Daniel Aegan

We’ve all seen the dumps and left some of our own. Well, some of us have. It gets smeared all over the page, obscuring your intended meanings, making a mess out of an ordinarily clean narrative.

I’m speaking, of course, about info-dumping.

Every writer and reader has an opinion about this issue. Some deem in necessary in order to build a world either on paper or in their heads. Others employ subtlety in world-building, allowing it to unfold as the character or characters experience it on their journey. Then, there are those who don’t care either way.

To put it out there right at the start (or three paragraphs from the start at least), I’m the more subtle type of writer and reader. I’m not too big on using tons of words to describe a world when it’s not necessary to the piece of the plot being laid out. If my character needs to head to the enchanted forest to continue their quest (I’m writing a fantasy at the moment, so excuse the trope), then that forest will be described as he traverses through it. This all goes back to the “show don’t tell” writing advice that wafts around social media every now and then. On that matter, I’m of the “show and sometimes tell” mindset of things, but that’s a separate issue altogether. Writers like Stephen King get a lot of newbie writers to lay the description on so thick you wind up with multiple pages to describe something that’s not that important to the plot. Don’t get me wrong here; description is important, but so is subtlety.

Getting back to world-building, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-description when it comes to writing your book. It’s understandable to want to “paint a picture with words” to give your readers an immersive experience when they dive into your story. They may feel, despite your best efforts, that you’re beating them over the head like J.R.R. Tolkien on crack. I get that some authors thrive in this arena. I say more power to ‘em. There are cases where the world itself is a character, and the reader needs to know all these little tidbits on how magic and science and whatever else works in its ecosystem. That feels more like a niche than the norm. Don’t forget that some readers feel that the extra info-dumping is a ploy to increase the word count.

Ah, yes, we’re going to be speaking about word count next.

Repeat this phrase in your head with your mind’s best Tyler Durden voice: “Stories will be as long as they have to!” That being said, I recently had a conversation about word counts in books. I was told in no uncertain terms that if you want to query and compete with other authors vying for an agent in the competitive world of professional book querying, you’ll need to be around ninety thousand words, and the genre doesn’t matter. If you’ve gone over that mark, you might as well pack it up. No agent, no book deal, no anything—all because you had to have a book with ninety thousand and one words. I hope you’re happy with yourself! If you want to go over that mark, you’ll have to split it up into two books, so you might as well query it as “Book One of the Frosty Testicles Series” or whatever world event in which your book takes place.

Alright, I may have gotten too overcritical with the querying process in that last paragraph, but I take a heaping spoonful of umbrage with it. I won’t get into it now. Maybe that’ll be a topic for a future piece where I rant about choosing self-publishing, staying indie, and doing whatever the heck I want with my books.

Word count and/or page count may be the least important thing about your story. I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. Agents are looking for clones of what’s already selling. Most of them are unwilling to take risks. Well, the ones who accept queries from new authors they don’t know aren’t. Those who can afford to take the risk of grabbing an unknown author with a book with a decent twist on an existing genre aren’t scrolling social media hashtag agent games or poring over query letters from their email inbox into the deep, dark hours of the night searching for the special book to make them a boatload of money.

I feel like I’ve gone off the rails and fallen into a rant I promised not to make. I guarantee you it’s relevant, even if it does sound a bit snippy. Ninety thousand words is my average book length. It’s actually ninety-three thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven words based on what I’ve published (yes, I keep track of all the numbers). Confidentially speaking, the average word count of my books published and unpublished combined is just under a hundred thousand. This likely happened since I’ve written some chonky sci-fi and fantasy books coming soon. Elvenweed (2025), a comedy/fantasy novel about an elf selling elven-grown cannabis in a human kingdom, is around a hundred and sixty thousand words long, throwing off the total average.

But why am I telling you this in a piece I dedicated to talking about info-dumps and overdescription? I’m trying to prove a point, trust me. The elements of my world-building are there, but I don’t spend page after page in the opening chapters describing it. Another piece of aforementioned social media writing advice that went around a few years ago was how to start your books. It’s one of the tips with which I agree. The first sentence should throw your character ass-first into the story. For instance, the aforementioned Elvenweed book begins with the squire character lost in an enchanted forest after his squadron of knights left him behind. There isn’t a pause to add lengthy descriptions about the kingdom, the world in which it’s set, or the hierarchies included within it. That stuff comes later when the story dictates it. The world-building elements are embedded into the story subtly. The main reason for the high word count in Elvenweed comes from the large ensemble cast and a handful of crisscrossing story arcs. Sure, I can split this into two or maybe three books, but it’s all one story. Besides, I’m leary about putting out a series since “Book One of The Elvenweed Chronicles” may be a bit of a pill to swallow for a reader. They don’t know what to expect, so they may not want to start a series with no guarantee it will be good.

OK, time for another side-rant. I don’t enjoy writing books as part of a series. Some of my readers have asked me about sequels to particular books they enjoyed, but I always have the same response. I don’t plan to have sequels because I’m not interested in writing any of my plot ideas into full-blown series. The only exception to this was the Blood Drive Thrillogy (now available on the ‘Zon). I only did the second book because I got a really good idea for one, and I hadn’t thought of making the third book until I got to the end of writing the second book and realized there was more story to be told. The fourth book, a collection of shorts from the Blood Drive world called Blood Drives (get it?!), will drop in 2025 and finish filling in the blanks of that world. Again, subtly. The key for me doing this was having separate stories that aren’t direct sequels. You can pick any of them up and still get a complete story.

As a reader, I read books and stories of all lengths. Some of my favorites were novellas, barely over thirty thousand words. I’ve dove into era-spanning fantasies of four hundred thousand words or more, and I’ve also read epic series based around a singular character or world. I loved them all for various reasons, and the word count wasn’t important. A longer book can be daunting for some, but it goes double when that reader bases their decision on a review or a post on social media that’s blasting it for being bogged down with unnecessary world-building or narration.

They do this in movies too—maybe more so than in books. The most glaring example off the top of my head is the beginning of Marvel’s The Eternals. It begins with a narration about how the world, the stakes, and the heroes and villains of the movie operate. It’s a hundred percent unnecessary since all the information was written subtly into the story itself. Giving it all away at the start was a disservice to anyone in the theater or streaming it six months later. I get the feeling some movie exec at Disney who hires people to open his soda cans for him decided that subtle wasn’t the way to go and made the director tack on the narration so people wouldn’t complain it was too smart for a superhero movie. It’s a great movie, and that dumbing-down of the world-building at the start condescends like a sonofabitch.

I feel like this blog piece went off the rails a bit and for way too long, so I’m going to cut it off here. See, I can keep my word count short when necessary! There’s nothing inherently wrong with being prolific. If you’ve got a long story to tell, do it in whatever way you see fit. At the end of it all, you don’t have to listen to anything I’ve said here or any other writing advice found on the interwebs. A lot of this is my opinion based on my experiences. Don’t forget that it may be your world, but your readers also have to live in it. If they feel like you’re bogging them down with your narrative style of dumping everything on them all at once, you’re going to induce some yawns instead of excitement. Be cognizant of what you’re telegraphing in your stories, and keep a level head about building your world.

Subtly yours,

Daniel Aegan–1/31/24

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Looking to see some subtle world-building in action? Check out the latest by Daniel Aegan: In Search of Channel Void. It’s full of tons of sci-fi goodies, episodic chapters, and a cosmic energy storm that reshapes the world while twisting reality’s nipples. Don’t believe me? Read it for yourself!