Peg Herring's Blog - Posts Tagged "secrets"
Teasing Readers
I'm reading Kate Morton's THE HOUSE AT RIVERTON, a sort of classy soap opera. I don't usually like authors who tease the reader continually, "I didn't suspect at that moment what I would soon encounter" can be used once or twice, but soon I want to shout: JUST TELL ME! However, she does it well, always delivering the answer to the tease within a few pages and making it worthwhile. Like everything else in writing, it's a balancing act, and readers fall along a continuum in which some will hate waiting even one paragraph to learn the secret and others will happily wade along for half the book to find it out. It's all about how much tension you can stand.
The Limits of Teasing a Reader
Okay, Author, you've got a big secret in your book, something that happened to the main character in the past that has a bearing on how he/she acts today. Here are Peg's rules for dealing with it:
First, refer to it sparingly. I get tired of being reminded that there's something you know that I don't.
Second, make the clues progressive, so I have a chance of figuring it out, at least partly, before the end.
Third, the secret had better be good enough when I get there to justify the hints and clues. I want to feel what the character felt and decide I might have had the same reaction.
I guess it's pretty obvious that I just finished a book with such a secret. I got tired of the vague hints that kept coming up but never added to my understanding of the character. And in the end, I thought the author hurried through the explanation so that I never got the sense of experiencing the terrible event with the protagonist. He was so well drawn in the rest of the book that I felt cheated by being left out of his life-defining moment. I'd been teased all along, and then the author just walked away. Authors shouldn't do that.
First, refer to it sparingly. I get tired of being reminded that there's something you know that I don't.
Second, make the clues progressive, so I have a chance of figuring it out, at least partly, before the end.
Third, the secret had better be good enough when I get there to justify the hints and clues. I want to feel what the character felt and decide I might have had the same reaction.
I guess it's pretty obvious that I just finished a book with such a secret. I got tired of the vague hints that kept coming up but never added to my understanding of the character. And in the end, I thought the author hurried through the explanation so that I never got the sense of experiencing the terrible event with the protagonist. He was so well drawn in the rest of the book that I felt cheated by being left out of his life-defining moment. I'd been teased all along, and then the author just walked away. Authors shouldn't do that.
