graphic by peg ihinger
Some years back, I had a writer friend who’d switched from being a journalist to writing fiction. She told me once that for her, the hardest part of writing fiction was learning not to automatically apply the basic journalism tenet: “Tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.”
That three-point repetition of “what’s going to happen, what is happening, what just happened” does a great job of hammering home the important who, what, when, where, why, and how of any story, but in fiction, it often does so at the expense of tension and pacing. Also, many readers hate the spoilers that are inherent in “what you’re going to tell them.”
Nonetheless, there are times when fiction writers need to apply all three techniques for various reasons. Just not all at the same time. It gets boring pretty quickly if the reader keeps seeing the same information over and over.
“Tell them what you’re going to tell them”—In fiction, this usually involves setting up the key scenes. It’s one thing to let the reader know that tomorrow, the villain’s army will arrive to start the battle. It’s another thing entirely to let the cat out of the bag by telling readers the exact surprise that will win the battle for the hero.
In it’s most innocuous form, “what you’re going to tell them” is the set-up for a big scene. The reader knows that something big is coming up, but not how it’s going to go. They know there is a plan, but they haven’t been “spoiled” by being told exactly what the plan is. There’s a lot of doubt about exactly what is going to happen, because there’s no certainty that the protagonist is going to win the battle, catch the actual murderer, or pull off the blueprint heist successfully.
A variation of this the scene in which the protagonist’s eyes light up; they straighten and look around at everybody; and then they say, “I have an idea.” And that’s the end of the scene. The resulting “plan” is usually something especially clever or sneaky—a trap for the villain, an unexpected way to rescue the hostages, a way of tricking the murderer into confessing. The technique generally works best when the protagonist does pull the plan off successfully, particularly when the plan has elements of risk to it, so that the reader can’t quite be sure whether the unknown plan is going right or not until the end of the scene, or even just after. (See the finale of the movie The Sting for a great example).
What rarely works in fiction is having the good guys lay out their entire plan in front of the reader (what’s going to happen), and then having it play out exactly as planned (what happens). Most modern readers are familiar with the quote “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” If they’ve been told the whole plan, they expect something to go wrong, and they’re looking forward to the surprise and to seeing how the characters will cope. If everything plays out perfectly, they’re going to be disappointed.
“Tell them.”—Most of the time, this is really all a fiction writer has to do: write the scene with the battle, revelation, heist, etc. after a minimal set-up. (“The battle is tomorrow. Try to get some sleep.”) The writer doesn’t have to tell them the plan in advance, especially if the plan is going to work as intended. The readers will see it play out (successfully) in front of them, which is usually more interesting and more memorable than being told about it. (And if the scene isn’t clear, interesting, and memorable, why is it in the story at all?)
There are, very occasionally, times when the writer has reason to skip over “tell them what happened.” In this case, “tell them what you’re going to tell them” becomes laying out the plan in detail, and “tell them” gets shortened to “Everything worked just the way Herman had planned.”
If you really want to pretend to follow the journalism formula, you can lead readers to think they know the whole plan (in the “what’s going to happen” part), have something awful “go wrong” with it when they put it into practice, and only reveal later that this was part of the plan all along. This is tricky to pull off without coming off as cheating or deus ex machina when the “unexpected” double twist arrives—there need to be just enough hints earlier for the readers to realize, in retrospect, that this was part of the plan, but not enough for them to figure it out ahead of time.
“Tell them what you told them.”—This piece is frequently necessary in fiction (because some character always missed the fight, the revelation, or the caper, and needs to be told what happened). However, repeating the same information over and over to different characters can get old for readers very, very fast. One solution is to summarize it. “They spent the next two hours getting Marcus, Jenny, Ivan, and Loreen up to speed on Friday’s events” will often cover the bases without boring the reader into ditching the book.
However, having a character tell some other character what just happened, in detail, can be extremely useful if the character gives a different account from what the reader “saw” happening. This can be because the character is outright lying, because they are trying to slant their account to make themselves look better (“I saw it from under the table, where I was absolutely not hiding—I was trying to sneak over to the bomb and shut it off. Honest.”), because they are adding their interpretation of what happened (“Then April shot Ivan—I think she’s hated him ever since that business in Helsinki.”), or because the character doing the explaining saw something the reader didn’t see (this usually requires that some other character was the viewpoint character during the original scene.)
People have also done really interesting things with stories where the reader doesn’t see the key scene (there’s no “tell them what you’re going to tell them” and no “tell them”), so that all the reader gets is several very different eyewitness accounts of “what happened,” without knowing who is lying, who’s telling the truth, or who’s just really confused or biased. (The movie Rashomon is one example; Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet is another.)
It has always bothered me that in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare completely gives away the ending. It is quite enough to inform the audience that it takes place in Verona between two warring houses, but to inform them that
“a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
do with their death bury their parents’ strife”
is simply foretelling way too much.
I remember a 4th Street panel where someone pointed out the thing about explaining the plan in advance – i.e., if it all gets spelled out, you can be pretty sure things are not in fact going to happen that way. It’s a useful thing to keep in mind for writing any type of story that hinges on a clever plan.
There’s some ballads that manage it. They do it by simply skipping the unfolding. Tam Lin and Fause Foodrage
I’d rather treat plans like exposition, something to dribble out while the narrative goes on. But that’s just me.
Have to have characters that plan that way. If they do sit down and line up everything, it wouldn’t work.
Example of what I mean:
“We rounded the corner, only to find they’d anticipated us, and were waiting, guns drawn.
“Except…we’d anticipated *that,* and our allies stepped out of the alley behind them…”
I simply don’t want to present all the planning behind “we’d anticipated *that.*” I’d rather just show what happens, with some asides and remarks showing it was planned.
But again, that’s just me. Personal preference.
That sounds perfectly fine to me, as a reader. Probably a lot more entertaining that seeing the planning in real time.
you can lead readers to think they know the whole plan (in the “what’s going to happen” part), have something awful “go wrong” with it when they put it into practice, and only reveal later that this was part of the plan all along.
This is the standard formula for heist movies, and I’ve come to realize it’s why I don’t like heist movies (which you’d think would be very much my jam). To me, it always feels like a bait and switch, like I wasted all the time and energy I put into caring about the plan and the something-awful. And for heist series, which consistently follow that formula, it completely kills my engagement: why should I care about the first half of the story when I already know the plan’s going to fail? And if I don’t care about the first half, I’m not sticking around for the second half.
Obviously I’m in the minority here, since these things work for quite a lot of people. I wish they did for me — heists look like so much fun, from the outside! — but I’ve finally learned to walk on by.
As for telling them what you told them: I’ve read a few too many mysteries lately that do this, not to bring other characters up to speed, but to make sure the reader didn’t miss a clue. Which can be a useful technique when done well, but when done poorly, tends to elicit “Yes, thank you, I have actually read the book so far.” And of course well/poorly is a sliding scale that’s different for each reader.
In Dorothy Sayers’ mystery novel _Five Red Herrings_ the detective examines a crime scene and notices something amiss. The narrative deliberately does not say what he notices (even though he tells someone about it on-stage!) but just lists what he sees, from which it’s possible to deduce what’s wrong. Someone finally does explain it but it’s about 100 pages later.
I understand in the abstract why you might want to pull this stunt, but it annoyed me when I first read the book (and failed to work it out), and it continues to annoy me with re-reading even though I know the answer now. It just drops me right out of the narrative and makes me think about the author–and not kindly thoughts, either.
Sayers never did it again, so perhaps she came to the same conclusion. (It’s an early work and she was trying her hand at hyper-technical forms of mystery which she later backed off from.)
Mileage surely differs here; I’m not overly fond of being dropped out of the narrative, but some styles revel in it. (_If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler_–I finally managed to finish this after several failed attempts, but it didn’t make me happy, despite my love for Calvino’s other works.)
As a reader I tend to feel cheated if I don’t get some kind of reaction from the characters to a big event: that’s a kind of “tell them what you told them” but for me the extra information about how they react is key.
I also can’t resist mentioning one of the best stories I critiqued when I belonged to Critters. It was a superhero story in which a past super team, now disbanded, finds that the member they left to die (which was a major reason they disbanded) is not dead and needs their help. The story covers how each member is located and persuaded to help. It gets to the point where they are about to step through the portal to begin the rescue–and ends there.
I would never have expected that to work for me, but it did. A whole lot of planning and no execution at *all*. But it was a character story about why they left their teammate in the first place, how they’d dealt (or not) with having done so, and how they got to the point of being willing and able to go back. The missing last section would not have added to that. Anyway that’s my best guess why it worked. A tour de force for sure.