there's not actually showing the plan happen too. like, skipping by it actually happening to whatever comes next. i think there might be situations where that would work.
That's absolutely my favorite way of communicating worldbuilding too. :D Especially fun when the setting details in question are a) weird and mind-bending as hell from our perspective, b) similar to our world in most ways but with a handful of key details that are totally, fundamentally different, or c) both, but they're never particularly remarked upon or even formally exposited on by the characters/narration because they're just totally normal facts of life in-universe. It's the most effective way I've ever seen to drive in the fundamental differences in how this fictional world operates to your own. Probably my all-time favorite example of that type of worldbuilding is the Homestuck fic Reviews Of Young Adult Novels, Mainly Those Prominently Featuring Vampires, And Containing At Least One Love Triangle by Snarp, which is a... uh... I feel like saying "YA author!Rose/fugitive online reviewer!Kanaya petstuck AU" would make it sound too sane, but that's basically what it is. Just... with some very creative worldbuilding. Some choice excerpts from a later chapter where Rose tries to explain her timeline to an alternate Dave: Spoiler
sometimes, though, when the setting's really weird and the facts are introduced so casually like that, i end up having to take a couple seconds to absorb them and update my mental model of what's going on. take my mental image and change it. but that is almost just a normal thing i do in my head anyway - i just have to do it more when the setting's weird and/or when i'm reading something for the first time.
That is absolutely possible and can work beautifully in a story that is, for example 100% focused on just the emotional beats of a specific central relationship and only one part of the ship is actively involved in making the plan happen. But if it doesn't fit the feel or tone of the story it can have the exact opposite effect of what you want, feeling clumsy and rushed, like nothing ever actually happens and the story is 90% infodump by volume - which again might work for SOME things, like WTNV fanfics sticking to the community radio tone (after all Cecil as a narrator does nothing BUT infodump at us in a way), but more often than not it will feel like the author wanted to skip over the difficult/annoying parts of figuring stuff out and just skip right back to writing what they wanted to write. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's definitely an understandable thing! But it will read distinctly unpolished and amateur :P
in conclusion: I have no fucking idea how I would write a heist movie and I am a little in awe at people who cna make it work and I wrote heist centered OC fic already I just can't remember 90% of my thought process while doing it because writing feels like a fever dream to me almost always. I'm weird.
While we're talking forms of exposition, there's also the "one character who doesn't know the thing has the thing explained to them by someone who does know" option. Nobody accuses Harry Potter of boring setting infodumping in the first book when Hagrid is showing Harry around Diagon Alley.
I keep thinking of video games, where it may well tell you exactly every step of the plan, and you then may go out and execute it perfectly step by step, and it's *so exciting* if it works just right. And I think you can totally capture that second-hand without it being boring. The stakes just need to feel real.
ohhhh i hadn't thought of that but it's definitely like a level above my ability I think xP That'd be cool as fuck though if one managed to pull it off.
Well, I've definitely heard several professional authors (though I cannot for the life of me remember who atm) talk about stories they wrote that they had to put away and revisit years later, because they lacked the skills and experience to tell them. All is not lost.
See, I'm torn about this, because on one hand I'm a giant geek who does actually enjoy being informed in minute detail of every complicated piece of strange wordbuilding, but on the other hand I do agree that having it just dumped in clumsily can be really obnoxious. So, I guess that it's not that I don't enjoy infodumping, so much as that I think there's a time and a place for it?
heh. It's probably something I should practice given how much I love writing war time ficlets for my TF OCs and how many of them are kind of the opposite of the typical guns blazing frontliner type :P Clearly every franchise should come with an indepth almanach of all the worldbuilding details anyone could even think of asking for.
Re: the plan thing, one thing I've seen when the plan mostly goes okay is that you show them going "okay, here's the plan-" and then cut away before they actually describe it. Then you show them putting the plan into action, and if you're so inclined, flash back to bits of the planning meeting as those things happen.
I liked the Imperial Radch method of infodumping at the beginning of the first book: have the protagonist be (internally) vocally annoyed at length about this planet's gender concepts.
Haven't seen it, but that strengthens my conviction that I need to watch it one of these days. :::PPP
I also remember one fiction author giving writing advice (though again cannot remember who) about infodumps. She..? -pretty sure it was a woman- said she realized she was gonna need to have one of the characters explain a bunch of stuff, and that if he just launched into it, it was going to be really boring. Because the reader had no reason to care. So, give them a reason to care and you've solved the problem. She realized that if she set it up so her main character really wanted the information, it could be an interesting scene with one person trying to drag information out of the other person instead of an infodump. I never read the finished work so I don't know how effective it was, but it seemed legit as an option at least.
