Known Unknowns #8: Let Me Entertain Us

The Known Unknowns is a weekly series of posts about the things that bedevil me in my writing life. It’s a catalog of what I’ve learned, and am still learning, from years of missteps, blind lunges, and thick-headed perseverance.

(Note: I do hope non-writers are reading this, as I usually try to cover things that apply to most creative endeavors. However, because of what I do, I’m going to simplify the language by referring to “writing.” It’s the same reason we revert to “they” in conversation about various genders, instead of saying “he or she” all the time. So if you’re a musician, filmmaker, etc., please hear “music” or “film” whenever you see the word “writing.” If you’re a sculptor, do NOT hear the word “sculpture.” I have my reasons.)

What do we owe our audience? I find myself asking this a lot as I crawl my way through Drood, Dan Simmons’ dense and fascinating novel about the final years of Charles Dickens as “narrated” by Wilkie Collins, and sprint through The Redbreast, a well-written Norwegian thriller by Jo Nesbo. In the case of Drood, much time and psychic energy is given to examining Dickens and his relationship to his audience — and in Drood, he seems to consider anyone he encounters an audience to be won over and beguiled. At the same time, Dickens has undergone a period of intense emotional distress late in his life (to put it mildly), and has withdrawn a bit, working on something much darker and far less universal than what he’d written before.

In the case of The Redbreast, it’s the author I’m watching as he moves the “A” story, a police procedural, forward via multiple points of view while filling in the second “A” story (versus a smaller “B” story) with a chain of ever-more incredible events from the eastern front in the last days of World War II. Nesbo has to keep both these stories moving forward, deepening as they go, and he has to keep the reader not just interested but fully engaged. I have to say, he pulls it off.

By the way, the audience I speak of in this piece is the one you’re creating for, not who’s necessarily consuming your stuff. So if you’ve never been published or had your work released in any way, you still have an audience for whom you are writing. The sooner you get used to this concept, the better. People who say, “I just write for myself,” unless they truly have no intention of showing their work to others, are kidding themselves. I was one of these people for a very long time, and my work, which has gone through many degrees of terribleness over the years, was especially terrible when I believed I was writing only to please me. After all, it’s one thing to be incompetent; it’s far worse to be dull.

To be clear: You do need to please you. I write, first and foremost, because in my mind there’s an ideal story with ideal characters and a set of ideal situations — and no story or book in existence offers this combination to me. Therefore, I must write it. Now, is this delusional? Yes! And welcome to the world of the creative arts. But I think this is at least healthier than another common catalyst, which is “I’ll show them!”

But once I’m up and writing this story which only I can write, then I need to shift into the other mode of thinking: “Is this working for the reader?” Am I giving them a literary experience, or have I just spend the first ten pages describing the thoughts of a character as she gazes into a mirror, thinking about all the things that have gone wrong recently? Because I’m here to tell you, these things are not one and the same.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that I have some rules for engaging your audience. These are rules I’ve developed first and foremost for myself, but I also expect them of books I’m reading, student work, etc.

1) Always be entertaining. This cannot be understated. Homer understood it. Shakespeare understood it. The Russians and the Victorians understood it. The South Americans understand it in spades. It’s a misguided, pretentious motherfucker who believes it doesn’t apply to them. To be entertaining does not mean always be “on,” like Krusty the Clown, and it doesn’t mean “pander,” and it doesn’t mean car crashes and anal sex every ten pages. It simply means, you know, be mindful of being interesting. After all, if it’s not interesting, why should I be expected to keep reading?

So why didn’t I just say “always be interesting”? Ah, because “interesting” is a much more subjective notion. Just because you like sparrows doesn’t necessarily make them interesting for your audience. But if you can write about sparrows in a way that makes them entertaining, they will become interesting. “Entertaining,” then, always reminds me to project outward. And sometimes I do have to remind myself: Hey, someone will be reading this. Has anything funny/odd/unexpected/touching/shocking happened in a while? If not, why not?

2) Always be artful. Here’s where a lot of entertainment falls short, and frankly why genre gets a bad name, thanks to certain artless writers (e.g., James Patterson) who’ve spoiled it for the rest. I really have no patience for a writer who doesn’t attempt to fully engage language. Jesus Christ, you’re writing a book! It’s a symbiotic experience between you and the reader, using a common language to transmit the stuff that’s in your head to their head. Nothing else does that! Why not use language that actually recreates the five senses instead of reading like amped-up court transcripts? Use a little care and avoid cliche, and you’re already halfway to something decent. Make a rule for yourself: If you’ve heard something described a certain way (“manicured lawns,” “Armani suit,” “as if he’d seen a ghost”), don’t say that thing. Come up with a new thing. And use the fewest words possible. Do you have a paragraph describing the broken-down state of a car that is not an important car in the story? Find the one or two words that do the job of that paragraph. And don’t be lazy about it. Don’t whine about not being able to say “manicured lawns.” You know who has to do this ALL THE TIME? Poets. Which is why most of them drink so much.

Be artful, too, in your storytelling. Make characters we’re going to want to stay with for several hundred pages. I heard a woman say the other day of a book’s characters, “I miss them.” That’s what you want. Create a way of telling a story that is the most engaging way possible. Treat your reader with respect and let them fill in the pauses and gaps. (More on this in #s 4 and 5.)

3) Humor is always appropriate. It took me a long time to learn this one, even though my wife had been repeating it to me from day one. There is no single place in a book or story where humor is inappropriate, as long as you use it artfully. And it will do wonders for your relationship with your reader. If something terrible has happened to a character and things have become dark and upsetting, having a moment of humor in there, or afterword, is like a release valve for the reader. Moreover, you always want balance in a story, and too many of us believe that fiction isn’t legitimate unless someone is either dying or causing the death of another. But trust me: Use humor, and the weighty parts will magically feel less oppressive yet even weightier.

4) Be as clear as you can be. I don’t mean don’t withhold information — that’s a key part of storytelling. I mean don’t be coy about the basic facts. How old someone is, their race, their age, where they live, what they do. Sometimes you’ll have to gauge how important it will be. As mentioned above, I tend not to describe my characters too much, but if the person’s height is important, I’ll mention it as early as I can. A lot of writers, especially newer ones, tend to feel like being overt about that key information is inelegant. Thus, they sprinkle it into the narrative in “clever,” indirect ways, like so many oblique breadcrumbs (what?), and then you have a frustrated reader. Wait, who’s talking? And how old is this person? Why couldn’t the writer just tell me she’s black?? We’ve all felt this frustration as readers, yet so many of us completely forget to avoid it as writers.

Alice Mattison, author and teacher, had what I think is the best solution for Key Information: Introduce it as quickly as possible. As Alice always told me, it may indeed read as slightly inelegant (e.g., “Mae Parker, a 33-year-old Dominican immigrant, stepped out of her New Haven apartment. It was noon on a Saturday, and since the restaurant wouldn’t open until five, she had nowhere in particular to go.”), but your reader will be more forgiving of this than of some sneaky bullshit where we learn on page 20 that our main character is in her thirties, on page 45 that she works at a restaurant, and on page 80 that oh, by the way, she’s Dominican.

5) Leave some work for the reader. This sounds like it contradicts #4, Be As Clear As You Can Be, but no. That was with key, basic information. This is all the other stuff. One of the main reasons why we read is to make connections within the text. We like that putting together of piece A from Chapter Two with Piece B from Chapter Sixteen and Piece C from Chapter Twenty-Nine and OH MY GOD THAT MUST MEAN…. Right? This isn’t just in thrillers and mysteries, it’s in all fiction, and it’s because it’s an essential part of the reading experience, which derives from the much more ancient experience of hearing storytelling. But if you were to say, in Chapter One, something about Penny, the servant girl who will later be revealed to be carrying the baby of Mr. Manchester…. then much of the story to follow would be ruined for the reader.

This leave-work-for-the-reader stuff applies to description, too. I can appreciate a two-page description of a main character’s face, clothes, and office, but not all that often. Most of the time, as a reader, I want to “cast” my own character, based on a few descriptive notes, yes, but mostly on the basis of dialogue, behavior, demeanor.

It works for the subtler stuff, too, like symbolism (think of The Great Gatsby and all the east-west talk and the Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg), but especially with dialogue. Great dialogue usually doesn’t involve the characters saying exactly what they’re thinking. Rather, it suggests worlds of meaning below the surface. Good dialogue (meaning: a good writer) leaves it to the reader to understand what’s going on.

So what do we owe our audience? Everything. It’s a stupid question. But — and this is crucial — you can’t write only for the audience. That’s what a hack does. That’s Krusty the Clown territory, and your audience will eventually smell your manipulative bullshit a mile away. Your audience needs to feel that you’re being true to yourself, that you’re genuinely excited by what you’re writing and that if you had to, you’d still do it for no money (ha ha) and for no readers. That need to write the thing you believe only you can write? Merge that with a mindfulness that someone will be reading it and so you’d damn well better make it entertaining and artful, etc., and you can achieve the sublime.