Is it Wrong to Expect Readers to be Active Participants in the Story?

Happy Thursday! Today, we're gonna talk about description, how it might impact the reader, and what authors might or might not expect from the consumer. Ready? Grab your coffee or tea, and let's get going!

So, I'm on the phone yesterday with an author friend of mine, and we got into talking about what we expect from our readers. Both of us agreed that we write with the assumption that the person picking up the book has a brain and understands the basics of the world they live in.

For example: If you say someone walks into a bedroom, do you need to write out to the reader that there's a bed, or is that something you can expect them to infer by telling them it's a bedroom?

Several writers will go into great detail about the room's furniture, but those machinations are usually reserved for the times that it matters, right? Say, if there's something "off" about the decor, or if the bed is an antique and should be admired for a moment. Even if the scene calls for a description to tell the reader it's a male's room or a sex cave, that's okay. But if the character is just walking into a bedroom, is it really necessary to bog the reader down with minute details right off the bat?

Here are some other ways to work those details into the story without having an information dump--again, unless the character is actively admiring, or scrutinizing, the decor:

• As the person is active in the room, they run their hands over things like the brocade on the chaise lounge.
• When they tell someone else to sit, it could be noted they made the choice of where to place the person based on potential comfort level.
• If the character lies on the bed naked, the satin sheets could feel cool on the skin.
• While they're being made to wait, they can then notice one thing about the room and scrutinize it to give their brain a distraction.

There are several ways of describing a room's contents without going into infodump mode, as you can see above. Unless you're actively trying to slow the story down, is it really necessary to tell the reader everything that's in a common room (bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, etc...)?

I think, perhaps, we should give our readers a little credit and assume they have brains in their heads. If I read that someone is sitting at the bar in the kitchen, I have a pretty good idea of what that room will look like.

I've gone into description and when it's useful in this post, and I went into how to paint the scene in this post. If you're looking to heighten tension with description, here's a post I wrote a while back that breaks it down (this post also compares showing and telling).

What do you think? Do you expect a more active participation from your readers, or do you spoon feed them all the things?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Set Your Story!

Happy Monday, everyone! Hope you all had a fabulous weekend and are ready to start the awesome week ahead. No? Well, grab that coffee and let's talk about setting. You know, that place in your story where your characters dwell.

There are two ways to go about giving setting:
1. The old way of bogging people down with pages and pages of "what the character sees."
2. The more interesting way of putting the character IN the setting and letting the reader know how it feels.

We're, obviously, focusing on the second way.

Why? Because it's more interesting to read and keeps folks from paging through your book really fast.

So, what's the difference? If you aren't sure, I ask you to recall a book you read in some time and space where your eyes glazed over as the author described the trees, flowers, and sun.

Now do you know what I mean?

Let's get the hell on with examples, shall we?

Example of style 1:
     Juniper sat on the stone bench and stared at the water after her breakup with Harold. Red roses bloomed in abundance, their thorny stems intertwining. Next to them were pansies in every color of the rainbow. On the water floated boats with giant, white sails billowing in the wind. Across the water stood the poor houses. She used to live there. People were standing outside or sitting in chairs, doing nothing. A couple of children were playing in the many puddles on the street. Broken down cars with weeds growing out of them were scattered here and there.

And so on, and so forth.

Now, let's give style 2 a try:
     Juniper sat on the bench, the cold of the stone seeping through her shorts as she stared at the water, wishing it would bring calm with its lapping sounds. Red roses bloomed near the shoreline in abundance, their thorny stems intertwining like lovers in a secret embrace. She couldn't help but think how, just hours before, she was in a similar embrace. While the roses would be strong, her love was broken.
     Why did it have to be that way?
     Through the ship sails, she could just make out the poor houses on the other side of the river where her family lived. Once upon a time, she was one of the dirty children playing in the puddles and around the abandoned cars--those weeds growing out the windows and doors gave her hay fever more times than she cared to mention. But she'd gotten out of there.
     What about that didn't Harold understand?

This isn't a vice I suggest you use often. Page after page of anything like that will get old. However, if you're in a key scene, you should get your reader invested in the story by pulling out all the feels.

In the first example, you're looking at the scenery as an outsider; in the second, you're feeling how it might impact someone.

There's the key to engaging the reader in a show, don't tell, situation. Again, telling is for the parts where not a lot is happening and you don't want the reader to slow down and pay attention. More on showing vs. telling in this post.

Care to give it a try? Revamp a scene and share with us!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

On Writing Scenes

Happy Friday, good people of the blogosphere! Today I'm gonna talk about writing scenes. If you remember, a while back I wrote a post on Showing vs Telling, When Telling is Okay. If you haven't checked that post out, I invite you to do so now. One of the comments that popped up on that post was a question by another writer about specific examples of how to use this technique. Well, grab your pens and notebooks and let's get going!

A collection of scenes in a novel are what bring the story together. Image a spiderweb where each thread is heading toward a central location (your epic ending). Choose one or two of those threads and follow them inward. Now, everywhere they meet at a cross-thread is where a scene occurs. Notice how those scenes gain in number as they reach the central core.

As your characters meander toward that center, there are what I'll call sections of Getting There Prose. These sections aren't intense and the reader gets a good sense of who your character is by what they're doing between scene A and scene B. Sitting and drinking coffee, for example. In these scenes, you're giving your reader a little break from the tension and action. They're also commonly used to lead into the next rise in momentum.

Here's the key: Leave out description. Dull down the five senses ever so slightly.

If Joan is sitting and drinking coffee with her bud Lisa, Joan can look over and notice the girl appears tired without going into a long description of how she looks tired.

Example of telling:
Joan blew the steam off her coffee and looked at Lisa, noticing the dark circles under her eyes. "Girl, you look exhausted."
"I am." She nodded and slumped.

That's dialogue to cut out description and give a coasting feeling to the scene. Your reader expects light conversation to follow and friendly terms.

Let's go the other way. Say this coffee scene isn't what it appears to be. Joan is poisoning Lisa.

Example of showing:
Joan blew the steam off her coffee, inhaling the heady scent of the special Colombian beans she ordered for this encounter, hoping it was strong enough to cover the distinctive almond of the arsenic. She tilted her head up slowly, peering over the rim at her adversary, noting the dark circles under Lisa's eyes and the way she gripped her cup with both hands. "Girl, you look exhausted." It was difficult for Joan to keep her tone light because of the nervous energy radiating through her limbs. Blinking rapidly, she gave a wan smile.
"I am," Lisa croaked out, slumping in her chair and letting out a huge breath in a whoosh. She pushed her too-hot ceramic cup back and stood.

Now, you've engaged all the senses. Smell: coffee, Sight: Lisa's dark circles, Sound: light tone and whoosh, Taste: almond, Touch: too-hot and nervous energy. This is also a place where you don't want to describe the room around them. You should've already put that picture in the reader's head before the ladies ever sat down. When you use description leading up to a tense scene like this, use short sentences. It indicates something's coming.

You've pumped up the scene and the reader expects what?

Either A) For Joan to go bananas because Lisa didn't drink the poisoned coffee, or B) For Joan to pretend to be friendly and hide her anger while trying to get Lisa to drink the coffee.

Either way, it's gonna be a tense situation. We've made it so. Can you cut a lot of that description and get to the same place? Yeah, but the tension is lost.

Example:
Joan blew on her coffee, waiting for Lisa to take a sip of the arsenic-laced concoction. "Girl, you look exhausted."
"I am." Lisa slumped and let out a breath before pushing her cup away and standing.

Same outcome. You know something should happen afterward but the resulting action won't have the same punchy effect on your reader. You haven't built up the tension quite enough.

To fill your novel with scenes that show everything all the time, you're reader will either get too hyped up or they'll start skimming. Skimming is bad. It means your reader has disengaged from your story. Very few writers can pull off a book like Dean Koontz's Intensity.

Remember to vary your sentences and your word usage. Not sure how to do that? I wrote a post on Variation, too. If you missed it, check it out.

Don't forget to pay my featured author of the week a visit! N.L. Greene, author of the highly rated book Twisted, graced me with an interview. You can find that post here.

Thanks so much for stopping by.

Are you familiar with this writing technique?

Next week, I'm going into how to use MS Word to rate your book's tension. Betcha didn't know you could do that, huh? So, come on back for that.

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo