#they whole-ass thought self-rising flour and all-purpose flour are the same

[azurahearthborne]

I wanna beat up whoever decided it was a good idea to give me a jar of yeast and self-rising flour in the same kroger delivery order so badly

[juleskelleybooks]

TIPS #2 - Back That Dump Truck Up

Providing background is one of the areas where writing original fiction varies greatly from writing fanfiction. Most of the time in fanfiction, your readers are coming to the story with the same knowledge of the background that you, yourself, have. They know the mechanics of the universe. They know the character arcs. You don’t have to explain anything. You can just go on your merry little way and trust your readers to keep up with you. (If you’re writing a really ambitious AU, you might have to do a little more worldbuilding, but that starts treading the line of original fiction anyway so stick with me on this one.)

But if you’re writing original fiction, all that information in your head? Your readers don’t know it. And it might be tempting to tell them everything all at once so that they can get on the same page as you, but the thing is, almost nobody reads fiction to learn things, and after about two sentences, their eyes are going to glaze over.

So how do you provide the information you need the readers to know without boring them? You bake a cake.

Writing and baking are both a little bit like alchemy. You take small parts, raw ingredients (ideas, words, eggs, flour, etc.) and you mix them together in such a way that they become something bigger than the sum of their parts. And I don’t know if you’ve ever baked anything, but it turns out there’s a big difference between slowly adding one ingredient to another and just…dumping the whole thing together. The same is true for writing.

And the thing is, your book might be all right with a few info-dumps in it, but it’s kind of like biting into a cake and finding a little pocket of flour that didn’t get mixed with the other ingredients very well—it might not ruin the whole cake, but it’s an unpleasant bit of dryness that you honestly could have just done without.

So here are some simple do’s and don’ts to help you gently stir all that dry information smoothly into your other ingredients.

Don’t: Explain your world up front. In books with a contemporary setting, this isn’t as big of a deal as it is in fantasy or sci-fi, but it can still be a problem. I really, really don’t want to spend the first two paragraphs hearing about how your main character lives in a penthouse in San Francisco that he bought with the inheritance his great-grandpappy left him, or how the ancient kingdom was once peaceful and technologically advanced but now it’s war-torn and in ruins.

Do: Sprinkle little details here and there that paint a picture. Give them a purpose. Make them a part of the story. Use contrast to make them stand out. For the San Francisco penthouse, have him stress about the ever-rising property taxes. Have him examine the seams of his shirts to be sure they’re going to last until his next paycheck. Contrast this with a breathtaking view of the bay or the bridge or Market Street or whatever. Something doesn’t line up here; there’s a glaring mis-match between someone who is running out of money and someone who lives in a sleek apartment in San Francisco (because let me tell you how expensive SF is). Let that mis-match intrigue your reader. Let it pull them along. They’ll want to know why.

For the war-torn kingdom, have your main character come into conflict with leftover souvenirs of the peacetime technology that doesn’t work anymore. A state-of-the-art glass elevator is now just an empty cage blocking a shaft that could have been used for stairs. The railroad tracks are a great place for a horse to break a leg, now that all the coal is being used to make weapons instead of fuel train engines. Show the gap between two areas of contrast, but don’t explain how things got from Point A to Point D. Discovering what B and C are is going to be what pulls your reader in.

Don’t: Give me your character’s entire life story right up front. “I was born in a cabin in the woods to loving parents blah blah blah snore snore,” to borrow a quote. Nobody cares. Only people who consider themselves self-important think that anyone cares about hearing the minutiae of their lives, and it’s because only people who are self-important spend that much time thinking about themselves in that much detail! Your novel is not an interview with a biographer (probably…I mean, you could make that format work if you tried really hard). Your novel is a peek into a character’s thoughts and personality and daily life, and most people just do not think about themselves in that much detail on a daily basis. They think about the things they’re in conflict with. They think about the things that give them problems. And you know when they think about them? When they come into conflict with them.

Do: Just get right to it. Jump into the action of their lives. Give me the point of your story right up front. Maybe not the main point. Maybe just a teaser. What’s your main conflict? Your main conflict is an ancient race of sentient machines invading to harvest all organic life? (Listen, just go with it, I love those stupid games.) Don’t tell me about the damn machines. Tell me about the day they found something those machines left behind last time they were here. Why did they find it? Were they on an archaelogical dig? (Then I can surmise your character is an archaeologist.) Did they find it because they responded to a distress call from someone whose computer got fried by it? Etc.  You don’t have to tell me on the first page that your character is an N7 commander or what that means. You can sprinkle that in somewhere along the way. “Commander Shepard! Dammit. Those N7 marines, always running off ahead of everybody else.”

Don’t: Stop the action to explain something. Please. Please do not. I mean, maybe, if you’re really good at prose, if you’re freaking Douglas Adams and you’re playing it this way on purpose, you might can get away with it. But let me tell you about the time I had to read “A Barn Burning” by William Faulkner in one of my English classes and write a “reaction paper” to it. And let me tell you about how my entire reaction was just how fucking angry I was about the stupid paragraph where Faulkner interrupted the pivotal moment, where Sarty is racing up the hill, lungs bursting, legs seizing—to tell me about how the fucking cows in the fucking barn remind him of his fucking sisters. I promise you I still want to murder William Faulkner over this moment and he’s been dead for years. (My English teacher found my paper hilarious and gave me the only perfect grade she handed out to anyone the entire semester. But Faulkner is still on my shitlist.)

Do: Bring up relevant details to remind the reader of something that might be easily forgotten. Make sure it’s something you’ve explained earlier in the story so that you don’t HAVE to stop and explain. Does your pivotal moment hinge on your main character being able to hit a small object very hard with a big stick? (Look, I don’t know why it would, you’re the one writing this story.) Don’t pick that moment to spend a paragraph on how hard she practiced to try out for the hockey team when she was a kid. Tell me about that earlier, and choose the pivotal moment to just mention it, briefly, in passing. Bring up one or two relevant details that bring it to mind.  

Don’t: Overexplain.

Do: Let the reader infer some things. I don’t need to know what a womp rat looks like, their evolutionary development, or their life cycle to get the gist of Luke Skywalker saying, “I used to bulls-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home.”  But does referencing a “womp rat” that’s “not much bigger than two meters” add some richness to the story? You bet it does. It also sure as hell tells me a lot about what a redneck Luke Skywalker was growing up without having to spend any time on that particular bit of background.

TL;DR – Make your background details a treasure hunt, scattered through your book. Use contrast and conflict to make them stand out when they’re important. Leave some things to the imagination. Readers like filling in a few blanks here and there. It’s engaging.

And most of all, do not pull a Faulkner and make me come kick your shit-I-need-to-make-my-wordcount ass.

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