The innocent abroad

I’m re-writing an old novel which is set on an orbital shipyard.  I had, unusually for me, a good idea of what the structure looked like in that original book.  But when I read the text, it was, as usual, very lacking in description of the setting.

One of the devices I’ve used to get this across in the new text is that of the innocent abroad.  This is a character who is new to a place, and who knows little, or nothing, about it.  It’s a great device for telling information to the reader.

It works like this: the new character arrives somewhere and needs to know something, so they ask a local who knows.  That person can then tell your clueless character what you need the reader to know. And if you make the information-sharing happen as part of a conversation, dialogue breaks up descriptions beautifully.

I’ve done something similar in a novella I’ve just revised (again) and submitted.  The innocent abroad there is a new President, who knows absolutely nothing about the atrocity that drives the story.  So I have the Security Chief tell her the history of the matter.

In early drafts of that novella I was guilty of a classic info-dump.  The chief told the President about the issue in one long monologue, which went on for about five pages.  Clearly, that wasn’t going to work.

So in the rewrite I’ve broken the conversation up.  I have the President reacting to the shocking things she’s learning, and questioning the security chief.  And I have her internal dialogue about the dark things she’s learning.  I team that up with actions such as her getting up from her seat to stand at the window watching people walking in a park below.  That then links into her emotions and internal dialogue, as she thinks that all those innocent people at risk of being murdered - and they don’t even know it.  The info-dump has now become a dynamic dialogue between the two characters, and works much better.

Going back to my novel, another way I’ve broken information up is by having different characters converse with my innocent abroad.  This book is multi-viewpoint, told in five viewpoints, so it’s easy to break up information and spread it out in small parcels between these characters.

The innocent abroad notices the small details about a place which the regular inhabitants have stopped registering.  This makes the new person the ideal one to describe the landscape they’re moving through.  In my novel, my new character sees the personal transport pod system as chaotic, whereas the regulars know it works.

I often underwrite setting descriptions, and using the innocent abroad is a good way to force me to slow down, look through their eyes, and really analyse what they’re seeing in that fictional world.