This is the seventeenth installment in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.
Many writers wrestle with the bête noire that is the infodump, that thudding, sodden heap of way too much data that so often clogs the plumbing of our writing. Because of the sheer quantity of information that often emerges from a research process, it is a problem especially for writers, whether of fiction or nonfiction, who have done or are still in the process of doing research.
As I often tell writers I work with, infodumping is a lot like doomscrolling. Most of us who write have experience with both things. What fewer of us realize is that these are two faces of the same problem, a dysfunctional relationship with information resulting from poor filtering and a lack of discernment.
… infodumping is a lot like doomscrolling… these are two faces of the same problem, a dysfunctional relationship with information resulting from poor filtering and a lack of discernment.
The “No Filter” Problem
The biggest difference between infodump and doomscroll isn’t the nature of the content but the direction of information flow. An infodump is when a writer keeps pushing information at the reader regardless of whether it’s meaningful or the reader has any apparent reason to want it, to the point that the reader simply gets overwhelmed. Doomscrolling is when a reader compulsively allows information to be pushed into their face, scrolling compulsively through online feeds regardless of whether what they read is meaningful or they’ve got good reason to read it, again to the point of overwhelm.
In both situations the reader ends up numb, unable to process the deluge. Typically, the reader can’t even remember much: the dump truck of data lands on them so hard and fast they don’t even get the license plate number.
What’s going on with this lack of filtering and discernment when writers infodump? It bears some careful exploration. A writer’s job, in large part, is to be a sort of information bouncer, standing at the nightclub door that separates the reader from a whole world clamoring for attention. It's the bouncer's job to assess the crowd of pieces of information that want to get to the reader, choosing what makes the cut to get through the door and what doesn't so the reader gets a maximum amount of valuable stuff with a minimum of useless fluff. This means it's also a writer's job to be able to evaluate that crowd intelligently and well, critical faculties fully engaged, and to sift and sort as they go.
Yet infodumping still happens and it happens all the time, usually driven by one or more of three primary reasons.
The difference between all and some is selection. Selection implies selection criteria. A writer must have some.
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