What is an Info Dump?

Often times, writers submit a query in an effort to land an agent with their brand new manuscript. Sometimes, authors don’t want a traditional publishing contract, and are happy to publish on their own.

Too often, a manuscript is rejected if there’s an info dump at the beginning; this can be a dossier of 150 cast and crew members that no one wants to memorize before a story because it leads the audience to believe that the writer doesn’t know how to introduce characters in the narrative. Sometimes, the info dump is 5 pages of world history, which lead the audience to believe that the writer doesn’t know how to build a world in the novel.

A story certainly contains a great deal of information. A writer must tell readers all about the world, the people, the technology, the magic, the murder, the mystery, the history, after all. More often than not, there is a need to set the stage, so to speak, and normally, writers provide a prologue with all accounts deemed pertinent to the story’s setting, pace, and advancement, so how can such a thing possibly be a problem?

Prologue or no, many books today start off in the exact same way — dumping a ton of information, hence info dump.

Let’s look at an example of a story starting with the dumping of information. This is an original example — as they all are here on out — I wrote specifically…