I’m not going to sugarcoat this: Forearming is not always something you want to do.
For instance, if you are going to engage in an armed conflict with someone in the future, maybe don’t arm them ahead of that conflict, right? Actually I’m not saying don’t send them guns, I’m saying don’t engage them in an armed conflict. Also, in roller derby, forearming is a penalty, or it was when I was playing. So that’s another time when you definitely don’t want to forearm someone.
Mostly when we say “forewarned is forearmed” we mean we want to be warned of things in advance so we can be forearmed. This phrase is not usually used to mean we should forewarn someone else, but you definitely do want to, when you are writing. Forewarn the reader, so they will be prepped for a satisfying payoff. Forearm them with all the heavy artillery they need to have a really rad time.
I will tell you without spoilers that I was on Twitter the other day and a user cited a passage in a book I recently read and asked, “Did anyone else scream when they got to this part?” In the passage she referenced, the writer reveals that the character we’ve all assumed was narrating something was, in fact, not, and some other character had been slyly telling us the story. I was like: “Yes, me. I also screamed at this.” I mean maybe I didn’t literally out loud scream but I at least mentally screamed. I screamed in my heart.
When a story is lining something up for the reader to find out later, there are two things that can really kill that payoff. Those are:
Not hyping the setup enough so that the reader doesn’t clue in that they should be wondering about it; and
Telegraphing the punch so hard that the reader has already figured it out by the time they get to the big reveal.
In the example I cited above, the setup was terribly well executed. The necessary clues were there; the reader is lead to question the narrative, to get continuously closer to understanding, but without giving away the whole game. The writer chose the right time to reveal the deception: Before most readers would figure it out on their own, but late enough that most readers will have come to several correct conclusions about the mystery. Screaming emoji.
Another book I read recently featured two characters of supposedly doubtful parentage: One character who knows neither of their parents’ identities and the other who is on the run from their unnamed mother and unsure of who their father is. Halfway through this book I was ready to put it down because so many ostentatious clues had been dropped, over and over, about people’s facial features and hair colors, that I could barely make myself go on. I was like: “Yes, I get it, the climax hinges on finding out how all these people are related but I knew three hours ago and now I’m just going through the motions.” Probably not very many people screamed at this big reveal. Eye-rolling emoji.
A third example I will cite is from a book I read some time ago, again I won’t give the title in the name of spoilers (you can always email me and I’ll tell you what books I’m talking about) in which a princess meets a prince in her youth, then suffers a whole bunch of tribulations and goes on like a pilgrimage of sorts—anyway, she eventually finds her way back to civilization and is working in a royal household and one day they finally recognize each other and he’s like, “Hark! It is me! The prince from the beginning!” And while I guess that was a nice circular ending I also did not care that it was the prince from the beginning, because he was not important to either the early part or the late part of the story. He was just kind of there. I was like: “Oh that guy? Cool, okay.” Shrugging emoji.
Know that the shrugging-emoji reaction is not a bad way to go. That the prince recurred late in the story, like I said, was a nice circular route for the story to take. The drama of the story consisted primarily in the princess’s physical, emotional, and mental-health journey. The prince was not that important. He was mostly just a guy who was around. The climax of the book did not rely on the reader finding out it was the same guy. So that was fine.
(If anyone recognizes the book from that description, let me know and I’ll send you a Shelf Life pin. It’s an old one. Nineties.)
But if you are trying to orchestrate a big reveal, this is a good example of what not to do. Don’t show me somebody for a second early on, somebody who has no emotional importance to the character or her story, and then show me them again 300 pages later and expect me to get excited. It’s just some person. If you want to create an important reveal, you need to keep the reader’s engagement focused on finding out (in this case, the writer would want to subtly direct the reader to wonder if and when they’d be seeing that guy again).
This isn’t plot death but if you’re counting on a big reveal to deliver the climax of your plot, you got to make sure it’s not an anticlimax or you will be left holding the bag.
The eye-rolling-emoji reaction is the one you really don’t want, in my opinion. When I get that many clues shoved unsubtly in my face, it completely puts me off a story. It makes me feel like the writer has no trust in me to figure it out for myself. I am an intelligent woman and I do not like the feeling of sitting at a tiny desk while an adult explains things to me slowly and carefully. That part of my life is over, thank goodness. I do not want to feel like I am back in school learning the basics.
From the three examples above we can draft some rules:
If you are working toward a reveal, you must interest your reader in said forthcoming reveal; you must not surprise them with the mere fact of a reveal.
You must give the reader enough clues and information to reach satisfying conclusions ahead of the big reveal—perhaps even though information to figure it out if they are reading exceptionally closely.
But you must not give the reader so much information that the secret is made cartoonishly obvious ahead of the big reveal.
That’s a tall order. Not item number 1, but striking a balance between items 2 and 3. This is something I really struggle with. I don’t want to make my story so opaque that the reveal falls out of the rafters like a deus ex machina, nor do I want to force feed the reader so many clues that I insult their intelligence. Nobody likes force feeding. Not readers, not waterfowl.
I don’t mind telling you that I rarely, if ever, nail this aspect in the first draft of a story. When I am writing, I aim squarely for eye-rolling-emoji territory and try to include enough details, clues, and hints to make it perfectly obvious to anyone reading exactly what I’m doing. A kindergartener really could read this version and figure it out. I do this because the more I put in early, the more I have to work with in revision, when I am taking the excess away. If I need, in total, ten hints and I put fifty in the draft, then I can select the best ten from those fifty to keep. More to work with.
In revision, I take a sharp turn and remove the most hints and clues I think I can get away with and still tell the story in a way that will feel satisfying for many readers but might leave some scratching their heads. I still have all those clues in my earlier draft so I can put them back in if I need to. In this phase I take away as much of the handholding as I feel like it is possible to remove and still guide the reader through all the important parts of the story.
Then I ask my peers and beta readers to take a look. One of the questions I always ask readers is whether they understood my intent to the degree they can explain it back to me. I will try to phrase it like, “Do you understand why Charlie interrupted Diane’s date with Michael? Can you tell me?” Sometimes I get an explanation of a character’s motive or behavior that is completely different from what I intended and that is excellent feedback for me that I missed the mark somewhere along the way—possibly, that I left too much unsaid, and the reader had to fill in a blank from their imagination.
When you are writing a short story, and especially flash fiction, you have to rely on the reader to fill in blanks with their imagination. You just don’t have enough words, like you do in a novel or novella, to explain and describe every single thing. That said, the reader should not as a rule be asked to fill in major plot information from their imagination—unless it is your intent that the story might be read as many different ways as it has readers.
If you want to ask your reader to fill in a critical part of the story from their imagination, then the uncertainty of “what really happened” has to be central to the way the story is understood. Consider the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, in which the narrator ends her last recording by saying she is getting into a van that could have been sent by the resistance to rescue her or could have been sent by the secret police to arrest her and she’s not sure which. Not knowing “what actually happened” at the end is the ending.
Shut up, you can’t spoil a 37-year-old book. There’s a statute of limitations.
Unless kaleidoscopic interpretation is the goal, you should make sure you are using the words available to you to to direct your readers to a shared understanding on the most important items—the parts of your story that must be understood as you intended in order for the story to make sense. Those are the things that every reader coming away from your story must understand. If you were the author of The Handmaid’s Tale and I read it and I said, “I was confused about how Offred felt about the laws of Gilead, did she support them or nah?” then either you did not do a good job imparting the critical information or my reading comprehension was inexplicably, inexcusably poor.
Everything that does not go toward supporting those critical facts is available to be pared back. How much you pare, or how little, will affect how much or how little work the reader has to do to arrive at the correct understanding of your story (as you intended it when writing) and whether you will give them a screaming-emoji, lightbulb-emoji, skull-emoji moment or an eye-rolling-emoji, yawning-emoji, upside-down-smiley-face-emoji moment.
While there are not many objective, unequivocal truths in this world, I am prepared to say you objectively, unequivocally want readers screaming-emoji-reacting your book and not eye-rolling-emoji-reacting it.
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