Today we see that readers don’t like to feel tricked.
What I gleaned about the story: A guy fell off his horse while riding in the woods. I’m a fan of the “Connecticut Yankee” story trope, so I can guess plenty about where this might be going, but I’ll resist the temptation to do so here.
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Analysis: The opening scene is short and stylized, but there is so little information given that I got lost. Something about a mighty prince now dead, but counting the narrator as well, that’s two people. Yet there are references to “he” and “you”, and “I.” So I’m confused about the voicing and referents for these pronouns. Is “you” an affected 3rd person reference back to the narrator? When I have to start drawing lines in the air, connecting the pronouns and nouns, I’m definitely not immersed.
Analysis: More flailing pronouns, and we’re still on the first page. These are the kind of mistakes that any qualified editor should have caught.
Analysis: His what? His cellphone? Holy crap, I’ve got temporal whiplash! The first scene was about a fallen prince. The second scene was about some guy riding to hounds, who fell off his horse. In the third scene, clumsy horseman dusts himself off and checks his cellphone? The problem is not that he can’t be allowed to have a phone in his pocket, because apparently he’s a modern guy. The problem is the misdirection of the first two scenes, which did not properly establish the setting. I call this “breaking faith” with the reader.
From my perspective, the narrator/author’s job is to convey all meaningful and contextual information to the reader that he or she would have been able to pick up easily had they been present. Any reader who had been present to watch clumsy horse guy riding after the dogs would have immediately seen that he was a modern man. He’d have been wearing modern clothes, riding with modern tack, carrying modern weapons, etc. So given the few period details we got from the first scene, and the lack of modern references in the second, readers will naturally assume that we’re still dealing with that historical milieu. So pulling a phone out of his pocket in scene three completely breaks my trust.
Or putting it another way… We all know that if there’s a big-assed cannon in the middle of the room, and it’s going to be fired in scene three, you really have to mention its presence in one of the earlier scenes. Well, by that same principle, if it’s a futuristic cannon, you have to mention the future setting first.
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Lots of he and his and him in the ‘look inside’. You’re right, it is off-putting. And I agree that readers shouldn’t be made to feel like idiots. The only thing is – speaking for myself – I would always read the back cover blurb of a book before I began reading the story proper. In the case of this one, I see that what happens – present day huntsman thrown into a magical world to save the wild hunt – is clearly spelled out (too clearly, to be honest – the blurb is more like a summary than a teaser). Having read the blurb, the phone wouldn’t be a surprise.
Do you not think authors should be able to presume that a reader will have at least a vague idea what they’re getting into before reading and therefore will not have immersion broken by things that would be a surprise if they were cold reading? After all, you are allowing that the reader knows what genre the book falls under and won’t be surprised by magic or magical creatures (or robots, spaceships, or whatever, in the case of science fiction).
That’s like saying that movie directors should be able to put information in the trailer that isn’t in the move and just assume you’ll have seen that. But as it happens, a great many people do their damnedest to avoid movie trailers, because they spoil too much of what otherwise would have been an enjoyable experience. And for exactly the same reason, there are those of us who avoid book blurbs. Yes, if I pick up a book while I’m out book browsing, I’ll have read the blurb,. But when a friend recommends a book, I’ll move heaven and earth to avoid learning anything more than what I was told before diving in. And I know I’m not alone. (Although we may be rare.)
More importantly, however, in many publishing scenarios, the author is not the person who writes the blurb. So how could they possibly guess what important story information will be conveyed by some marketing flunky?
Nope, the story is what’s inside the covers, not outside. And if a writer doesn’t give me the information I need, in the story, before I need it, then I will always see that as a problem with the writing.
Good point outs as usual. I must say though, from the sample on Amazon, I thought she’d get further. She was one of the more stylish writers in your Immerse of Die canon.
I don’t completely agree with #3. I think that sort of omission and then the reveal and juxtaposition at the end, can be amusing and interesting when done purposefully by a writer.
I agree that it CAN be done effectively, but ImmerseOrDie isn’t about what can be done, it’s about what was done. And in this case, for me, it was a misfire.
Question. Do unanchored pronouns work if you reveal the reference shortly after? I feel like it should be no problem for a narrator to speak, for instance, in dread of “they” who “came in the night, their arrival announced by the echoing gallops …,” to reveal some sentences later that he’s talking about “… bandits, fresh off their last raid, and hungry for blood.”
I am not editor however, and quite new in the field, hence the humble question.
-V
That’s a good question, Victor. And the short answer is: you can do anything you want, so long as you do it consciously. If you want to maintain some mystery by leaving “they” unresolved for a beat or two, that’s fine. But if you have recently referred to some other group, readers will assume “they” refers to them, and will likely be confused.
Solid reply, mr. Smith. Thank you for that. I’ve become part of a writer’s group recently, and though I have come to appreciate their critiques dearly, I also have the fear that if I listen too much, my writing will be such that it could have been written by any author. This answer kind of puts all of that in parentheses for me. Thanks again. Also, great article. I like the empirical approach you took on testing those books, and the slight satire of doing it on a treadmill. Keep it up.