I am still struggling with the WIP. After going to COsine in Colorado Springs, I became convinced that I’m starting in the wrong place and doing too much scene-setting, but when I try to revise I bog down in considerations of what the readers need to know, and if I don’t put it right at the beginning then when, and how many flashbacks can one novel support?
There are two parts to answering this question. The first is that “what the reader needs to know to understand what is going on” is generally a lot less than many writers think, and the second is that there are a lot of ways to fill in background besides flashbacks. The second one is for next week.
When it comes to imaginary settings, a lot of writers seem to think that it is vital for the reader to understand every single cool bit of background, culture, and historical politics that they have made up…and that their readers have to understand this right from the start. Taken to extremes, this causes problems like the query letter that included the title of the book the author was querying about, the protagonist’s name, and two paragraphs describing imaginary history that the writer thought the editor needed to know, leaving no room in the letter to say anything about the plot of the story the writer was trying to sell.
Few writers who set stories in the real world seem to have this difficulty. I think the difference comes from the subconscious knowledge, on the part of fantasy/SF writers, that there is no possible way that the readers could know any of the historical background information (because it is all invented), whereas the writers who use real-world settings/history/etc. have an equally subconscious awareness that at least a few of their readers will be familiar with the real-life history (and some may be more knowledgeable than the writer), that any of the readers could possibly have run across mentions of anything based in the real world, and that all of the readers can look things up in a library or on the internet if they get curious.
A useful rule of thumb for a writer is that readers need to know enough that the current scene makes sense in the context of this story so far. What the reader knows is a combination of what the writer tells them explicitly (“Marley was dead, to begin with.”) and what they can figure out for themselves from what is going on and what the characters say and do. (“ ‘At once, Your Majesty,’ she said. She placed both palms against her forehead and bowed.”)
Dickens didn’t bother to explain how Marley died; we don’t even find out exactly how long he’s been dead until the ghost appears many pages later, and even then, it’s only implied in dialog that it’s been seven years. All the reader needs to know is that Marley is absolutely, certainly dead at the start of the story; once that is established, the readers can see for themselves that the metamorphosis of the doorknocker is supernatural.
Similarly, in the second example, I don’t need to go into the history of this monarchy. The honorific tells the reader that there is a monarch. The character’s respectful bow indicates that she is probably a subordinate or servant. The gesture with her palms and the fact that “she” bows instead of curtsying implies that this is probably an invented culture (I don’t know of any real-life countries that use the palms-to-the-forehead as a gesture of respect, though there may be some) and not strongly medieval-European. Nothing more is needed to comprehend what is going on at the moment.
Explicitly describing or explaining every nuance of background, setting, culture, or personality can detract from the readability of most modern books. Stopping to provide unnecessary details about the origins and nuances of the palms-to-the-forehead gesture would likely slow the pacing to a crawl. Such descriptive background also often ends up being an indigestible lump that gets thoroughly in the way on a re-read, when the reader already has a picture of the culture from their first read-through.
By contrast, limiting the explanation of setting and background, while still making use of any relevant nuances in customs, gives people a reason to re-read. Not because they didn’t understand the scene the first time, but because now they can see and get the nuances they missed the first time around. “Wait—that white vase with the scarlet pattern is a funeral urn, like the one the evil uncle is going to break in Chapter 9!” “Oh—now I understand the insults those two characters were flinging at each other.”
An alternate rule of thumb, especially near the beginning of a story, is that if this type of detail is not something one would bother to include if the story were set in a real-life version of Chicago in 2023, it should be seriously considered for non-inclusion in a fantasy/SF story set in a totally imaginary world. Or at least, treated in the same way as similar common-knowledge real-world information would be treated in a book set in real-life Chicago.
That is, if you would refer to “the newly-elected mayor of the city” in a real-life book, without mentioning which party said mayor belongs to, the history of elections in the city, the involvement of Al Capone with the mayor’s office in the 1920s and -30s, etc., you would refer to “the newly crowned king of the country” without providing a summary of how he came to inherit the throne, the convoluted history around why he is termed a king rather than an emperor when he rules over a patchwork of conquered nations, and the even more convoluted family politics going back several generations…even if all those things are going to be important later. If those details aren’t important for understanding this scene, keep them to a short reference (planted for later explanation) or leave them out until they are required for understanding some other scene.
Use a fight scene for an analogy. Do you need to explain to readers what a feint is? Go through why your protagonist has shifted her guard from quarte to sixte? Provide a history of swords and sword-fighting?
As our hostess says, just give enough to understand the scene. It helps create atmosphere and the feeling of a real, lived-in world.
“Just enough to understand the scene” is a variable reader-dependent quantity, especially if expanded to “Just enough to make the reader feel comfortable that he understands the scene.”
One of my criticisms of David Friedman’s Harald years ago was that his hints, laconic descriptions, and exercises-left-to-the-reader, especially at the beginning, left me with a thin gruel of world-building when I really wanted a rich broth.
Absolutely. And readers are on a bell curve, too, so no matter how much or little you put in, there’s going to be someone out there for whom it’s not enough or too much. You cannot please them all.
But then, that just makes writing a more fun challenge, right? Right?
Absolutely. And readers are on a bell curve, some wanting more and some less, so no matter what you do, you’ll leave some wanting more and some impatient with how much you did put in.
But that just makes writing a more fun challenge, right? Right?
Seriously, you can’t please everyone. Use your judgment, what else can you do? If you get a lot of feedback one way or the other, adjust course, but otherwise, they’re getting your best, what more do they want?
I’m a reader on the “likes more background” end of the spectrum, and this affects my writing.
Perhaps a bigger effect is the general assumption of “presumed to be like the real world, unless noted otherwise.” This makes me balk at the “not something one would bother to include if the story were set in a real-life version of Chicago in 2023” test.
I don’t need to know the deep history of the fantasy city’s politics, but I do very much want to know if there is something fantastical about the city’s mayoral elections. If the mayor is elected by the seven Mayoral Electors (who are also the masters of the seven largest guilds), if the number of votes each person has depends on the person’s status, if the dead can legally vote for up to 50 years after their deaths, if older vampires are disenfranchised, or even if the mayor is chosen by a typical real-world type election but this is unusual or even unique in the story’s setting, then I’ll want to know then rather than later. If it’s sprung as a surprise later, it’s more likely than not to be an unpleasant surprise, and may even result in a book-wall collision event.
So I do not want to do that sort of thing to my readers.
Or to put it another way, I naturally bin a larger amount of material into the “Marley is dead” category.
Plus it can be real fun to read. Cool stuff.
Good advice. I am definitely as a reader on the side of less is more. I tried reading a book by one of my long-time authors last week and had to stop because they were taking two pages to explain the mechanisms behind each and every thing and it was absolutely not necessary. As an example, there was the equivalent of a magical projector in the book, I could’ve just gone along with the fact that the speaker was projected in a way that everyone could see them. I didn’t need five paragraphs on how the magic worked.
I think I’ve possibly become less patient with those sorts of mechanics and logistics descriptions the older I get. I want character and emotion and things actually happening. (I also do think that there is a portion of the spec fic community who wants all of the how-to so it can matter who the target audience is. But I’m not part of that group.)
Thank you so much! I wonder if the “show don’t tell” rule (I know, Da Rulez are not actually absolute, but it’s hard to ignore) is part of my difficulties. I can do an actual dining scene where the ship’s officers are introduced, or I can refer to the dinner later without actually detailing it. Hm.
Looking forward to next week’s column!
I suppose that depends on how important the dinner is in the wider context of the story. I once started to write a scene where the heroine paid a street urchin to deliver a message, describing what he was doing when she spotted him, how he reacted to her calling him over, etc… then realized that going into that much detail made the incident feel way more significant to the plot than it actually was. I ended up boiling it down to a single sentence instead (“…she stopped a young street urchin and gave him a coin to take Lady Leila’s letter to the palace for her.”).
Yes, that’s just the situation! The reader needs to have some idea who a few of the officers are, and the dinner can provide some background on shipboard life, but I think I’ll go with the short version.
As with Deep Lurker, I like learning about the background — but like ML Humphrey, I don’t want it to get in the way of the story. It’s actually rather fun to try and refine a passage so the reader gets just enough background to go along with and to convey some ‘local color’ — like the palms to the forehead. And that “just enough” does include Chekhov’s Gun references that lay the foundation for what happens later — to avoid Deep’s “sprung as a surprise” problem.
I often find in reading a story that there is a point about midway through where the author provides some occasion for a character to explain fully some of the obscure references and background. But that has to come after the reader is fully invested in the characters and *interested* in the background, and thus *wants* to find out what lies behind some of the events that have occurred. I enjoy those cards-on-the-table passages, but I think they have to wait for the right moment.
As a reader, I like gradual exposition. I also feel that too much description of how devices work makes the story stumble. If you’re talking with your friends, you don’t spend 10 minutes explaining how your car engine explodes a thousand times a minute; you just get in and turn the ignition on.
Long technical explanations were fine when Dick Turpin was building a rocket ship out of junk in his backyard because that was the point of the story. Now we just need to get on with it.
But sometimes the “technology” needs a bit of explanation. (I’ve just been re-reading Shadow Magic.)
I’ve read this now three times. I struggle with place descriptions and have been thinking about my problem. Part of it is I get these descriptions on the cheap–not for free but close to it. My worlds are real, stories character drive, and I write mostly about everyday life in rural-ish places. But I cannot assume that you will know everything you need to know by “a cross-roads bar and grill.” So I enjoy writing to set the scene.
The other thing is, and I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s as if the places are characters in almost the same way the people are. Better put, to the characters, the place(s) are just as important as the people in their lives.
Looking forward to next week’s post.
One of the best, in my experience, times I ran into the “leave just enough world detail” was in P.C. Hodgell’s Seeker’s Mask. At one point the character, in an aside and throw away line thinks about how they only could find the lilies (for some feast) “because of the purple glow through the snow”. It was so subtle that it is easy to think that the color of the lilies was getting reflected by the snow cover.
It is not until later that the MC actually uses the lilies as a active light source that you realized that they were actually glowing!
I love that kind of Hint and reveal to the world building. Just enough detail now, and then later build on it when it become story relevant.
This makes me think of a scene in Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell where the two MCs are attacked by a bear… but it isn’t until a few more details are dropped while describing its actions that you realize that what the residents of this planet call a “bear” is nothing like the big furry creature you’ve been picturing!