This Horse ain't Dead! Info-dumping, Exposition, Appendices, etc...

[Onyx]

The one line that I believed you missed when back-quoting some of my initial posts here being 'that it was crucial for me to make the existing storyline of Fargo (2000AD work) credible and realistic.

It would be a wild uphill battle to make any comic book plot line sound credible, doubly so for the satirical camp offered by 2000AD.

This is the reason I requested to know more about what you were writing early in these many conversations - the righteousness of using protracted exposition in SF really comes down to what needs to be accomplished, and what you're writing isn't really SF. I would look more closely at how someone like Tolkien presents a sweeping view of fantastic history. Exposition is not really the place to argue with your reader that the fantastic is plausible. Either just tell them that the fantastic is the reality of the story (fantasy, allegory or magical realism), or re-craft your story to make the world resemble ours (SF, thriller, mystery). SF fans aren't going to "buy into" a wholly unrealistic premise, and comic book fans don't really need or want to be convinced that the fantasy could be real.

I'm afraid the effort you're sinking into this premise is a bit like trying to adapt Groo the Wanderer into a serious live-action TV show. That isn't going to work for any audience. Some types of fiction are understood to be absurdist fantasy.

 

[-K2-]

@Onyx ; Thanks for your input!

K2

 

[James Bridie]

This is pretty much what I was musing about here:
Borges and the trivialization of SFF worlds.

Thanks, I somehow missed that thread

 

[James Bridie]

I see some unusual "similar threads" below - about horses

 

[Robert Zwilling]

If you can recognize something as an info dump, probably only a narrow group of readers will appreciate it. The rest are going to not like info dumps simply because they are out of favor or fashion, maybe it will come back, maybe it won't.

Having the readers go somewhere else to read the story is not going to be taken up by very many readers. Making readers work to get a story across has never really worked. Hyper links for an ebook might work for defining things. In real life, most articles don't use them because it would ruin the way the story has been framed by hand picked facts. That is what writing is trying to do, guide the reader so they stay within the confines of the story.

The unprinted backstory helps the writer keep everything synchronized as time passes. Hopefully that sense of continuity is picked up by the reader.

The world built for the story influences how the characters react and what happens to them. You can only see snippets of the world as needed to advance the plot. Acid rain concentration too high that day, the paint melts off the car, character curses, but you don't need to run through the build the up of what produced the acid rain cloud that day. People will see what happened, they don't need to read why it happened. That's for another kind of book.

The dueling chapters can be dangerous, although for an ebook, it is horribly simple for the reader to just bypass those sections without losing track of the action which is what driving the reader to follow the story. If it is an ebook, you could experiment. Give the reader two versions, one weighed down with explanations, one without the explanations. You would have two stories in one book, the page count or word count might be hard to explain. Someday, it should be possible to just push a button and revert back and forth between the abridged version and the full blown version, all in one story file.

Slipping in bits of pieces of the world here and there works much better than laying down the entire foundation. People want flash, they don't want to know how things work.

There is one kind of info dump that people do like and that is the emotional baggage that the characters are carrying around, simply because that kind of info dump is in style.

 

[Nozzle Velocity]

Good comments - and welcome to the chronicles forums @Nozzle Velocity .

Thanks, Mr. T!