Sometimes the unique aspects of your world (cobha, history, important people/places/things, etc.) can be easy to slide into the narrative of your story. They have a direct, immediate effect on the characters and world. The new king must choose his bride within a week of his coronation; everyone will be gossiping about it, so when the guards come to take the heroine to meet the king along with a hundred other girls he's choosing from, it's not a surprise to the reader. One of my stories has a plague that wiped out most of the population a few hundred years earlier; it had a huge effect on the people and when I get around to writing this story, it should be simple to work in references to it.

However. Some things aren't so easy to put in. In my NaNo this last year, I have a character who isn't exactly human. The reader and the viewpoint character don't know this, and although the POV character knows about his people, she doesn't have any reason to think about them up until the time he happens to introduce himself as an Esha in front of her. There is absolutely no reference to the Esha before that. All explanation comes after that first mention. Maybe there's a natural way I could work in an explanation of the Esha before that point, but if so, I haven't seen it.

Now, what I have works, I think. But that isn't the only story where I've run across that problem, and I'm not really sure what to do about it. I've seen people have someone tell a legend, or maybe have a history lesson in school, or similar things, but those can be difficult to pull off without being obvious about the fact that said legend or history lesson is absolutely true and going to be important.

So what do the rest of you do with your important-but-not-the-sort-of-thing-people-talk-about-even-though-they-know-about-it details? How do you keep the reader from going, "Wait, what's XYZ and why haven't I heard about it before?" without resorting to infodumping and "As you know" speeches?

I am actually facing this too: I handled it by making references so the reader goes "What?" and doing mysterious things so the reader knows that he's hiding something and may not be human, but doesn't know what.

Still fleshing out the details, though.

I'm facing the same problem. Mostly dealing with how to work with all the different races in my world, since I've developed each of them to a fair extent, but now am unsure how to bring it into the book, since I already have some of the races in there, but mostly as minor characters. So since it isn't a huge part of my book, I'm facing trouble figuring out how to give the readers enough knowledge that they appreciate them as much as I do.

It seems like a fair number of fantasy authors try to work around this problem by just having the ignorant character who doesn't know anything about anything and thus needs others to explain everything to him (and the reader.) Ignorant characters don't always fit in the stories, though

*nods* That can work, if it fits your story/character. I'm kind of suspecting now that how this can be handled changes a lot depending on the sort of story it is and what exactly the details you're trying to slip in are.


You might have to give up on letting the readers appreciate the races as much as you do. I mean, you're the author; you're always going to know the little details no one else does because they just didn't fit in the story. If you can bring out some of what makes your races worthy of appreciation through the minor characters, though...I dunno. That kind of thing is tough to figure out, hence my starting the thread in the first place.


Hehe, exactly. Plus, even when you have an ignorant character to explain things to, you have to be careful to keep from making him into just a way to infodump without looking like you're infodumping.

Good points. Thanks!

Yeah, I agree with Leandra. I have this extensive back history concerning my world that I sort of threw in there in two giant paragraphs, which I later deleted and replaced with two sentences of reference so the reader has an idea of what they need to know. Slipping info in without "info dumping" is a difficult issue. Honestly, though, you sometimes have to info dump a bit, and not all info dumping is bad if handled correctly. Sometimes, starting off a chapter with a paragraph or two of background is not a bad thing, particularly when if pertains to what the reader is going to encounter next. The one thing that drives me nuts is when authors try and slip too much into characters's conversations. It just makes it sound awkward and unnatural.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I have one particular ... scene ... that I've been wrestling with for years now. (But the "info" that needs to get through isn't worldbuilding, so I'll save that for another thread sometime.)


Indeed. The example that I like to bring up is Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Somewhat early in the book, there's a chapter which is, essentially, a ten- or twenty-page infodump on spacesuits, and specifically their features, repair, and maintenance. And it is absolutely fascinating reading.


Yes. About half of the (at least eight?) books about writing that I've read that have touched on any issue related to "infodumping," or working in orldbuilding, or conveying background at all have talked about this specific "technique" ... mostly in the context of backstory. And they've all roundly condemned it, as something that wasn't a very good technique to begin with, and was then done to death and then some .. just in theatrical dramas before the rise of movies! Plays wold begin with the curtain rising on the maid and the butler uncovering furniture, dusting the mantelpiece, etc., and each would say something like, "As you know, Betty, the Carnival of Time begins in three days." (To make up an example.)
The general principle is, you should almost never---vanishingly rarely---have one character tell another character, or ask another character about, something they both already know.

For worldbuilding, you could take the route that Robert Jordan did, and (in addition to "normal" background stuff in the text of the novel proper) add a glossary that explains things in more detail. Not too much detail (and you'll need to be essentially as concise as possible), or you'll make the glossary too big by comparison with the text of the novel, but most of the readers who will read a glossary are the ones who want that "infodump."

This works for when you have new characters, but what about when you're on a world where all of the races and cultures have interacted for centuries and don't need any explanation between themselves? The reader will know nothing between them all, so how would one work through that?

It's pretty hard. I'm having to do that with my current story – the two MCs both know more than usual about their surroundings and the way things work, so it's tricky trying to make the readers understand as much as they do – or even as much as necessary to hold up the story.

So... you work in as much as you can as naturally as you can via dialogue and plain old description, but you can't always do much with that.

Sometimes, you just be blunt about explanation. This works especially well when the explanation for something is very short – a single sentence or sentence clause. Personally, I dislike it when the explanation gets longer than a sentence or so. But if you just slip something in like this sort of way:

<The nobility – which the vampires call 'the crows' – were gathered in the room not missing a single man.>

Then it's so short that no one (at least presumably no one) grudges you the lapse into exposition.

K M Weiland uses exposition fairly frequently (though in pretty small chunks, not more than a paragraph or two at a time if I remember right) at points in her fantasy book 'Dreamlander', and I actually didn't like it very much personally. But she's a popular author and writing blogger.

Other times, you have to give it time for the reader to learn everything. If you work in enough bits and pieces and hints, they'll figure out what they need to know. This sort of thing gives a book a bit of a flavor of a translated book, like Dostoyevsky's books or 'Heidi'. They give little to no explanation of the cultures they are in since they were written for those cultures – and yet people still enjoy the English translations immensely.

Those are my thoughts on the problem.

And this will probably be what happens...

You explain very well! Thank you!