Creating stories is fun, isn't it? Chances are, your novel flows like a movie in your head, complete with character studies, story images, and script notes. Heck, I bet I could ask you how your MC would feel or what s/he would do in a particular situation, and you could tell me — even if it wasn't in your book! You know your story and your characters frontwards and backwards, inside and out. And your readers don't. This is the reason new writers are so prone to committing the infamous info dump . What qualifies as a dump? Basically, it's any information you include that the reader doesn't need to know to understand the scene or (initially) bond with the characters. Although a dump can happen at any point in a story, and often does, they're usually worse at or near the beginning. Sometimes it helps to come at a problem from a different direction, so let's do that.