Question 1

What is an info dump, and how do you avoid one?

Accepted Answer

A passage delivering a large quantity of **background information in one undramatised block** — and it is a problem not because readers cannot absorb information, but because they have no reason to want it yet.

**Why it fails.** Information is only interesting when it **answers a question the reader is already asking**. Delivered before that question exists, it is a list of facts about people and places the reader has no investment in. This is why prologues explaining a world's history are so frequently skipped, and why the opening chapters of ambitious novels are where readers most often stop.

**The recognisable forms:**

**The historical prologue** setting out centuries of context before any character appears.

**"As you know, Bob."** Characters explaining to each other things they both already know, purely for the reader's benefit. Instantly detectable and painful.

**The mirror description**, where a character conveniently examines their own appearance.

**The expert monologue**, where someone lectures for a page.

**Front-loading**, where everything is established before anything happens.

**What actually works:**

**Withhold until needed.** Introduce a rule, a history or a relationship at the moment it **matters to the scene**. The reader absorbs it effortlessly then, because it is answering a live question.

**Drip-feed.** A clause here, a reference there. Readers are far better at assembling context than writers credit, and **being slightly confused is not the same as being lost** — a small amount of unexplained detail creates curiosity.

**Attach information to conflict.** A fact delivered during an argument about it is absorbed; the same fact in exposition is not.

**Use ignorance.** A character who genuinely does not know something can be told, plausibly — which is why the newcomer is such a common device, and why it works when the ignorance is real rather than contrived.

**Trust implication.** Naming a thing casually implies a world behind it more effectively than explaining it.

**In non-fiction**, the same principle applies: establish why the reader should care before supplying the detail, and put background where it becomes necessary rather than at the start.

Question 2

How do you write a good opening?

Accepted Answer

By giving the reader a reason to continue within the first paragraph — which usually means a question, a tension, or a voice worth following, rather than the explanation most first drafts begin with.

Question 3

What goes in a query letter?

Accepted Answer

A one-page pitch to an agent containing three things: what the book is, who you are, and why you are writing to them specifically. It is a sales document, not a summary. The structure that works: A

Question 4

How do you research a novel without drowning in it?

Accepted Answer

By researching to a question rather than to a subject, and by accepting that most of what you learn will not appear on the page — which is the point, not a waste. Why research becomes a trap. It

Question 5

How do you get useful feedback on your writing?

Accepted Answer

By asking a specific question, because the default response to "what do you think?" is politeness, and politeness is useless. What to ask instead: where did you get bored; where did you have to

Question 6

What is an unreliable narrator?

Accepted Answer

A narrator whose account cannot be taken at face value — and the technique only works if the reader is given the means to see past them, which is what separates it from simply being misled. The

Question 7

What makes a good title?

Accepted Answer

It has to do several jobs at once — identify, intrigue, and be findable — and the balance between them differs completely depending on where the title will be encountered. What a title must achieve:

Related Questions