The easiest technique in fiction

Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.

Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really. 

So:

Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.

It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.

She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.

Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…

I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.

The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.

The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?

The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?

And then –

The disaster –

The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.

By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.

The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.

That’s it! That’s the whole technique.

A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.

That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?

Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.

The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.

So the technique you need to adopt is:

1. Create a mystery. Then,
2. Don’t solve it. 

Whenever you find chunks of text – perhaps only a paragraph, perhaps only a line or two – that delivers mystery-busting information, ask yourself if you can withhold it. Does the information need to delivered now, or can this safely be left until later?

In my Fiona Griffiths books, I took the biggest mystery about her (Why is she so weird?) and didn’t answer it until the very end of book #1. I have some minor mysteries (What colour are her eyes?) that I’ve never answered.

In Caroline’s case, I don’t think you could plausibly avoid telling the reader about the need for male disguise for as long as that, but a good strategy would be:

1. Get readers intrigued by her need for disguise
2. Get readers involved in the other details of her life (which they’ll love because of item 1)
3. As we start to involve readers in those other details, you can slowly reveal the money problems, the sickly sister and the rest
4. By this point, readers are now engaged in worrying about the money and the sister, and so you have another functioning story motor
5. That means you can slowly give up your first one and it’s safe to start revealing the reasons for the male disguise. 

That’s one way to look at it – and a good one. But you should also ask: what does my character reflect on or think about right now?

In our sample chunk, Caroline did think about flattening her chest, because she was in the actual act of doing that. She had just washed her hands, which made her think about her hands. But she had no reason to start thinking about the whole reason she’d taken on male disguise. On the contrary: she was up at dawn, she had lots to do, she had problems to solve – those are the things that would have dominated her mental landscape.

So another way to put things is simply this: narrate what matters to your character in the moment that it matters.

Gosh, how easy that is.

And honestly, if you go to your manuscript with these thoughts, I’ll bet that 90% of you will find places where you give away information too early, or in a way that clashes with your character’s own focus of interest.

Create a mystery. Then don’t solve it. The easiest technique in fiction.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Creating (but not solving!) a mystery

Today’s challenge neatly follows on from what you’ve just read.

Find a passage – 250 words or so – in which you create but do not solve a mystery. Post yours here when it’s ready. Give whatever context we need to make sense of that passage. And please also tell us how many words / pages / chapters it will be until the mystery is solved.

(By the way, I’m approaching a million words on Fiona and haven’t yet given away her eye colour, so beat that. I’ll send you a plateful of cherries if you do.) 

The challenge is open to anyone who wants to do it, but my feedback will be reserved for Premium Members. If you want to become one, I have good news! We’ve extended our 30% off November promotion into one last weekend, so now is the perfect time to join us. 

*** 

My Year 5/6 children performed in their school play this week – a version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And golly gosh, what an old pro Dickens was. It’s not just his literary gifts I admire, though I do. It’s his joyously unembarrassed commercial instinct. “I want your florin, and by God I intend to get it.” He’ll use every tool he has to secure your attention. The idea that literary fiction has to be boring to be acceptable? Bah, humbug.

Till soon,

Harry