Letting the Cat out of the Bag

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.)