Ambiguity and how to make the reader work

As youse know, I’m reading Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle at the moment. (I’m three-quarters of the way through and still enjoying it.)

And there’s a critical scene in it. The seventeen-year-old narrator, Cassandra, has an elder sister, Rose, who has an inner anger or ruthlessness together with a detestation of her family’s poverty. She is also, true to the book’s Jane Austenian roots, very beautiful and of marriageable age.

The Man With Money – the Mr Darcy role – is played by Simon, a charming American with pots of cash and an unfortunate beard.  Rose has been – crudely at first, then more cleverly – seeking to win Simon’s heart. And eventually she succeeds. In the scene I want to talk about, Rose persuades Simon to shave. He asks her to marry him. She doesn’t say yes, but asks him to kiss her. He does so. She then says, yes, she’ll marry him.

OK, so the facts are clear. But the interpretation of those facts is anything but.

Simon’s brother, Neil, thinks he knows. He yells at Cassandra, ‘She’s a gold-digger. And you know it.’

Cassandra hotly denies this – then reddens, because perhaps she thinks it too. Then, after things have calmed down a bit, Neil accepts that maybe Rose has fallen for Simon. In due course, the always-truthful Rose tells Cassandra that she really does love him. Phew!

Except –

Those conflicting initial responses to the news never really leave us. What are Roses’s real motives? How authentic is her passion? It’s those questions (and Cassandra’s own emotional rollercoaster) that dominate the next chunk of the book.

And the book works because it leaves these questions open.

Pretty much any book of quality will hang on scenes where some story situation just isn’t wholly resolved. The reader is presented with all the available evidence, but that evidence can still be argued both ways.

And ideally, the picture is ambiguous not simply because the data is fragmentary, but because the actual truth is shaded and complex.

So, yes, Rose is a gold-digger. She wants money. She’s perfectly capable of acting manipulatively to achieve her ends.

But also – she’s a young woman encountering her first real love and with enough self-awareness to doubt herself. (Hence getting Simon to kiss her before she answered his “Marry me” question.)

She’s both things at once: gold-digger and young woman in love.

Interestingly, the reason why ambiguity works so well – and why it’s so important for your fiction – is that it forces readers to work.

Now that sounds like it might be a bad thing to do. Books are meant to be entertaining, right? So why make readers work? We should be helping them to sit back and relax, no?

But making readers work is the whole deal. It’s everything.

Readers are gripped by a book when they are intensely engaged by it. That’s your purpose in writing it: intense engagement.

Since readers – most of them – are human, they are hugely engaged by the act of trying to interpret ambiguous but consequential human behaviour. The more you can sustain the ambiguity and deepen the consequences, the more you force that intense engagement.

I can’t think of a really good book that doesn’t, somewhere, make use of that basic tool. I think, in fact, it’s central to good writing.

Macbeth? He murdered a king, but his moral awareness is still what illuminates the centre of that play.

Hannibal Lecter? He’s a multiple murderer and a cannibal, and is anyone’s definition of an awful human being. But he was also, once, a terrific psychiatrist and he is the only one who can find a way through to the dark heart of what troubles Clarice Starling, the novel’s FBI protagonist.

And, strangely, ambiguity is the gift that keeps on giving. I write series fiction, which puts one character on the page for a series that has now passed the 750,000 word mark. Yet I still play the same games. On one page, Fiona is infuriating. On the next, she’s funny. Then brilliant. Then hopeless. Then heroic. Then back to infuriating.

How do you read her? How does your understanding encompass her?

It’s not easy and it’s meant to be. The result (I hope) has a kind of coherence – because chaos isn’t ambiguous or rich; it’s just chaotic – but I keep making the reader work.

A hard-working reader is a reader who’s gripped.

So ambiguity and rich contradictions are your friends. Keep those things alive through the book. Rock your reader to and fro over that hump of uncertainty.

Rose is a gold-digger? Rose is not a gold-digger?

She loves him? She loves him not?

Whatever your story-question is, you want to keep both answers alive and – often – find a way to say “yes” to both opposing readings.

It’s a fun way to read, but it’s also a hell of a fun way to write.