Maximum Absorption II: The Sequel

Last week, we said this:

A book, in any genre, is good to the extent that it absorbs its audience.

That means that the book holds your imagination when you’re not reading it, but also that it holds your attention with particular fierceness while you are reading it. You can’t glide quickly over a sentence (or paragraph or scene) because you’re aware there may be some crucial weight or implication which you’d miss.

Last week, we looked at how a fairly short piece of dialogue can convey whole layers of meanings to the reader. In fact, my explanation of what those meanings were ran to more than two times the length of the dialogue itself.

This week, I want to illustrate how you can build absorption into your work at almost every level, from bog to small. So for example:

The Twist

The classic plot twist isn’t something that features much in my work, but you can think of Big Twists – like the mid-book reveal of Real Amy in Gone Girl, or the shower scene in Psycho – where the entire book hangs on a moment of revelation or upended expectations.

Those twists work in part because the book is forcing the reader to work hard.  So, to take the Gone Girl example, the reader spent the first half of the book trying to figure out the relationship between Nick and Amy, based on his (basically honest) narrative and her (very dishonest) diaries. Then you hit the plot twist and all the past understanding has to be recomputed in light of the new information. Nick’s position suddenly looks very different. Amy’s character looks very different. The reader can’t coast through these changes. They have to ditch one map and rapidly, construct a new one … while also mentally understanding the genius-but-diabolical nature of Amy’s fraud.

Plot complexity

I don’t really go in for the kind of twist where the book hinges in a moment. But – like many crime writers – I do make use of plot complexity. Think, for example, of a Raymond Chandler novel. The plot is tangled enough that, even when you’ve only just finished the book, you’d struggle to recap what you’ve just read.

That means, of course, that as you read, you need to pay close attention. (“Hmm. So Marlowe is chasing Moose Malloy’s girlfriend, but then he’s to help deliver a ransom payment for another client, when he’s banged on the head, and that client is killed, but then Anne Riordan picks him up – and, hold on, who the heck is Anne Riordan anyway?”)

The sheer intricacy of the structure means that you have to focus relentlessly on each page, because you’re worried that you’ll miss some essential fact if you don’t.

Result: absorption – and a happy reader.

World-building

Another example: world-building.

The phrase (a good one) is used mostly in relation to speculative fiction but, really, you construct a world for every book and the interest you create in that world is a powerful mechanism for absorption.

So take Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Early in chapter one, we encounter the famous sentence, “The King is pregnant.”

Bam! You can feel how electrifying that phrase is. In four words, the reader learns something crazily unexpected about the world they now inhabit. The result: they start reading the text with intensity, keen to gather further clues about the way this world operates.

That’s a classic SF example, but you can take something as simple as Before I Go To Sleep, about an amnesiac who comes to doubt the story she has about who she is. That world is our world – muesli-eating, clipped-lawn suburbia – but it’s still the fascination of the world-building that keeps people glued to the text.

Locations

Even much smaller descriptions of place can force the reader to pay close attention. In one of my books, Fiona is abducted by bad guys, has a very horrible experience, and ends up taking shelter with her friend Lev, who lives in a squat. Here’s Fiona’s arrival at that lovely place:

The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor-quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.

Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.

Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.

Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.

I don’t say anything.

There’s no dialogue in this scene. No astonishing bit of writing. Much of the text is basically a list of nouns: a can of water, a wash bowl, a primus stove …

Yet the contrast between Fiona’s fragile emotional state and the uncomfortable starkness of this places forces itself at the reader. Again, the reader is being made to work. They have to assess how this place is going to work for Fiona. There’s also the tremble of some kind of conflict in the air: Lev presumably thinks this place is OK, Fiona thinks … what? The work involved in figuring these things out keeps the reader (I hope!) glued to the page.

Humour

Humour plays a huge role in writing and not only in books that set out to be comedies. The reason is simply that humour (like dialogue) has a vibrancy that keeps readers on high alert – like an audience hanging on the words of a talented stand up.

The extract above about Lev’s squat continues thus:

I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.

I mean, that’s not laugh-out-loud funny or anything like that, but – in context – a funny response to the situation Fiona’s now in. The description of the squat introduced a hint of conflict (is this place suitable for Fiona right now?) and here we get the first outright declaration of Fiona’s feelings. So short paragraph delivers some humour – that contrast between “girly girl” and “spent the weekend being tortured” – plus a development of the nascent conflict. The result is intended to be a paragraph that the reader can’t safely skip over. The text demands absorption not skimming.

Words

You can take this emphasis on absorption right down to individual words. In an email a while back, I wrote:

Here’s a sentence made up of the Dull Five Thousand [ie: the most common words in English]: “A bird had somehow got into the room and, unable to find a way out, flapped feebly at the windows.”

Here’s a sentence that draws richly from the glittering parades [ie: more interesting vocab]: “There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once – in the chill of late autumn – Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jewelled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon.)”

The second sentence is from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Signature of All Things, and its language forces attention in the way that my first version of that sentence clearly didn’t.

That phrase – a jewelled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon – isn’t particularly hard to decode. It’s not like the kind of literary writing that you need an English degree to understand. But it forces the reader to do some work: “OK. Yes. Parabolic flight of bird = missile shot from cannon, got that. And right, hummingbirds are colourful, hence jewelled missile. Got it.”

The sentence forces the reader to do some work, but that work is rewarded by a valuable payoff

Rewarding work

And that’s the whole deal. Getting readers absorbed in your book is all about:

1. Making the readers work damn hard, AND
2. Rewarding that labour as generously as you can

That’s the whole deal. The secret of writing.

Adult fiction, kids’ fiction, non-fiction, short stories, poems. Heck, it’s the secret of writing emails like this. It’s the secret of query letters or book blurbs or pretty much anything at all. Your mission – maximum absorption – operates at every level from plot to word choice. So all you need to do now is implement that strategy.

Easy, no?

Oh, and thanks to Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash for the delightful header image 🙂