How to Avoid Info Dumping Your Way Through a First Draft: Journaling
Hey Story Crafters,
Info dumping is a danger all writers face while writing a story. Every story—regardless of genre—has some degree of world-building, and all characters have backstories that need to be developed.
But just because you, the writer, needs to know this information, doesn’t mean your readers do.
Info dumping can happen at any point throughout a story, though it tends to be concentrated at the beginning, when the setting and characters are introduced. After the setting and characters are established, info dumping may occur whenever new characters appear, when the main character travels to a new setting, or, in the case of sci-fi/fantasy stories, when a new form of technology or a new magical power is introduced.
We’ve all faced the temptation to info dump. Often, during a first draft, we allow ourselves to fall into that temptation, since we’re still piecing together all the world-building elements and character backstory details while also writing the story.
There’s nothing wrong with using the first draft of your writing project to info dump wherever and however you want. But if you want to try writing more efficiently during the first draft of your story, journaling all of your world-building and character backstories before you start writing can help you avoid the temptation to info dump.
Journaling before writing your first draft helps you find clarity about:
1) Setting.
Before you can start writing the actual story, you have to establish where it’s taking place. Describing physical locations falls under this category, as does world-building elements such as culture and politics (e.g. race, gender, and class structures). In genres like SF/F, this can mean creating an entire society from the ground up: creating a form of government different from what the reader is used to, creating new or unfamiliar technology, creating and establishing a system of magic, etc.
(Even if you’re not writing genre fiction, your story will exist in a world that’s influenced by different cultures and politics. It may or may not be relevant to your story, but those elements will still exist and appear in some way.)
This type of world-building is important to develop, so your readers can understand not only the physical space your characters live in, but also the societal pressures and constraints your characters are living under—or, depending on your story, it will help your readers understand the societal pressures and constraints your characters are trying to overthrow.
You—the writer—need to know all the technical world-building details, because you need to know the rules of the world your characters are inhabiting. Your readers may need to know some of these details, but they won’t need to know all of them.
Part of your job is to pick and choose which details your readers need to know. But you can’t decide what your readers need to know unless you have all of your world-building developed. Journaling can help you achieve clarity on this, before you start working on your first draft.
2) Characters.
Knowing your characters before you start writing can help you find the shape of your story quicker in your first draft. I’m a big fan of character-driven stories, so my stories tend to progress and develop based on my characters’ desires, motivations, and relationships.
Journaling for character goes deeper than details like gender, hair, eye, and skin color, family structure, their job, etc. These details are important, but they may not necessarily drive your story forward. What will really drive your story is knowing the core personality, the desires, and the motivations of your major characters, especially your main character. These elements—core personality, desires, and motivations—are what cause your characters to take certain actions depending on the situations you put them in, which creates tension, and in turn moves the story forward.
Journaling lets you free-write these character details without having to interrupt your creative and narrative flow, so you can concentrate on the events that must happen in the story. Since all of this character backstory will be in your journal, you also won’t have to search through pages of your story for specific character details you wove into the narrative, if you need to fact-check your character backstories later on.
If you’re more of a visual planner, or if you just need to take a break from text-planning to sketch out a diagram instead, one tool you can use to track and develop your major characters is a relationship map. Relationship maps can help you keep track of the bigger picture for your major characters, and their relationships with each other. They’re useful for establishing who your characters are, individually and in relation to one another, which in turn helps with character and relationship development. To learn more, subscribe to this newsletter and get your free copy of the relationship mapping guide.
3) Story.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of character-driven stories. By journaling about your characters and discovering who they are—as though they were living, breathing people—you eventually discover how their personalities, desires, and motivations interact with each other. This, in addition to understanding the world they inhabit, naturally gives rise to the story you may or may not have known you were trying to tell.*
(*You may have started your project knowing exactly what the story is, and developed your characters with that story goal in mind.)
Finding clarity for world-building and characters before you start writing your first draft will help you avoid info dumping, and let you focus more on writing your actual story. All of your notes will be in one place that you can easily search (your journal or journal-equivalent), if you need a refresher on specific world-building or backstory details. And finding clarity on what your story is really about, once you’ve established what your setting is and who your characters are through journaling, will help you feel confident as you start writing your story.
The next time you start a writing project, try journaling the world and the characters you’re envisioning for your story. Start writing only after you’ve gotten all of the world-building and character backstory details squared away. When you start working, you should feel less of an urge to explain world-building or character details, and find it easier to get into the meat of writing your story.
Happy writing!
Leah
P.S. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the newsletter to get your free copy of Relationship Mapping: A Guide for Tracking the Development of Your Major Characters!
Relationship maps are a great way to keep track of who your major characters are, how they relate with each other, and help you plan how they might develop over the course of your story. If you’re more a visual planner and you’ve been looking for a new method to track and develop your major characters, this could be the tool for you.