It’s taken me over a week to write this blog post. It’s been in my head, and I got as far as clicking the ‘New Post’ button and writing a title and then…I open it every day and stare at it and don’t finish the thought.
It’s not because it’s a difficult or contraversial subject. It’s pretty far from it, at least in my opinion. It’s because my state of mind doesn’t support being verbose right now.
I’m going to publicly state it’s because I wrote too many words last month and have run out. It’s not the real reason, but it sounds good on screen ^_^
Anyway…questions, right? I’ve been thinking about this, because it’s something that’s nibbled at the back of my sanity lobe in my brain for as long as I’ve been getting critiques on my writing.
On the one hand we hear that questions keep someone reading. They turn the page because they want to see what happens next. If all the questions are answered, there’s no reason to move forward.
On the other hand we hear things like “I had too many questions, it was confusing. This kept me from reading further.”
And my poor little gray-matter would melt because on the surface, the two statements so completely contradict each other.
Because so rarely does anyone giving this advice stop to point out there’s a difference between good and bad questions. People have tried to explain this concept to me, but it’s taken a long time for it to click. I’m kind of slow sometimes.
It’s finally coming together in my brain, though. Which is recongealing even as I type. Sort of. I’ve been trying to put some structure around this concept to make it easier to grasp…let’s see if I can.
A bad question is the kind that confuses the reader. When they say “Wait. The snurble just flarked the rankle with a gorb? WTF?” That’s a bad question. If the message conveyed is so completely out of context to your reader that they can’t even picture if the scene is good, bad, sad, happy, funny, romantic, etc, they can’t get into it. They won’t know if they need to keep reading, because they don’t know what they’re reading.
I read a first chapter yesterday that had this effect on me. I wish I could say otherwise because it was a published book by an author I enjoy. I decided to try a new series of theirs and…two paragrahs in I was confounded by the rankle and the gorb.
So a good question would be the opposite of that. Right? I think that makes sense. A good question would be “okay, Maryanne just decided to talk to Jake because they’re having relationship issues. How will Jake respond?” There’s enough information about the character and the situation to know what has happened, and that makes you want to see what will happen next.
I think this is something that’s always an issue in my writing. I assume (not consciously) that the reader sees the subtext that is my thoughts and therefore can draw logical conclusions. It never occurs to me to explain the snurble until I’ve already lost them during the flarking.
So I’m making a conscious effort to keep the snurbles in my narrative flark free until I place them in context.
What’s your thought on the whole thing?
I have the same problem when I’m revising. I know I’ve written it, so I assume the reader knows what I’m thinking, but then I’ve cut that whole chapter and written something new, so now the snurbles and flarks make no sense….
My thought is that genre writers have a harder time with this than literary or contemporary or whatever you want to call them-writers. Because we have snurbles, and we are justly admonished not to engage in the “as you know, doctor…” info-dumps. It’s a fine balancing act, it takes a lot of practice, and I think it involves being a little telly-er than I would expect.
Also I think it’s easier to bring the snurbles in if the people are pretty much still people. This is my own pet theory about speculative fiction, but I posit that in order for a story to make sense the people (be they human or giant reptiles or Ewoks or whatever) have to behave in a way we recognize and understand. If the people make sense, we can layer on the snurbles and our reader will trust us enough to believe we will explain.
So the Ewok’s war doesn’t have to be explained much– it kinda make sense to us because rebellion makes sense to us. But the concept of the Force takes exposition, because we have to understand precisely how the magic system works. Or, for instance, in the Chronicles of Amber we get to meet Corwin and recognize his personality (fun at a party, wouldn’t lend him my car keys though) and, through the clever device of his amnesia, have everything explained as he figures it out.
“I assume (not consciously) that the reader sees the subtext that is my thoughts and therefore can draw logical conclusions.”
Yup. I do this all the time. :/
I think often writers feel if things aren’t clear it will just intrigue the reader into wanting to know more. But readers require a solid base to work from. The reader needs to have an idea of what the problem is, rather than that a character is feeling worried (and if you keep reading you’ll find out what she’s worried about later). It’s when you have subtext without context that the snurble hits the flark.
mood
Moody Writing
@mooderino
The Funnily Enough
mood
Love your descriptive terms 🙂
But I think we all have this problem – know which are the right questions for the reader to be asking. I read my own stuff over so often I find myself deleting phrases, thinking the reader has already known that . .
Not easy to separate what’s in my head with what’s actually written.
………dhole