Your listeners likely will need some basic information to help them understand the context for the story. Exactly what they need will vary; examples might include how old you were when the story took place, or how certain characters came into your life. It is ideal if you can weave this information into the flow of the narrative, revealing it unobtrusively just as the listener needs it, but that is not always possible. You may need to tell and not show—you may need what some writers call an infodump. In my case, an infodump might sound something like: “When I was in junior high, my parent’s divorced and my mother married a man named Mike who collected exotic animals, which is how I ended up spending my high school years living on a tiger farm.” A short infodump can sometimes be used to great effect in the middle of the story to emphasize some particular development—for example, I might withhold the information about having hemophilia until I come to a place in the story where injury seems imminent. But by and large, infodumps are like speed bumps—you want to avoid slowing down the narrative once the audience is engaged, which means you should think hard about where you place an infodump. Consider putting it at the start of the story. That way you can get through it, and then start to pick up steam as you get deeper into the piece.
Excerpted from Lions and Tigers and AIDS! Oh, My!.
Craig McLaughlin
Author, performer, public speaker
