We Like To Watch

By Nichole Bernier

A comment in one of my new Amazon reviews got me thinking. I know, I know, look away from the sun. But, well.

The gist of the reader’s gripe in an otherwise positive review was that the ending cut in sooner than she would have liked. “I wanted to be in on the conversation that was about to happen,” she wrote, “but was sadly cut off.”

It has always felt to me like the right place to step away from the characters, with a hint toward where they are headed. But taste in endings is as varied and personal as taste in books. For some people, an open-ended conclusion offers freedom to entertain their own theories. For others it’s a heaping plate of shortchanged. (Remember the hoo-ha over the blackout finale of The Sopranos? And where did the cast of LOST really go in the end? Where did they ever go?) Some folks simply want to see things come in for a neat landing. Wheels down, you’re exactly where you need to be, you may now move about the cabin and move on. I get that.

The Amazon comment about wanting in on the unseen scene raises an interesting question though, and not just about endings. How much, and when, does a reader have to experience a plot turn played out in front of the eyes to feel satisfied? An author can convey information and events easily enough in other ways. But knowing something happens isn’t quite the same thing as seeing it happen in scene.

Jargon alert: “In scene,” for those who aren’t familiar with the term, refers to action that unfolds in live time, as opposed to things that happen offstage and are gleaned later or can be otherwise assumed to have happened. For example, a character is getting dressed for work, then later appears at the office. We can safely assume she turned the knob, opened the door and walked out of her house without having to see every tedious step in scene. However, if there’s a statement to be made in way she triple locks the door behind her and makes sign of the cross as she walks away, then by all means show it.

How does the writer decide what the reader needs to see? Generally speaking, readers feel more engaged witnessing a big event in its tense unfolding than having the action paraphrased after the fact, glossed over as a fait accomplit. Sure, sometimes expository writing has to happen to move chunks of storyline down the playing field. But when it comes to the big things, I wonder if a reader needs to see it in 3D detail to feel it in the gut, like seeing the body to believe the death. Say, the escape from a treacherous situation. The romantic connection of two people, finally, who’ve been prancing around one another for awhile. The murder of a principal character. Not very satisfying have these sorts of things tied up with a few descriptive sentences after the fact.

The exception is when the details of the scene are held out like a tantalizing carrot: it is hinted that this pivotal thing has happened, and you trust the author will show it to you down the road. Say you know from the beginning of the book that one character has lost a child under grueling circumstances. But it’s mentioned in a way so mysterious and unsatisfyingly brief that you just know the author’s going to come back and make good on it. An effective technique for building suspense, no? Of course there’s a fine line between vivid and gratuitous, and that line is as subjective as it gets. Love it or hate it, Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t be so unforgettable without the you-know-what.

Sex might be another exception; in many books, the camera turns away from the characters in the heat of the moment and checks in with them again in the afterglow. Most readers accept that blush of modesty. Even if they secretly wish the bedroom door had been left open a crack.

And then theres’s this: Sometimes it isn’t possible to tell the story in scene, because you’re limited by the narrative point of view. There simply isn’t always someone privy to the event. How can one character, who wears the narrative camera on his shoulder in close third person point of view, show the love scene between his two friends if he wasn’t there?

There are ways to get around it, particularly if you can get creative with the narrator’s voice and imagination. One of the best I ever read had the narrator, a wry but modest man who came of age during the Depression, recounting the way he thinks it might have gone in the courtship of friends, married for decades. He describes the Vermont family compound they would have visited, and which he himself knows well.

“The love scenes of my friends have never been my long suit or my particular interest, and anyway, I don’t know that at that point she was sure she wanted him, though I am pretty sure she did…. So I will simply take them on the walk they would probably have taken. They go back through the wet woods to the main road…” — Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

The walk they probably would have taken. And then a highly detailed imagined scene of budding romance that we accept as fact. Brilliant.

A last thought on deciding what to show in scene: There are some moments in your storyline that beg to be shown in narrative detail because they pack an emotional punch, or carry the promise of it. These can be plot points that contain pain, euphoria, the promise of vivid action, or simply the potential to deepen the reader’s connection to the characters and their fate. The trick is figuring out which scenes they are.

Sometimes there’s a sticky bit of plot you keep shying away from writing — it seems too hard, or gives you the heebie jeebies — and you manage to convince yourself, almost, that it doesn’t have to be experienced in real time by the reader.

I’m sorry to say, but chances are, that’s the piece that needs to be written. The omission most likely to make reader say, That bothered me, I wanted to see that.