Communicating your Setting I

This is the trick that writers need to learn, especially fantasy writers. How do you convey information about your world in a natural way? And in a way that is interesting and doesn’t break the flow of the story?

I touched on this at the end of the previous chapter. It’s all about character. Every scene in your story is told from the viewpoint of some character. They are the ones actually experiencing the world and living in it.

So how do you convey information?

• Through the lens of character
• By showing instead of telling
• By using tricks to put the information in dialogue

The rest of this chapter explores these three techniques in more detail. They give you a good method for conveying the information. Next chapter dives into the specifics of how to write them.

Communicate through character

Convey information only when it’s relevant to the character. And do so in a way that tells us more about this character.

This is the easiest way to drop information here and there. I often add information this way when revising, adding one or two lines here and there throughout the book. I find the character who is most likely to think or consider this information, and find a slower moment in which it would fit.

Logical Leaps

The key here is something I call logical leaps. If you can create a logical connection for the reader between one paragraph and the next, you can get away with explaining a lot.

If one paragraph states they miss home, then it’s natural that the next paragraph recalls a memory from home. (Which you can use to sprinkle some more worldbuilding into the story!)

If, instead, one paragraph states they miss home, and the next one delves into the history of swordfighters … that second paragraph will completely halt the story and feel like an “infodump”.

Motivations

An easy way to make such a leap, is by employing character motivations.

• Give your character a simple goal
• But they must use (or at least consider) some part of your unique world to accomplish this

This way, it’s natural to “explain” this information, and the reader will be excited and follow along.

Infodumps versus Teaching

For those unaware, the term “infodump” refers to stories that dump a large wall of text into the story, with the sole purpose of telling the reader some info. It’s very much frowned upon.

Sometimes, you can’t do without them. And there’s no clear threshold on how long a piece of information needs to be to become an “infodump”, so some people already call one paragraph of explaining an “infodump”.

Generally speaking, though, you don’t want this.

How to Teach

Instead, you should approach all information about your world (that you want to explain) as teaching. You are teaching your reader how the world works.

And what’s the best way to teach something?

• Give tiny bits of information that are immediately relevant
• Spread them out, with some gaps in between.
• Regularly remind people about the essentials (in varied ways)

Spend five paragraphs explaining how a culture (in your world) works … and the reader is bored. They will forget all of that. The story is stopped dead in its tracks to turn into homework.

Instead, spend one paragraph explaining something about the culture.

A few chapters later, use another paragraph or two. Also repeat an essential statement from before, something the reader must remember to make sense of the story later on.

Keep doing this—give a new tidbit of info, then let it be for a few chapters—until you have eventually explained everything!

This way, the story never grinds to a halt, and the information actually sticks.

This does require planning on your end. You need to be smart about how you “chop” your world into pieces of information, and when you tell what. I’m not saying it’s easy—that’s why infodumps are still a thing in many books—but it’s absolutely the better way to do it.

An example: epigraphs

This technique is very common among writers, because it literally uses the system I just described.

An epigraph is a short piece of text before a chapter starts.

In many (fantasy) books, each chapter will start with an excerpt from a journal, book, conversation, history lesson, whatever. This means you dole out these tidbits of information, every chapter, which combine to convey a huge amount of information. (The important part is, therefore, that these epigraphs are really short and you only include them once in a while.)

You must realize, however, that not all readers will read them. (Most will, some will automatically skip it.) So you usually want to reinforce them in the main text anyway, or make the worldbuilding details not essential to know.

A longer example

I’m currently writing one of my Wildebyte books. In it, I try to craft stories around games and how computers work.

This means I have to teach important (and not necessarily easy) concepts about how computers and code work!

For example, I have to teach the GPU (responsible for graphics). What do I do? I break it down into parts.

• The GPU is for graphics, completely separate from the CPU (for calculations).
• They calculate what the camera is looking at.
• Then convert that into pixels (through rasterization).
• They are parallel: all pixels are calculated at the same time.

Each part can then be broken down even further. I try to attach the details to the plot.

• The fact that graphics and code are separate, for example, means that things can change appearance! Just because you coded something to be a table, doesn’t mean it has to look like a table. This sets up a mystery about a shapeshifting enemy they have to track.
• The fact it is parallel, means different pixels cannot communicate with each other. This sets up a funny scene about miscommunication.

The crucial thing here is that I don’t allow parts to be too big and I never introduce multiple parts in the same chapter. As of right now, you only learn the existence of GPU in chapter 2, its separation from the CPU in chapter 4, that it converts stuff to pixels in chapter 7, etcetera.

The information is small. It is spread out. And where possible, it’s directly tied into the plot and the mysteries. But once you combine all of that, near the end of the book, you have learned how a GPU works and the climax can happen (which uses that information).

Force it to happen

The previous example (from Wildebyte) shows the second most powerful technique for communicating setting.

Make something happen that forces thoughts or discussion about the information into the story.

For example, say your world has an important class of magical objects. You want to communicate what they look like and what they do.

A very subtle writing mistake would be to give such a magical object to the hero from the start. They carry it around, which means they will think about it, right? When they look at it, they can naturally explain it to the reader.

While this is fine, it’s not ideal. Why would they describe the object they’re very familiar with? Why convey this information as a thought (or maybe dialogue), when you could also … make something happen.

Instead, in chapter 5, the hero receives this magical object. They haven’t seen it before. They don’t know what it does, and neither do the people around them. As such, they figure out how it works and they ask around for details. Once they actually use it for something, you show what it does.

This is a more natural and active way to convey the same information.

It’s also harder to pull off and takes more time. That’s why it’s not as easy to “add” or “change” in revision as the first tip about character lenses.

This is something to keep in mind all the time as you plot a story.

See my previous example as well. I don’t just want to tell how a GPU works, Wildebyte has to discover this information by solving mysteries and using the things he learns.

Setup a mentor-student relationship

This brings me to the third (and last) general technique for conveying information naturally. Once you know this, you’ll see it in many stories.

Setup a situation in which one character is the mentor (who knows all the information) and another is the student. This way, you can communicate details simply by having the student ask questions, which the mentor answers.

It’s not the best, which is why I put it in third place. But it’s still more natural and fun than just explaining the info outright. Additionally, by adding a human component, you can add variation and twists.

Maybe the mentor holds back some of the information. Maybe they lie about something. Maybe the student is lost and helpless when the mentor disappears and they can’t ask questions anymore.

Integrate your worldbuilding communication into your plot and characters. If you do that, you can get away with explaining a lot, and it never feels bad.

Name it, drop it

Earlier, I mentioned the need to “imply” or “promise” you did more worldbuilding than you actually put into the story. Especially as a fantasy author, you will often “subtly imply” that there’s more going on in the world. But you will give that information later, at a better moment. (Or you don’t give it at all, it remains a hint towards a greater world.)

If you do one aspect of your world with great care and depth, you can imply the other aspects and the reader will trust you.

But how do you do that? With a dead-simple technique I call “name it, drop it”.

You simply name relevant events, locations or characters that the character would know about … then continue with the rest of the scene without explanation.

Again, your characters live in this world. If they mention some great event from a hundred years ago, chances are everyone knows what they mean and has learned of this event. So they can just mention the name and move on.

This is another technique you will notice in many stories, now that you know about it.