“The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.”
– S.S Van Dine, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928)
One of the oldest principal elements of writing a mystery novel is to ensure that everything the reader needs to figure out the mystery is hidden in plain sight, somewhere within the novel itself. The author’s job is to misdirect, the reader’s job is to infer.
So far, every novel I’ve published leans heavily on the ability of the reader to form inferences in order to get the most out of their experience. I’ve used a light touch on them; a notion here, a hint there, all in order to paint a rich world behind the scenes. A world you can explore without detracting from the flow of the foreground action. It’s not a secret technique. A younger version of me spent a lot of time reading books from all kinds of authors across all kinds of genres. The ones that impressed me the most were the ones that had stories within stories, passages that could change their meaning depending on how you digested the neat arrangement of words within them. They were tidy books with brisk pacing: the authors rarely relied on “info dumps” thanks to the reader’s inference, and instead could keep the action flowing effortlessly. All it takes is a word here or an action there in order to spark the necessary conclusion in the reader’s mind.
In theory.
The reality of the situation is that not every carefully placed clue and hint is picked up by the reader. Hell, sometimes those carefully crafted sentences aren’t even read! When I run my novels through writers, everything is fine; they’re thoughtful readers, they don’t rush and they don’t skip words or even paragraphs. Regular readers, though? Someone once asked me why, in the first chapter, the main character was acting so ‘child-like,’ and why she seems so mature afterward the chapter afterward.
The problem with that feedback? I state the age of the character (twelve) in the third sentence of the first page. Something similar (thirty-ish) with the second chapter. That discovery sort of blew my mind, since it came from someone who considered themselves somewhat of an aficionado. Other readers simply read the novel for what it was, with little effort applied to digesting the words: they understood without understanding, I guess you could say. Ultimately I determined that I wrote for the wrong audience.
I wrote my first two novels for writers and genuine enthusiasts.
I need to write the next ones for casual readers.
That’s not saying that they’re two independent groups with no overlap. However, its clear to me based on feedback that the proverbial pen I wield should be more mallet shaped if anything else.
I said earlier that my novels lean heavily on inference. That’s because there’s certain elements that can only be discovered by thoughtful digestion. Her Things is a light read: it’s a story about a strange guy and a strange gal coming to grips with their feelings for each other. Most of the world-building happens in the background. It’s only discoverable if someone asks “Why?” and thinks back to certain events. But because it requires someone to think about the context, that also means that it’s possible that a reader just haplessly blazes through and leaves thinking there’s not much more to the novel than what was explicitly said.
In contrast, weaker (in my opinion!) but more successful works don’t do this. They come at you hard and fast, mercilessly assaulting you with paragraphs of exposition. I’m halfway through a “successful” novel where not much has happened, because the author so laboriously informs the reader of everything in the most explicit manner possible. The passages take no prisoner, and even though I don’t find the story all that interesting, I still remember most of it just because it was so in your face about everything. Thinking about it, if I were to write my own rendition of everything that happened up until the point I took a break from the book, the result would easily fit within 40 pages. Careful wording makes for two stories running concurrently: the foreground and the background. Yet he’s the winner and I’m the loser.
I think I get it, though. It’s 2017, and words cost next to nothing. A digital book isn’t limited to a certain number of pages, for better or worse. Hit the reader hard, with everything you’ve got. Didn’t make enough progress? Save the rest for the next book in the series.
This is how I’ve been working for the past few months, so soon we’ll see if my theory was on point or if I need to just try, try again.
C’ya then.