Hello, writers. Thank you very much to everyone who wrote stirring and informative Write On! diaries during this past fall and winter, while I was living in a house without internet access. I have a question in the comments below about where we go from here, and I hope you’ll take the time to give your thoughts.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the extent to which a novel or story is a spell, and how writers have to decide, consciously, when to sustain the spell and when to break it.
The spell, of course, is a kind of hypnosis in which the reader agrees to immerse him/herself into the world the writer has created and accept all its parameters as real. The reader’s part in this is called the suspension of disbelief; the writer’s part in it is building the spell so strongly that suspension of disbelief is possible.
(This is perhaps why being told someone else's dream is boring; we have no need to suspend disbelief. We know it’s a dream.)
Anyway, a few things have me thinking about this. One was a conversation with another writer who was trying to decide whether to include the word “gay” in a fantasy story. Someone else had complained the word felt anachronistic. I’ve had similar complaints about the use of “well, duh” and “cool” in the Jinx series.
The fact is, if a reader says the spell is broken, then it is, at least for them. You’ve thrown in something— an anachronism, a word that doesn’t seem to go with how the reader imagines the characters speaking, a concept (e.g. religious freedom) that the reader thinks is foreign to the setting you’ve created— and as far as that individual reader is concerned, the suspension of disbelief has snapped. Or at least made a loud TWANG.
So the questions for a writer are:
1. Are a lot of other readers going to feel the same way?
and
2. Did you do it on purpose?
If the answer to #1 is “no”, then you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. Should you change the buzz-killing word, sentence or scene in order to placate a small number of readers? (My answer to that with the Jinx series was “no”. All the complainants were adults. The characters aren’t speaking English anyway. And I wanted to convey a sense that the books are set in the present day.)
If the answer to #1 is “yes”, then you should ask yourself the second question. Did you do it a-purpose?
Examples of TWANGs that are probably not done on purpose are historical novels where characters default to thinking like 21st century Americans (valuing the individual over the group, automatically believing that all people are created equal, etc etc); language that is clearly anachronistic (in a book I read as a child, a boy on the Oregon Trail makes a pun and then says “Get it, Dad?”); or reminders that the world of the story is not real at all (what we’ve discussed before as 4th-wall moments.)
Examples of what are probably intentional TWANGs:
-Terry Pratchett’s footnotes (mentioning British Rail or cars up on blocks in the semi-pre-industrial Discworld)
-The infamous Epilogue at the end of the last Harry Potter book, which stays within the world but intentionally snaps the reader out of its “present”
-The last chapter of a novel from a couple years ago, Hokey Pokey
-The movie (but not the book) ending of Wizard of Oz
I think these were done for different reasons. In Mr. Pratchett’s case, he could just get away with it; it was a Pratchett Exception (one of many). In Ms. Rowling’s case, I think she’d become rather alarmed at the obsession level of her fans, and was intentionally creating a 19-year distance in hopes things would calm down a little.
In Hokey Pokey, the fantasy world is a metaphor for childhood, and in the last chapter the world is shown not to have been real at all. Critics loved this. I accepted it as the writer’s choice. Librarians I talked to about it were not happy. I think it would be fair to say it didn’t work for a goodly proportion of readers.
I’m not sure about this, but I think the Wizard of Oz ending was changed from the book because of some concern about how a fantasy world would be perceived by the movie-going public. Anyway, “it was all a dream” is surely one of the most annoying tropes in fiction.
But I really started thinking about all this because of a reader comment about my most recent book, Jinx’s Fire. The guy complained that I apparently hadn’t known how to tie up all the story threads at the end.
This put my nose out of joint. I intentionally didn't tie up all the story threads at the end.
The next day, I got an email from a kid who said that he’d finished the series a couple days ago but he felt like he was still in the Urwald.
Bingo. I realized why I had ended it that way. Many fantasy series end with a partial spell-breaking, the revelation that everything happened long, long ago. The Prydain Chronicles end that way. The appendices of Lord of the Rings convey that impression. The Harry Potter Epilogue at least takes the protagonists into a settled, married, child-minding, adventureless future. So I now realize the reason I ended my series as I did was because I wanted to keep the spell immediate. I wanted readers to think of the characters as still living their lives while the readers are living theirs.
Sorry to go on so long! Short version: Break the spell only when you need to, and always with intention.
Tonight’s challenge:
Write a scenelet, under 150 words in length, in which you throw in one TWANG that breaks the spell.
Write about anything you like, or use something from our handy list o’ scenarios:
- Goodwife Thankful Goodheart is feeding her hens and minding her own business when she sees that awful Agnes Addlepate giving her the evil eye.
- Belinda sees Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) leaving the ballroom on the arm of her rival, Adelaide, who isn’t even capable of appreciating all he went through in the Peninsular Wars
- The battle isn’t going so well for intrepid mercenary soldier Wallace Higginbotham.
- A callow youth and his/her stout companion, having finally found the sacred Jewel of Togwogmagog, lose it again.
-Incorruptible detective Scotty Blaine delivers a warning to the local mob boss.
The Write On! timeslot is presently Thurs 7 pm ET (4 pm Pacific), but we’re gonna talk about that below.
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