The Information Download

Normally, I'm not a great fan of writers writing about writing. To me, it always seems like an author has given up on real writing. While there is the marketing angle to consider, it always seemed to me like a cop-out on one level or another. Having said that, the educator in me has wagged its long finger in my general direction and said: "tsk, tsk."

So in order to keep all the voices happy, I thought I would share something I have learned from my notes. These are the results of my own journey of exploration. In the process of writing out my own thoughts for my personal benefit, I think I have discovered a few important ideas that I can share. And I share those with trepidation as a learner among learners.

I write YA Christian: Soap Opera / Military Sci-Fi. I even have a sign to prove it. Military Sci-Fi has a few unique characteristics of its own, which I will save for another blog. One of the challenges that does stand out for the writer in this genre is the "information dump." Somewhere in the first few chapters of the book, there is a need to convey a large amount of information at one time: equipment, tech, starships, personnel, or sit rep. The example before us is that of a heavily damaged ship. We must give an accounting of the crew and the condition of the ship's systems.

Showing vs telling is best, but it slows down the pace so much and requires a lot of space, so I save that for the single most important thing. The broken tech in the "show" section propels the action forward for the rest of the book - as in "gotta find this broken part and replace it or we're never going home and we all die - very slowly." That leads to the frenetic search through a junkyard of ships (while avoiding alien owners of said junkyard) to find the part which is the core of the plot and the reason for the action.

In the show section, in addition to the broken control, we also find that the replacement is gone. In place of the replacement part in the box is a note from the previous captain of the ship. He says he hid the replacement part on a planet (far, far away on a previous mission) so that if the crew mutinied, they would never get home without him (he anticipated breaking the original part if they mutinied). The ship was originally found by the current captain and crew deserted, with no idea of what happened to the previous occupants. Nice bit of theater. Bad captain reaches out from grave to destroy yet another crew.

The rest of the information can be from a crew briefing (or debriefing) which is second strongest means to communicate a lot of info. A meeting involves dialogue and a chance for more characterization, etc. Aside from its value as a "meet the crew" montage, this also needs to include some action (ie Captain pacing the deck, crew members reacting with each other over information, etc.) and discussion of implications and interrelations of individual systems. You can convey most of your remaining information in this manner, but without the action, the scene turns into a mosaic.

The weakest way to convey info is in a brief or letter which gets the information out the fastest and is also easiest to write, allowing the character's thoughts to provide interpretation of the raw data, or in a discussion with a single crew member. It is useful for collecting and recapping information already known, especially useful for introducing a protagonist to information already known by the reader..

Hope this helps someone out there in Blogland!

Keep Your Blasters at Full Charge,

E W Finch, III