The Proto-Draft

Sometimes it's called scaffolding. It's that stuff that you've got to write to make part of a story clear in your own head, but doesn't work as finished story. Stuff dealing with the background of character relationships, or (in speculative genres) the hows and whys of the technology, magic or creepy stuff that's essential to making the story work.

In a novel, it may be possible to have an infodump work, especially in relatively hard sf. A lot of readers of Heinlein, Weber, Kratman, etc. actually enjoy those solid blocks of information about the hows and whys of the science, technology and political systems that make the world work. It makes the imagined world read more real for them.

But that's not true for all readers -- I know some readers who absolutely will not read some of my favorite authors because of their information-feed techniques. And a short story won't have room for all of that information, so you have to very carefully choose what's the absolutely essential parts that must be explicitly presented to the reader and find ways to salt them into the story.

As I'm working on "The Man I Love Is on the Moon," I'm running into that problem -- I've just written a lengthy passage in which the protagonist is reflecting upon how the current situation makes her think of a similar space disaster when she was a kid. It's important stuff, both the backstory (which is so critical to how Kitty Strowger became who and what she is) and the current events on the world scene. But it's just her telling the reader all this information directly (since it's written in first person), and I'm not sure that it works as a short story. I've seen plenty of first-person novels that stop the action so the protagonist can directly address the reader and tell about how he or she became interested in a line of work, or suchlike (the one I'm currently reading, Travis S. Taylor's Warp Speed, does, and it really gives you a feeling of this down-home sort of guy sitting there and telling you the story over a couple of beers). But when you've got only a few thousand words, can you spare the room for recollections?

I'm hoping that, as I get a completed text, I'll be able to see how to get the critical information woven into character interactions so it isn't just a big lump of the protagonist telling the reader Important Stuff.