How to write info dumps that are actually fun to read

One of the cardinal rules of fiction is to avoid info dumps like the brown lumps at the dog park.
 
But I'm here to tell you to break the rules like that friend your parents warned you about (if that friend was trying to lure you into writing rather than doing drugs).

You CAN write info dumps that readers will enjoy

(A quick aside for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term. An info dump is when the author stops the action to explain something like you're in a History 101 lecture. Much like how this aside is an info dump about the meaning of info dumps.)

The bad news is that writing a good info dump is as difficult as building a teleportation machine out of parts from Radio Shack. The rule of "don't write info dumps" exists because info dumps are so hard to get right that your story is usually better if you avoid them.
 
But I think you can do almost anything well if you learn how.
 

First, why bother with an info dump if they're so hard and so hated?

It might be the best option for explaining a crucial part of your world or plot.
 
For example, if the conflict of your story centers around a historical event that took place before your book starts, the reader needs knowledge of this event to understand everything else going on. Because it happened before your book, you can't exactly show it.
 
Another example is if the inner workings of a piece of technology are important to your plot. You might not be able to "show" how a particle collider works on the page.
 
If the explanation is short (think a sentence or two), you can get away with just stating it without doing anything special, as long as you don't do this often.
 
But for info that requires more complex explanations, you have to get creative or lose your reader to boredom (or more likely to TikTok).
 
Alternatively, you might choose an info dump as a stylistic choice (Douglas Adams does this well). As we'll see below, writing good info dumps is all about style.
 

What makes an info dump fun

To show what makes a good info dump, let's look at a book that has a whole lot of them and is still massively entertaining: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente.
 
Note that Valente is using the same strategy as Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so you can refer to that series as an example too!

In Space Opera, a washed-up glam rock band has to save humanity by competing in the galactic version of Eurovision, called the Metagalactic Grand Prix. The species who comes in last is annihilated.
 
Every second chapter veers away from the main characters to tell us about an element of the world such as an alien species, a historical event, or the creation of a book of Unkillable Facts.
 
Each of these chapters is an info dump that's a whole chapter long. But they work because they use a strong voice, focus on a specific character, and include an element of mystery.
 
Let's break these elements down.

 

You need a strong voice

Have you ever had a friend who tells stories that make you laugh until your face hurts? (Okay, maybe even my facial muscles are out of shape.)
 
When you try to tell their story to someone else--after all, everyone should get to enjoy this bit of hilarity--you're met with silence as deep as the echoing insecurity that silence creates inside of you.
 
But you got all the details of the joke right! In the right order too! Only, no one cared.
 
Turns out, it wasn't the story itself that was all that funny; it was the way it was told.
 
Voice makes all the difference between a dull info dump that forces you to close the book and one that gets you to keep turning the page. 
 
We’ll pay attention to almost anything if it's funny or dramatic enough. For example, do you have a favorite nonfiction podcast? Do you watch Ze Frank's True Facts videos about animal biology?
 
So, how do you channel the voice of a friend who can captivate a room, short of summoning a demon to steal their charm?
 
Let's look at an example from Space Opera:

This flashy hot spot with commanding views of the mind-jellying infinite raw reality beyond the accretion disk is homeworld to the Utorak, a race of, to get it out of the way quickly, blinged-out Easter Island statues with faces like busted kachina dolls, bodies like rejected Stonehenge designs, and a sense of humor like a rock dropped down a dry well. They live a little longer than a human, stand a little taller than a human, and could brutally pulverize a human by accidentally brushing against the shoulder of one on the tube platform.

This info dump has a clear voice because it's specific.
 
Our brains skip over generalities because they provide so little info. They fail to create a mental image we can latch on to.
 
But if something is funny, strange, or new in a way we can envision with specific details, we pay attention.
 
So instead of saying that wormholes are big and slow, Valente writes:

They have the most in common culturally with the giant panda bear of Earth. They are large, slow, solitary creatures whose natural habitat is relentlessly encroached upon by the implacable advance of civilization, and, improbably, if you could ever see a whole wormhole all at once (which you can’t), you’d find them just as chubbily adorable.

This brings us to part two of developing a voice: When describing your details, use unexpected turns of language, metaphors, and jokes, such as comparing wormholes to pandas.
 
Even if describing something more mundane than a strange alien species, using details and metaphors that are unexpected and precise will make your description as fun to read as your lottery ticket up until the point you realize you've lost again.
 
If you don't get it right away, that's okay! Developing a voice that's engaging enough to get someone to read about the evolutionary history of a wormhole takes lots of practice and editing.

 

You need a character to lead the reader through the info dump

In Space Opera, each info dump comes with characters for us to follow, from a military leader who rigs a talent competition to the galaxy's greatest neutral politician.
 
Valente doesn't just tell us about the characters. We follow them as they face obstacles from trying to win the galactic version of Eurovision to figuring out a way to "invent a way, any way, to get off that rock full of socially challenged chain-saw-faced hooligans."
 
This gives the info dump a mini-story and character arc that pulls us along  (and it adds specificity, making the general--a galactic war, for example--into something personal--a leader who wants to keep his planet out of it).
 
Even when explaining a species, Valente writes about them as though they are an individual, imbuing them with specific personality traits and desires:

A Voorpret is a virus. Simply the most successful viral outbreak in the history of the galaxy, infecting, replicating, mutating, spreading, and absolutely liquefying their hosts since before humans ever imagined that oversize frontal lobes were this season’s must-have accessory. In the halcyon days of their youth, the Voorpret were a humble hemorrhagic fever originating in the rain forests of Fenek’s northern hemisphere, toddling about learning their pathogenic ABCs, killing proto-primates and ungulates far too quickly to become a pandemic to write home about.

Focusing on a character is a trick pulled in nonfiction too. Have you ever read an article in Scientific American about the discovery of a new black hole that follows the astronomer who found it by accident? Or a newspaper article about a policy change that focuses on someone affected by it?
 
It's the same idea. Don't just tell us info. Give it to us through someone specific we can follow along.

 

You need a mystery

Good news! This aspect of a fun info dump is as easy as drooling in your sleep.
 
Valente's info dump chapters often start with a statement that begs a lot of questions, such as why a galactic war was started at a bus stop. We read on through the background info because we want to know the how, why, and huh of it.

The Sentience Wars began and ended at a public bus stop.

Starships are frightfully useful and pleasant things, but not, strictly speaking, a must-have to get around town. Even the jankiest hand-me-down FTL-capable hoopty that couldn’t pass a special relativity inspection to save its intrepid bridge crew is the neon-tracklit, fully stocked wet bar, stripper-pole-fitted superbass party limousine of galactic travel. It doesn’t just get you from planet to planet, it gets you there in comfort, good company, high style, full of canapés, with a good buzz going, and looking like somebody to reckon with, which is very important to most young species trying to splash some cash around and make their mark on the nightlife. But you could always take the bus.

Simple, right? Give the reader enough info to spark their curiosity and fill in the rest gradually throughout your info dump.

 

What if you don't write humor?

Our inspiration for this post was funny books because humor is an easy way to get people to stick around through info that would otherwise be boring.
 
But these tips work for stories with more dramatic tones as well. Instead of picking humous details and metaphors, you'd choose tense or bloody ones. Instead of a light-hearted character, you'd go with a hard-ass. And instead of a silly mystery, you'd pick a dark one like "he walked into my office with a pencil protruding from his left eye."
 
 
If you struggle to write info dumps that readers enjoy, don't worry! It's a difficult skill to develop and you CAN write an entire book without ever adding an info dump.
 
But if you want or need to include one, use specific and unexpected details, give us a character to follow, and add a mystery that can only be resolved by reading the rest of the info dump.