Raising Questions in Our Stories
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
One thing that can trip up even experienced writers is giving everything away in the story too quickly.
It’s always a temptation for me. I tend to want to reveal things too quickly in my story. I want to explain everything as it happens so that readers won’t be confused.
But when I reveal too much, I end up halfway through the story without enough material to make a full-length novel.
Areas where it may help to raise questions:
Questions about character behavior. Sometimes character motivation isn’t clear. But as long as that character is behaving consistently, readers will want to learn why the character is acting that way.
Backstory is another important story element to release in bits and pieces. For one thing, no one likes a backstory dump–it’s boring and can seem irrelevant to readers who don’t know the story’s big picture like the author does. Backstory can be character motivation or history or anything else in the past that plays into the plot or character development.
Particularly in a mystery, we want characters with secrets. No one is going to want to be completely upfront with investigators. There’s information that suspects will want to withhold. They won’t want to immediately confess to the affair or the spotty criminal record in another town or the fact that the murder victim had been blackmailing them about some past indiscretion.
It’s also important in a mystery to keep little details/information out of the hands of the sleuths. Where were the suspects really when the crime was committed? Why doesn’t Annie like Jim? These details will vary, depending on genre.
Benefits of raising questions to be answered later:
These questions act as teasers for our readers and can prompt them to keep turning pages to find out more.
Raising questions instead of providing all the answers as we write can help with story pacing.
Unanswered questions, if the questions are big enough, can also serve as subplots through our main story. Will Mark be fired from his new job? Are Katie’s parents moving in with her? Is Tom going to be able to fight his addiction to alcohol or will he succumb to it?
An important note: when we’re raising questions, we need to keep track of all of them. That way we don’t leave any loose ends at the story’s end. We want to make sure that there is a payoff when the readers have been patient to wait for the answers.
Unanswered questions in our stories help with pace and keep reader interest:
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Image: MorgueFile: Seemann
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