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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2555472" data-attributes="member: 2205">For many years, it's been my ambition to write a novel of fantasy or science fiction, although I've never done much about it.  Due to many things I lack: time, energy, discipline, confidence, etc., I've made one excuse after another and not done much of anything with it, other than a few very fitful occasional starts at something.Now, I'm actually putting my nose to the grindstone (part of a big self-improvement plan dreamed up by my wife where we actually, y'know, make goals and attempt to keep them) and getting somewhere with it.One of the things that people always tell would-be and knew writers is to know when to cut stuff that you've already written.  Don't get too attached to it.  In that spirit, here's a chunk of my novel that I've decided to cut.Mostly as a homage of sorts to Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of my favorite authors and highly inspirational to what I'm writing, I started the book off with a framing introduction or prologue, wherein a normal Joe receives the fantastic story that goes on to make up the remainder of the book.  I was--sadly--too tempted to turn that framing chapter into an information dump about the setting so I didn't have to work some of that stuff in later.  Thinking on that, and realizing that was a bad idea, I went to revise the introduction to remove the tedious information dump aspects of it, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought the entire concept of the framing chapter should probably be scrapped.So here, I present to you, the cut portion of my novel; the introduction that would have come before the novel itself started, information dump and all.  This is all unedited.Anyway, to give this thread a direction for future discussion, how do you handle the need to pass on setting information to the reader?  I've seen a few methods in novels I've read where I've consciously noted the strategy.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The ERB Method: Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters were actual Earthmen, so when they went to Barsoom, or Pellucidar, Amtor, or whatever other exotic setting, they were learning stuff at the same rate as the reader, making information dumps actually make some sense.  This won't work for me; my characters are not Earthlings.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Robert Jordan Method:  Jordan's characters start off as isolated and provincial people in a quaint little countryside and culture that is very familiar to us.  He doesn't have to do much "ethnography" of the setting until they start travelling a bit, and then stuff is as new to them as to us the reader.  That won't work well for me either; there are no quaint and familiar areas of my setting.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Steven Erikson Method: Don't tell your readers anything, except what they can pick up through context.  Maybe halfway through the third book they'll finally start to piece together what the setting is like.  This method doesn't work for me either, because it annoys the crap out of me--I had to put down Erikson in disgust, made all the more disgusting by the fact that I suspected that if I could ever overcome my frustration about not being able to figure anything about the setting out, the stories would probably be pretty good. </li> </ol>Any more strategies?</blockquote>

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