Every fantasy writer faces the same temptation. You've spent months (years, decades) crafting a world with its own religions, trade routes, blood feuds, and calendar systems. You want readers to see it all.
So you do what feels natural: you explain.
And that's where manuscripts go to die.
The Iceberg Principle
Hemingway argued that the dignity of a story's movement comes from what the writer knows but leaves unsaid—the seven-eighths of the iceberg hidden beneath the water. Fantasy world-building works the same way.
You need to know 100% of your world's history. Your reader needs roughly 10%—the fraction that affects what's happening right now, on this page, to these characters.
The rest? It's not wasted. It's ballast. It's what makes your world feel real rather than invented on the fly. Readers sense the weight of what you're not telling them. That weight creates gravity.
The Tea Cup Rule
Here's a practical test: never explain the history of the tea trade when two characters are simply having tea.
Only explain the tea trade if the tea is poisoned because of a trade war—and even then, feed it through the scene's tension rather than halting everything for a lecture.
Ursula K. Le Guin did this masterfully. In The Left Hand of Darkness, we learn about Gethenian biology not through textbook explanations but through Genly Ai's confusion, his mistakes, his slow adjustment. The world reveals itself through friction.
The Golden Ratio in Practice
So what's the actual ratio? It shifts by scene, but a useful heuristic: for every piece of world-building you include, ask yourself three questions:
- Does my protagonist need to know this now to act?
- Will withholding this create productive confusion or just frustration?
- Can I show this through action, dialogue, or sensory detail instead of exposition?
If you answer "no" to the first two and "yes" to the third, you've found your move.
The Real Secret
Info-dumping isn't really about information. It's about trust—or lack of it. Writers info-dump because they don't trust readers to follow along, and they don't trust their own world to reveal itself organically.
Build the iceberg. Then let your readers discover it one cold, gleaming edge at a time.