I was talking with a friend yesterday about Vernor Vinge. My friend just finished reading A Deepness in the Sky, and I’m still partway through A Fire Upon the Deep. A lot of people have told me that they like to read Vinge because he makes his readers feel smart. He doesn’t spell everything out for them.

The conversation got me to thinking about my own style of writing in the first draft. My super writing weakness (one of them, anyway) is using big sections of text to explain what’s going on rather than revealing character, setting, and plot by showing what’s happening. Usually I go back through on the second draft and delete these infodumps in order to let my readers connect the dots.

So, revealing the story so that the reader can figure it out seems to be a balancing act. It’s akin to those old connect-the-dots exercises in activity books. The writer’s job is to draw enough dots that the reader can connect them correctly in order to see the big picture.

The writers who draw too many dots, or connect dots that readers can obviously connect by themselves, make a reader feel stupid. A writer who draws just enough dots and lets the readers connect the rest make readers feel smart. A writer who draws too few dots will make discerning readers feel smart and the rest of the readers feel stupid and/or confused.

According to my friend, Vinge makes some readers feels smart and others feel stupid/confused. I can’t tell from my own experience of Vinge, since I’m not done with the book yet. But the prologue to that thing had me scratching me head, wondering where exactly to connect the dots.

Anyway, just another way to look at infodumps. I’m striving for the middle ground. Not too hot, not too cold. But that medium amount of dot drawing that is considered just right.