Anticipation is Crucial for Story Telling

At the weekend I saw two films, War Horse and Iron Lady.  War Horse I had neither read the book nor seen the stage play.  Iron Lady I knew the story well, as it was the story of my own life as I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s.  So, which was the story that had me gripped, the one where I knew the plot or the one I didn't?

Iron Lady was the answer.  War Horse was so filled with cliche that you knew what was going to happen at every turn, and your anticipation was never wrong.  Will the horse and his boy ever meet again?  Well, what do you think?  I don't want to give the plot away, but every plot question was answered in exactly the way you expected.

Iron Lady, on the other hand, had the clever device of switching between Margaret Thatcher in the present (elderly, with the onset of dementia) with her incredible history.  You may have known the history, but you didn't know the present, nor when there were going to be parallels between the past and the present, nor when the switch was going to happen. 

When we read, we often anticipate the ending - the guy gets the girl, the murderer is uncovered, the jewels are found and restored to the rightful owner.  Anticipating the ending doesn't matter; in fact, we'll be disappointed if we don't get the answer we expect.  What we enjoy is not going the route we were expecting, but still ending up in the right place.  That's the trick of story telling: giving us what we expect but not in the way we expected it. 

Z is for ZZZzzzz

As a reader I love books that I simply have to finish.  They're the ones that I'm so absorbed by that I carry on reading late into the night, even though my eyelids are drooping and I'm finding it hard to focus.  Books that make a long boring journey happen in seconds.  Books which take my mind off domestic problems and whisk me away to more interesting places.  

Different types of books are going to work for different people - what makes me an insomniac may turn you into a narcoleptic - but I think a primary aim of an author should be to interest the reader to the point that they forget their circumstances, whatever that may be. 

The most basic method is to pose a 'Will they, won't they' question - will they, won't they discover the truth/get together/find out who dunnit.  Part of the skill is for the answer to appear obvious, so the reader thinks they know what they're getting, and then to do something entirely plausible but completely unexpected.  That'll keep them reading.  

A mistake many new writers make is to believe that the action has to be big and dramatic to make it unputdownable.  I read Family Album by Penelope Lively a couple of months ago and was riveted, even though it's a very small story on a limited domestic scale.  The characters were real and consistent, but never predictable. What was going to happen next?  Where was it going to end? I never knew and that kept me reading late into the night.  

So if you want to keep your readers from going to zzzz then keep them guessing the answers to your story questions, and then give them answers they weren't expecting.  

Workshoppers and Readers - Why You Need Both

I am a BIG fan of workshopping - giving and getting feedback is the quickest way to develop as a writer, in my opinion. But it shouldn't be used as the only method of working on a novel.

The problem is that workshops, by their nature, can only look at small pieces at a time - a chapter or maybe two would be the maximum. You can (and should) edit each section thoroughly but be careful of losing sight of the bigger picture. The question 'Does the story work?' can only be answered by looking at the novel as a whole, not in little sections.

So, you need to find some people who will be readers. It's a good idea if they can be different to your workshoppers so they can come to the story fresh. It's good if they're writers too, but they don't have to be, so long as they read your genre. That's essential. Ask them about the story, ask them about how the characters are coming across, ask them about pace. Don't ask them to do a line edit - leave that for your workshop group.

I know several people who have spent years workshopping their novels, when IMO they'd be better off sending it out to readers. I understand why people do this - no one wants to ask a friend (let alone a book doctor) to commit several hours of their time to reading your novel until it's as perfect as you can possibly make it - but at some point it has to be done.

The perfect pattern would be: workshop until the first draft is done. Then send it out to readers, to check the story as whole works. Then back to workshopping to refine the text. Repeat as required.

Think of your editing as beautiful embroidery on a dress. There's little point in doing the finest work if the fabric of the dress is poor, or the style is wrong. Getting that right is what a reader will help you to do, and the workshop will help with the embroidery.

What's In It For The Reader?

Lots of writers say things along the lines of 'they just want to get read' so I must be in a minority on this one because I'm indifferent if my books are read or not.  I want them to be bought, because that's how I make my living, but read...?  It's not a big issue for me.  I write, I get work finished and sold, and that's enough for me.

But even though I write without thinking about whether my books are going to be read or not, I am very conscious in the editing process about what's in it for the reader.  I don't think it matters exactly what the reader is going to get out of investing their time - lots of exciting action, beautiful use of language, interesting historical information, insight into human emotions, a removal from this mundane world into a fantasy land - but I think the writer should know what it is they're offering - and then deliver.

I've been thinking about this because I've workshopped a friend's memoir for a couple of years. In our workshopping group, we know each other so well that we're sometimes blunt: 'It's interesting to us because we know you, but it wouldn't interest anyone else'. The discussions gradually centred around 'why would an outsider want to read this?'  Sometimes the answers suggested that the author should go down more sensational or personal paths than she wanted to go, so she had to find other pathways.  

I'm pleased to say that the memoir has found a publisher, the contracts have been signed, and the book is scheduled for publication in 2012.  I like to think that asking What's in it for the Reader? helped.  It's made me go back to my own work and ask the same question.  

I know what I think I'm offering the reader - do you?

And Another Rude Poem that Goes Too Far

We can go too far with showing not telling. This is the poem I was originally going to recite at the Get Writing Conference last Saturday:

Mary had a little lamb.

She also had a duck.

She put them on the mantlepiece

To see if they'd...fall off.

It's just not as funny. Yet we're still relying on the audience identifying and then supplying the missing word, exactly as in yesterday's poem. I think it's not as funny for two reasons: the missing word is generally considered ruder and cruder, and the substitution weakens the joke.

When you're writing, you're creating a world. You want to lure the reader into your world and keep them there. They're usually keen to stay, but can be jolted out. By being crude, the reader is startled out of their comfort zone. I was interested to learn that several friends preferred my later novels because there was less 'bad language'. Now, I don't think there's much in any of my novels, but I took their comments on board. The 'bad language' had jolted them out of their comfort zones and away from my story world.

And then there's the substitution. I think this weakens the joke by pointing out that it IS a joke, a contrivance. The reader doesn't feel as clever as they did in yesterday's poem when they did the work and substituted the word. Instead, it's a trick, and they're the ones being tricked. The subtext runs: You're expecting this rude word, but - ha ha - it's something else quite innocuous.

So there has to be a balance. If we use showing not telling, but make what we're showing too obscure and difficult, it becomes too much like hard work and the reader will give up. If we mislead the reader, the reader will turn away. Sometimes telling is the right thing to do. Part of the writer's job is learning about the balance and getting it right.

When I told my partner of my poetry plans for the talk at the Get Writing Conference he said I must have balls of steel (!) to contemplate reading out such material in front of a group of strangers. Yesterday's poem got a laugh, today's wouldn't. On Saturday I got the balance of smut:crudity right. Tomorrow maybe I won't. Who knows? It's all a matter of trial and error and, balls of steel or not, isn't it fun to be playing and experimenting?

Teasing the Reader

I was asked by a student recently if it was okay to have two characters be attracted to each other, to nearly have sex, but then decide not to at the last minute. Would the readers be disappointed?

The only answer to this was: Yes. No. Maybe.

If your novel is entirely about these two characters getting together and they don't, then the reader will be disappointed. I read a novel a few years back where the main character doesn't realise X is the man for her until near the end (despite lots of Unresolved Sexual Tension simmering between them), then finally at the end of Chapter 23 decides to tell him how she feels. I eagerly turned the page to Chapter 24 and read: The following year... What had happened in that following year was quickly summarised, and the book ended with every one happy except me, the reader. There had been all that emotional build up, and for nothing. The author had cheated me of the scene when the two characters got together.

On the other hand, if we'd had the scene and it had all gone wrong, X had revealed that he'd been interested but had got fed up with waiting and was now involved with Y I'd have been - not exactly happy (because I'm a sucker for a happy ending), but satisfied as a reader. In Adaptation Charlie Kauffman does much the same, and it sits naturally with the main character's story line. Joanna Trollope did something similar in The Men and the Girls and not only was it satisfying, it worked better than the more traditional ending.

So, in answer to the question, it's not compulsory to fulfill reader expectations; in fact, it can work just as well if we subvert their expectations and give them something different. What is compulsory is that we write the scene. It's not okay to cop out and write: The following year...