Don’t Explain Anything!
Yesterday I was emailing with an author who had submitted a manuscript to me which I had turned down. The story was hard science fiction, and the word count was in excess of 140,000, but that wasn’t why I turned it down. The reason I did turn it down was because when I read it I was bombarded with information that, to me, was extraneous and got in the way of the story. There were other reasons that I didn’t accept it, but they were all related to the same writing “mistake.” And I’m not talking about telling vs. showing. I’ve already covered that subject. No, the real reason I decided to turn down this otherwise well-written story was because the author didn’t trust me, the reader, to understand his thoughts.
I’ve touched upon this before, but when I read a story, I want to work for it. I’m a troubleshooter by trade, a problem-solver, and I take a great deal of satisfaction in figuring things out. And I’m not the only one like that in the reading world. The entire mystery industry is built on people who want to figure out whodunnit. Not every story has to have a mystery to be interesting, of course, but what doesn’t work for me is being handed every single tidbit of background and motivation on a platter. It ruins the whole point of puzzling things out.
The author to whom I am referring has read The Hungry (I’m pretty sure I gave him a copy), and he liked it. But he made an interesting comment about it. He said, “Having read Penny Miller, I see how very lean your prose is. Part of that may be your style preference, part may be that in a zombie apocalypse motivation and backstory need not be as explicit (as in don’t get eaten and who cares).” Now, I agree that the lean prose he refers to is a style preference. Harry Shannon, my writing partner, has to continually add detail to my writing in order to anchor the reader in the scene (although in my opinion, I could get away with even less detail than Harry adds). But I don’t agree that it is the genre or the style preference that dictates the need for “lean prose.” I think any kind of storytelling can get away with reducing the amount of detail until there’s just enough to keep the reader in the story (as Harry would have it), and not ruin the mystery.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of my writing idols is George Lucas, particularly regarding Star Wars: A New Hope. In that movie, we are presented with a lot of crazy ideas—faster than light travel, laser swords, white radio/ansible-like communications, the utter lack of orbital mechanics, sound in space—and we bought into every single one of them, mainly because Lucas didn’t explain a damned thing. I was 6 years old when that movie hit the theaters, and I didn’t need a degree in engineering or astrophysics to understand what was going on. I used my imagination to fill in the blanks. Now, let’s fast forward to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which is an otherwise tolerable effort. I say otherwise because Lucas did something in that story—or more to the point, with that story—that he never should have done, ever. He explained things. I can sum it up in one word: Midichlorians. WTF? I mean, really. I thought the Force was created by all living things, not just these little microscopic organisms that live inside other beings. But Lucas needed an objective measure for the ability to use the Force that everyone could agree upon. Hence, midichlorians. And, in fact, the whole trilogy of “new” movies—episodes 1, 2, and 3—was one big explanation. Why did Anikin Skywalker become Darth Vader? he asks in those movies. You know what? WHO CARES?! He was Darth Vader, and that was good enough for my six-year-old mind. And 35 years later, it’s still good enough. George Lucas became one of the most important and successful people in cinematic history by not explaining. And he became irrelevant by choosing the opposite path.
Now, let’s get back to my author friend with the hard science fiction story. One of the features of hard science fiction when compared to any other kind of science fiction is that the technology at the heart of the story is as important—if not more so—than many of the characters. You have to get the technology right, even if it is complete bunk, because the technology drives the story. It must be internally consistent (as with all storytelling), and it has to be worth the suspension of disbelief that you are asking from your readers. You can’t do silly things like have breathable atmosphere in deep space (like Lucas did in the asteroid scene in Empire Strikes Back, but that wasn’t hard science fiction, it was space opera, so he can get away with it), mainly because it is demonstrably not feasible that space is filled with Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere. We know it isn’t so, so don’t say it in hard science fiction. But this author didn’t do that. To the best of my knowledge, his science was dead on. No, what he did was, in a way, worse. He explained the people.
I will admit up front that it has been a few weeks since I read his story, and that I did not read the entire thing. It was a submission, and I gave it just enough time to realize it wasn’t working, then stopped. But that doesn’t take away from what made his story good, or, for that matter, make what he did wrong all right.
In his story, he has an antagonist, and the antagonist has a sidekick. In order to justify that the antagonist was a true bad guy in every sense of the word, he gave us the background on the sidekick. The idea was, if the sidekick was this bad, think about how really awful the antagonist must be (he might have explained why the antagonist was bad, too, but I didn’t read that far). So the author launches into this psychological treatise on the obsession that drives the sidekick to be so bad. There were two problems with that. One, he didn’t do a very convincing job of making the sidekick someone we cared about—even to the point of caring that he lost—and two, his explanation for the obsession was kind of silly, unimportant, and frankly incomprehensible. The sidekick did his thing because he was obsessed, but the reason he is obsessed is lost on the reader.
My point is this. If you are going to make the technology an important factor, be conversant enough with the technology to understand it yourself, and dole out the information that the reader needs a little at a time, allowing the reader to piece the technology together. The same goes for the people. If you don’t have a handle on why someone is a bad guy, you as the author should figure it out. But explaining it—and explaining it wrong—are bad choices.
When an author explains something all up front, whether it be technology, or psychology, or any other -ology, and doesn’t let the reader participate in the figuring-out process, that shows a lack of trust of the reader to piece it together. I like to think I’m a smart, observant, and above all, trustworthy kind of guy. And I expect most people view themselves that way. So when the author of a story violates the trust that is inherent in the author/reader relationship, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that the readers will turn away from that author—or at least that book.
To be fair, I must say one other thing. The author to whom I am referring took my suggestion that he cut out anything that looked like excess explanation from his story, and he reports that his 140,000 word manuscript is now 108,000 words, and it is better and cleaner than ever. I’m really looking forward to reading the revised edition of the manuscript. It should be a lot more fun and challenging to read now.
