Do Not Stage a Conversation for the Reader’s Convenience

Characters tell each other what they already know so that the reader can catch up. The Turkey City Lexicon, compiled by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling and first circulated in 1988, calls it “As You Know, Bob” and a “pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue” and records another name for it, “maid and butler dialogue.” Readers often feel it at once, because the characters seem to exist only as pipes for the author. Our reasoning is that people read fiction on the understanding that no one is being addressed over the characters’ heads, and a speech aimed past the characters can break that for a moment.

The rule doesn’t forbid background. It asks that the information be new to someone in the scene, or that the telling itself be an act. In the first scene of Gogol’s The Inspector-General (the translation is Thomas Seltzer’s), the Governor tells the Judge that the attendants have turned the courthouse entrance hall into “a poultry yard,” and the Judge knows it already, and the audience learns the state of the town, but the Governor is managing a subordinate, and each fact is a reproach. When the Governor mentions the “little peccadilloes” in the inspector’s letter, the Judge volunteers, “I tell everyone plainly that I take bribes,” and defends it by kind: “White greyhound puppies.” “Bribes are bribes,” the Governor replies, “whether puppies or anything else.” A lawyer reciting the record, a teacher reviewing a lesson, and a mother reminding a child of the rules are legitimate too, because the repetition does social work.

A simple grid finds the problem. Give each character a column and each fact the reader needs a row, and in each cell write K if the character knows it at this point in the scene, N if not. A row with K in every column is information nobody needs to tell anyone.

Practice. Take one scene in which characters explain something and build the grid. For each fact marked K by all speakers, choose one treatment: cut it, move it into action or an object, or give its telling a purpose by deciding what the teller wants from it and what the hearer wants to prevent. Rewrite the scene so that at least one fact is withheld until the final lines and at least one comes out in the wrong order, as someone’s mistake or evasion; the grid and the rewrite together take forty-five minutes. Then read the old version and the new one aloud and compare them.