Ann Leckie

So, a week or so ago, Kyle Aisteach wrote a blog post called “Hiding in Plain Sight.” It’s a pretty good post on an important topic–that is, when you want or need to “surprise” a reader with something, but in order for that surprise to work you also have to lay certain information in front of the reader without letting them realize just what it means. This is, no joke, a really important thing to be able to do, and it can be tricky. I think the first time I actually really, truly noticed it was when I first watched The Hudsucker Proxy. Yes, I know, films are not stories or novels. However. The Coen brothers pull this particular trick off in a spectacular fashion, and once I realized what they’d done, I spent some time figuring out just how they’d done it. I won’t spoiler the movie for you. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about, and could do worse than to watch for yourself, again, to see exactly how they pulled it off. If you haven’t, well, you might want to start watching Coen brothers films.

Anyway. In his blog post, Kyle is contemplating that particular technical issue. It’s an important one, for various reasons. You want it in your tool box.

But there was a particular line in the post that made me go “Nope. Nuh uh. No, Kyle.” But I was at Worldcon, and only looking at the web to relax a bit before going to sleep, and so I didn’t comment. But it’s come to mind now and then and hey, this is why I have a blog, right? So I can muse on whatever takes my fancy.

I’m not meaning to aim any criticism at Kyle or at his post. Like I said, he’s talking about a technique that pretty much every fiction writer needs to think about at one time or another. No, it’s just this one line: “Surprise is also the basis of suspense, which is arguably even more important to the storyteller than humor is.”

Here’s the thing. Surprise is not, in fact, the basis of suspense. Surprise can be very important–though, as Kyle reminds us, it’s mostly a particular sort of surprise. One that’s been carefully prepared. But suspense?

Suspense is not about surprise. Suspense is not about hiding information. You can hide as much as you want, you can jump out from behind doors as often as you like, you can surprise your reader every time but that’s not the same thing as suspense. At all.

I’ve said it before, and will doubtless say it again. Suspense is not generated by not knowing what happens next. Suspense is generated by the reader caring about what happens next.

Now, this is not to say that the order in which a reader receives information isn’t important. In fact, managing the flow of information–the order and the pace of it, what details are revealed when–is something any writer has to get a handle on. Particularly in science fiction and fantasy, where so often you don’t just need to tell the reader what’s happening, you also need to convey just what the world of the story is like, or the history of the story’s world, or…you know. Exposition. I suspect most of us learn very early that we need to pay serious attention to the ways we handle exposition. But we forget, perhaps, that just telling a story is, itself, a kind of exposition.

The aim is not to conceal–suspense is not about concealment, not about surprise. The aim is to expose. Suspense is generated by the act of exposing–by the way in which you reveal.

In The Hudsucker Proxy, nothing necessary is concealed from the viewer. What isn’t immediately revealed to the viewer also isn’t immediately revealed to Norvile Barnes, the protagonist. The viewer learns it at the appropriate moment–the moment he learns it. A large part of the effect of this revelation is surprise (very much the sort of surprise to which Kyle refers). But we have not been waiting, while watching the film, to discover this thing. What makes the revelation so effective is not that we’ve been waiting for it, but that we never actually suspected it was there to begin with (although of course it was carefully set up for us from nearly the beginning of the film*). So it’s not the concealment of this information that makes for suspense. Any suspense is generated by our sympathy for Norville, by the way the viewer engages with him and with his situation.

Any time you tell a story, you aren’t going to be able to present every bit of information at once. So even when you don’t mean to conceal anything, you’re going to start in a state of the reader not knowing everything she needs to know. The way you reveal that information is going to have a huge impact on how the reader experiences the story–but this is not the same thing as getting the forward movement you need from concealment. I know that seems like a nitpick, but it’s really not the same thing. And I kind of wish people would stop framing suspense as an issue of what is concealed–because it’s nothing of the sort. Like I said, I’m not pointing a finger at Kyle. This is the common assumption about suspense, and like so many common assumptions it’s rarely questioned. But the fact of the matter is, a reader doesn’t keep reading because of a mystery, or because there’s something she doesn’t know yet. She keeps reading because she cares about the answer to the mystery. She doesn’t keep reading because she doesn’t know if the character lives or dies. She keeps reading because she cares if the character lives or dies. Different things.

Still, it’s true, how you manage information is extremely important. I mean, like, completely, entirely essential. You could do worse than to ponder that issue daily for the next few months. Or even years. I’m not joking. The order and pace at which you reveal information to your reader can keep your reader reading, can engage her so that you can get her to care. And in fact, this isn’t just an essential issue on the level of story, but also on a word-to-word level. I suspect it’s what Charlie Jane Anders was talking about when she said on io9 that “there’s really only one kind of sentence that actually works: a sentence that carries the reader forward from the previous sentence.” Some of the commenters were all “well, duh,” but actually I think this is an important insight, it’s just that it’s difficult to articulate. It’s all about how you’re feeding the information to the reader. Word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. Scene to scene. It’s all about getting the information to flow exactly the way it needs to, for your story to be effective. It’s about exposition.

Not how you’re concealing it. How you’re exposing it.

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*I’m trying very hard not to spoiler this film, but really, why haven’t you watched it already? And I really, truly feel I learned a lot from how it handles this sort of exposition. It is, for me, a very clear, textbook example of a particular technique that has come in handy, for me, more than once.

You guys. Seriously. There are things I see over and over again in slush and after the fifteenth or sixteenth example of it I just want to shout “Stop doing that!” But of course, the writers don’t deserve to be shouted at, and it’s certainly not their fault that their story is the nineteenth I’ve seen that day that does exactly the same thing.

It’s something I’ve mentioned here before. But it’s so, so common that it could bear mentioning again. Put briefly, an idea is not a story. In fact, a single idea is generally insufficient to make a story with. You need at least two, and then you need, you know, a story.

Let’s say I’ve had an idea–coffee naiads! Like water nymphs, you know, only for coffee!

This is the sort of thought you have when you’re waiting in line at Starbucks. The best thing to do with this kind of idea is to set it aside. Maybe put it in a notebook if you keep one (I don’t, mainly because I never actually look at notebooks. This is a problem I have with calendars, too. Thank goodness for SMS alerts, is all I can say). Maybe it will come in handy some day, and maybe it won’t. Probably won’t–most of these idle idealets don’t turn into anything more. If it will, it won’t do so on its own–the idea of a coffee nymph, with nothing more, really can’t support even a flash piece. It needs something else–another fantasy premise added to it (perhaps a very careful working out of what that would mean, for such beings to exist), a very compelling character with a definite problem or crisis that is, somehow, linked to the existence or nature of coffee nymphs. Something. Anything.

Anything but what so often turns up in slush. The writer had the idea of the coffee nymph. Like a good, industrious writer she sat down to make something of it. “What do I do with my coffee nymph?” she wonders, and the first thing that comes to her mind is….oh, a guy who goes to Starbucks every day and is in love with a woman he always sees there. He doesn’t know how to get closer to her, or perhaps he talks to her every day but she’s not forthcoming about who she is or where she lives and won’t agree to meet him anywhere but at the coffee shop. The employees there obviously know her well, and they look at him with pity, and they warn him to just leave her be, he doesn’t have a chance, she’s not for him. Ah, but if he gets a job there, he’ll know what they know! He will, they agree, but warn him that he will regret knowing it.

Nevertheless, he is driven by love to quit his high paying corporate job and take work as a Starbucks barista. At the end of the first day, they empty the urns and turn them off…and his love vanishes into thin air. Because she is the spirit of coffee, you see? No coffee, no coffee nymph. He can never have her and he has given up his former life in vain! His heart breaks, but he will stay there to Be With Her Always. The End.

(There are, of course, alternate endings available. Our MC might find a way to triumph, investing, perhaps, in an industrial coffee urn for his apartment, or buying the coffee shop and making it 24 hour so he can have her at his beck and call, for a “happy” ending. Or alternatively, he can find that he is now trapped forever, and will for the rest of his life be only a mindless slave to Coffee.)

Nine out of ten folks who write this story give it to us in a very predictable fashion. We open in the coffee shop with our main character in line watching the coffee nymph, musing on how he’s come there every single day to see her. We probably have some backstory inserted–if we’re lucky it’s a paragraph or so of straight narration. If the writer has spent too much time exposed to The Rules of Writing we get some As You Know Bob dialogue–not one sentence of which is even remotely likely to actually appear in an actual human conversation–that takes up four times the space. We get the conversation with the sympathetic barista, we probably get a scene where he talks to various other people in his life, perhaps a scene at the MC’s work where he reflects on how empty his life is without Her. We’re told (or, gods help us, shown in great detail) that he quits. Our last scene will be an extended description of taking the Starbucks job, showing up for the first shift, explaining how much he anticipates finding out the truth about Coffee Nymph (Oh, her name will, of course, be some kind of pun or clever joke on her nature), and then, finally, the tragic Truth is revealed.

The tenth writer will realize that, in fact, there isn’t actually enough here for a story to run on. You want a story to propel the reader forward, to keep her reading. That’s actually not easy to do, and it’s even more difficult with insufficient material. What that tenth writer ought to do with this realization is to either put this story away until more material has appeared, that she can combine with this to make something that will really do the job, or else she should spend a lot of time and thought on this idea, build it up into something less flimsy, something that will really, truly hold the weight of a story, really, truly, interest a reader.

But this tenth writer, having seen that her story is lacking a certain something, decides that what it needs is suspense. So she’ll write this story from the point of view of the coffee nymph. While carefully never mentioning just what the character is, just lots of mournful references to “But I could never be what he wanted me to be, what any of them have ever wanted me to be.” And in the end, she will explain to her would-be lover (and to the reader) just what she is. Surprise! You’ve been waiting all through the story to find this out! On the edge of your seat, even!

Well, no, not. The reader gave up a few paragraphs in.

These are not stories. These are “Once upon a time, I had this idea–coffee nymph! The End.”

To be honest, I am profoundly uninterested in the coffee nymph idea. I produced it with about five minutes’ worth of flailing around, while I sat here on my couch. The plot outline took another five minutes. If I wanted to write this story, it might take a few hours. As outlined above, anyway. But I wouldn’t do it, and won’t. It wouldn’t be anything anyone would actually want to read.

Now, another writer might really make something of the coffee nymph. Perhaps next week I’ll read a coffee nymph story and be really fascinated by it. That’s how these things go–you have to make your reader interested in your story, and if you’ve done your job really well, you can even interest the reader in something she’d have told you an hour before was inescapably, deadly dull. But that takes work. You can’t just rely on what you assume you know about coffee or naiads. You’ll have to do research. You’ll have to think hard about your characters–who gives up a good job for a woman in a coffee shop who so far hasn’t given them more than the time of day or some light conversation? No, I mean, really what sort of person does that? Don’t just lean on “but love!” There’s not enough structural integrity in “but love!” to hold a styrofoam cup off the ground, let alone support a reader’s interest. And there are actual implications in “but love!” and in that character’s actions. Who goes to desperate lengths to court a woman who has repeatedly indicated her lack of interest in his courtship? Whose friends have warned him off? Let’s say this guy is convinced that even though she has continually said she is uninterested and unwilling to share more with him, somehow in her manner she has conveyed that she might actually love him–in that case, she said “no,” but this guy is sure she must really have meant “yes.” Suddenly “but love!” takes on a sinister, pathological air. The writer didn’t mean for this to happen–she only had this idea about coffee nymphs and she knows she should write every day and this seems cute and clever.

You guys. Think your ideas through. Combine them with other ideas, or break them open and look at what’s making them tick, examine them exhaustively from every angle so that you can find the things about it that really intrigue you, that raise questions maybe.* Write down the first two dozen things you think of, when you’re first putting the coffee nymph story together, and then throw that list away and don’t use anything on it. Learn about coffee–I mean, really learn about it. Read a bunch of really good fiction. Think about the coffee nymph some more. How would your favorite writer handle it? Spend months pondering. Why have you spent months pondering a coffee nymph? There’s something there that interests you, what is it? Dig that out.

Then write the story. Otherwise I can pretty much guarantee you’re getting another form rejection.
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*”What kind of asshole won’t leave a woman alone even though she and everyone else have asked him to leave her alone?” isn’t sufficient, here, but might be a good start. It would, however, be a distinct improvement on not asking anything, just slapping the story down and submitting it.

**This is, you argue, an awful lot of work to go through for a silly two-thousand-word story about coffee sprites. And yes, it is. But I suspect that most people submitting these stories are trying very hard. They want to sell stories, they want to be good. They will never achieve even half of their aims if they aren’t willing to put in that work. If you want sales, and readers who say “Wow, that was a great story!” you won’t get it without actually, yes, going to such lengths for what is, in the end, a couple of pages of fiction. You want editors and readers to take your writing seriously–so you should take it seriously.

***I didn’t want to use one of the many ideas of this type that I’ve seen in slush over the last couple of years–like I said, I’m pretty sure every single one of them was written by someone who is genuinely working on their writing, and none of those writers deserves to feel as though they’re being held up for ridicule. And ridicule isn’t my intent–I just want more people writing those kinds of stories to understand why they keep getting rejections for them.