Tuesday, April 13, 2021

How to Lose Readers (or Audience) - How not to

You can offend, disgust, anger, or appall readers, and, often, readers keep reading. What you can’t do is bore them. Thus the sage who made me a writer in high school said. It’s true. But boredom comes in many forms and it isn’t the same for everyone.

Audience - The main reason writers drive people away is because they see communication as one way. That’s how it can feel when you’re cleaning out adverbs at one in the morning, but who are you sprucing up your prose for? Someone who will appreciate the poetry of your words? Someone who wants a window into the world you’ve created? Someone who empathizes with your character’s struggles?

Probably yes. But who is this mythical someone? Not a mob. Not “young adults.” Not “people who like romances.” Vonnegut recommended writing to a specific person. (He always wrote to his sister.) The value of that is having a sense of who might care about the story you’re writing, worry about your characters, and bring the knowledge and perspective to understand and be interested in the world you’re creating. “Everyone” won’t. And writing for yourself may be fun and save you the work of learning about readers, but it can be limiting. Were you ever at a gathering where someone talked at you, with no interest in who you were? That’s practically the definition of a boring experience.

Anticipation matters. Expectation matters. Surprise matters. How can you use these in your story to engage readers, if you don’t know these people?

The audience also tells you the level. Vocabulary for a young adult novel may need to be simpler than what you put in an adult literary work. Explanations may need to do the job without talking down to readers. (Same with repetition.) Humor is especially dependent on audience. “Too smart for the room” is a well-known experience for standup comics. A joke for which the audience does not have context falls flat. Similarly, “too soon?” is often tagged on jokes that cause people to squirm because other emotions (grief) may block out the humor.

Clarity - This is so hard to get right because you know exactly what you’re trying to say. You abridge and edit because describing everything is both impossible and tedious. Good writing means selecting what to describe, reflect on, or illustrate and requires taste and judgment. Unfortunately, leaving things out means making assumptions about what people know (was something critical missed?). Words can literally mean more than one thing, but also may be read more than one way (depending on emphasis). And, if the vocabulary (or syntax) isn’t quite working, the best ideas can be reduced to gibberish.

What do readers do when prose is impenetrable or incoherent? They stop reading. Heinlein said his best training as a writer was a Naval Academy lesson on writing orders. If anyone in the class could come up with an alternate meaning, you failed that day. So the first step is becoming alert to possible misunderstandings. My best training has been reading a lot of other people’s manuscripts. Finding their errors builds sensitivity to how things can go wrong. Beta readers, editors, and even reading out loud can help with this, too. I found fiction podcast writing (radio theater) especially challenging with regard to clarity. People can’t reread audio. They hear, misinterpret, and it’s on to the next thing. With the help of another writer, I ended up creating a clarity test that I still use for every fiction podcast scene I write.

Confusion - Even if the words are right, there can still be confusion. The most common sin here is describing action that doesn’t flow in the right order. It’s amazingly easy to do. My training on that was writing detailed sequences for producing over 100 biochemical products. Write enough of those to be used by people for whom English is not a second language, and the skills are set. But the simple way to solve this is to be aware it can happen. Visualizing each step isn’t difficult, but many writers skip the test. Don’t.

There are other ways that people can get confused: Too many characters. Too many with similar names. Too many that are too similar. Too many who talk the same way (especially when attribution is missing).

Transitions are easy to fumble. Time and place need to be established because WHEN thing happen matters and a location that hasn’t been established puts the scene into a void in which no one can be immersed. And readers want to be within the story, not just spectators.

Who is in the room also comes under this. Anytime a character I don’t know is there suddenly speaks up, I’m tossed out of a story. (How was that character reacting earlier in the scene?)

Indelibility - Anything that’s vital to understanding a story needs to be memorable. This does not mean that every clue in a mystery needs to be underlined and boldfaced, but it should be interesting in some way. Surprising but apparently unimportant works. So does amusing. Humor is a great way to make vital details memorable without distorting the story.

Many times, places, characters, and actions come with emotional content or are emphasized by time devoted to them. Choices usually stand out by virtue of identification with the protagonist. But, no matter how naturally elements are unforgettable, I’ve seen writers make them disappear by (unintentionally) creating distractions. I’ve read different interpretations of “murder your darlings” (usually attributed o Faulkner, but I find on checking it’s from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch). I think of it as removing those bits of fact or fine prose or side trips that, not being necessary, distract. While a careful plant delights, hiding elements of a story only gets readers lost. They usually don’t forgive that.

Handholds - People like to participate. That’s one reason why empathic characters are good to have in a story. People live through their experience. But questions also provide ways to participate. I suspect few people read mysteries without wondering who the murder is or which clues matter. And though it’s expected that love will triumph in a romance, worry about the relationship (because of failures, wrong turns, and dark moments) invest readers in the story. In classic science fiction the premise will get readers wondering about all the “what if?” possibilities.

Fair play - Deus ex machina, since Aristotle’s days (and probably before) has been the mortal sin of storytelling. Having a savior of some sort sweep in with no preparation and solve all the problems both infantilizes the protagonist and makes all the choices and actions that proceeded it irrelevant. In mysteries, an unmotivated confession can kill a story. Odd coincidences and hidden relationships (that matter to the story) can be deadly. Foreshadowing is expected and needed. To me, the biggest strike against opera (love the music, hate the stories) is its offenses against story logic. Readers do not forgive cheating.

There are writers (especially humorists) who violate all of the above and still hold readers. That’s because they actively keep readers engaged. B movies could be train wrecks storytelling that enticed people with appealing stars, violence, cool monsters, broken taboos, clever camera play, and pyrotechnics. Philip K. Dick balanced out cardboard characters and flawed prose with brilliant concepts. Page-turning beach reads cover plot holes with dazzle. Writers can keep readers without avoiding things that drive them away. But they probably would please more readers by avoiding the problems detailed above.








No comments:

Post a Comment