Hello, writers. I know some of y’all don’t like it when I talk about rules, so you might want to avert your eyes, but the best writing rule I’ve ever learned is
Give the reader a break.
I think that’s the rule that enabled me to step out of my piles of rejection slips. Like a lot of writers, I wanted my clever readers to figure out what I meant through my oh-so-subtle hints. The thing is, even though our readers are, of course, very clever, they might have other things on their minds than following our subtle hints. Most readers read for enjoyment rather than to appreciate our subtlety.
During times of extreme stress and/or mental nonavailability I always like to tuck into a little Marion Chesney. She writes Regency romances, which I don’t otherwise read. And she believes in telling, not showing. I doubt there’s a writer alive who believes in telling, not showing to the extent Ms. Chesney does. When your world is going mad, telling, not showing is just what you want in a writer.
Most editors like a bit of telling, not showing. Sometimes you need to Tell in order for your readers to know what’s going on. I’ve occasionally had an editor ask why something is happening – was this established earlier? And I’ll say why yes, I hinted at it on page 45.
Not good enough. If the editor didn’t pick up on the hint, the reader won’t either. Especially as the editor may be on her third or fourth read-through. You either need to hint a few more times, or just state the thing baldly: “Francis suspected Esme was cheating on him. In fact, he was sure of it. Why did she always run down to the mailbox when the mailman came, and why did it always take her at least 45 minutes to return?”
All that being said, there are degrees of giving-the-reader-a-break. There’s a continuum. At one end lies Ms. Chesney. At the other end lie the more abstruse samples of what I guess is literary fiction—writers who invent their own language and write the book in it, for example.
There are probably endless gradations in between.
The thing is while you might want to make your reader work for something in the story—to figure out who the narrator really is, for example—you don’t want to make the reader work for everything. Because s/he’s probably not there to work. S/he’s probably there to relax.
Just be conscious of what you’re giving away and what you’re asking the reader to work for, and in most cases, try to keep the latter to a minimum.
Tonight’s challenge:
Last week’s challenge generated many fine stories about giant cockroaches. Because you all engaged at least three senses, I really felt I was there with your giant cockroaches. So I thought maybe tonight we’d focus instead on the
Least Grebe. (You’ll note he is “the most poorly understood of North American grebes.”)
Here’s the setup—
A Callow Youth, having narrowly escaped from an evil wizard with the aid of his Stout Companion and a magic mirror, is still on the run, slogging through a swamp. The two adventurers encounter a Least Grebe. This Least Grebe is damned important to the narrative—he’s not just scenery. He might turn out to be the key to everything, in fact.
Write a passage (it can be description, dialogue, action, whatever you want) in which the Least Grebe is either
1. there for some obscure purpose that you think the reader should guess, or
2. just being introduced for future use, so in this scene the reader’s attention is drawn to the grebe for the first of several times (this is called “seeding”), or
3. actively doing or saying something that’s important to the narrative now
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