
  4. Avoid infodumping. Read the first chapter and identify the information that is just placed there before it’s truly needed. Compare this to other parts of the book where information is not given so quickly. How would you rewrite the first chapter to give a steadier, more gentle flow for information? 
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