The Discomfort Gambit

Let Your Reader Sink or Save Them

Let’s get uncomfortable. Here’s your life pro tip right in the first paragraph of the article today: When a social situation is awkward or uncomfortable, the best way to handle it is to call it out as being awkward or uncomfortable for the benefit of the others in the social situation with you. Ignoring it and hoping no one else notices will not work. Everyone notices and is distracted thinking about how awkward or uncomfortable the situation is. Acknowledging something being awkward or uncomfortable takes away its power to distract everyone. Figuring out the weakness of something you don’t like so you can kneecap it whenever you want is how to get good at life.

The president of a company I worked for taught me this at a happy hour when he swooped into a conversation group standing around a tray of canapés and took the last one. “I always take the last one,” he said, “because otherwise it just stays on the tray distracting everyone. Let’s get you some more canapés.” And then he was gone. There’s a leadership lesson in there if you’re looking for one.

Today I am writing about user discomfort when engaging with a new book (or any other media), how to manage that discomfort, how to use it to your advantage.

First: With a show of hands, how many of the people in the Shelf Life audience today have ever begun a new job or started attending a new school and not felt uncomfortable for the first day or few days at least? No hands are up. Everyone feels uncomfortable in that situation. It’s uncomfortable because you’re in a place where you are unfamiliar with the rules (written and unwritten), the social hierarchy, the physical layout of the space. You don’t know anyone, you don’t know what’s going to be expected of you, you don’t know where the bathroom is maybe. You have to learn a lot of stuff in a short about of time to get up to speed. 

This is a normal life situation that happens all the time but it’s uncomfortable when it happens. Some people seek out these opportunities because this type of discomfort is a chance to grow. Many people will tolerate this discomfort from time to time because it’s the price of starting a new venture. Others have less tolerance for new and uncomfortable situations and will do what they can to avoid starting a new endeavor. Everyone has a different level of tolerance for this type of discomfort and will do their risk-versus-reward calculus factoring in that level.

When you go into a new environment like that, you expect that you will acclimate totally or to some degree and after the adaptation period the discomfort will subside. This doesn’t always happen before the discomfort does you in. I once spent a short time working in a very strange and unpleasant corporate environment. On my first day exchanged these texts with my best friend:

Six weeks later I gave notice; two weeks after that I walked out for the last time and texted my friend “It never became normal!”; and one week after that I started a new job, the one I still have. The discomfort level of working in that environment was too much for me and I bailed. I did not stick around to acclimate. It was taking too long and my tolerance was not great enough.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, what does anything have to do with anything? Nothing relates to anything. Everything is meaningless.

I experience the same thing when I am first getting into a new piece of narrative media like a book, a movie, or a video game. Getting into a new book is like starting a new job. You’re dropped into an environment you don’t know everything about. You may know more or less about what to expect depending on whether you’ve read the author before or how much information you got from the back cover copy. You’re going to need some time to acclimate to the text you’re reading.

Ever heard someone say, of a book, that it just didn’t grab them quick enough, or that it was boring, or that it had too much exposition at the start, that the pacing was too slow, or they found it confusing? Those people did not acclimate to the new environment quickly enough to overcome their discomfort. The risk (time and energy they’re putting in to reading) did not justify the reward (enjoyment of the story) and they bailed. 

Those are common reasons for people to “DNF” (“did not finish”) a book and they all come down to the same thing. They were experiencing discomfort—confusion, boredom, uncomfortably fast or slow pace—and they did not continue to press forward after a certain point. They may have thought the discomfort would not let up and they’d stay bored, confused, or otherwise unsatisfied all the way through.

Your goal, as a writer, is to keep the reader investing in your story. As I wrote in Get Your Reader to Pony Up, you want to keep the reader buying in again and again: To your story until it’s told, and then to future books by you. You have a short amount of time to get them interested and then you have to keep them interested because they can put your book down and walk away from it at any moment. Part of getting and keeping your reader hooked is managing their discomfort.

Now: A writing style that just doesn’t do it for a specific reader? There’s not much or anything you can do about that. If a particular reader doesn’t like your writing style and it’s uncomfortable for them, you can’t just change your whole writing style. A reader finding your writing style uncomfortable to read doesn’t mean your writing style is bad. Some people find Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston challenging to read because so much of it is written in early twentieth century Black American dialect; but Hurston’s writing style is masterful.

Challenging the reader is not a bad thing. Unintentionally challenging many or most readers past the level of discomfort they are willing to sustain to read your book is probably a bad thing.

The reader’s discomfort tolerance is personal—it varies reader to reader—but there are still some generalizations you can safely make. For instance, a person who likes to read contemporary romance novels without speculative fiction elements probably has less tolerance for discomfort in a new book than a person who likes to read urban fantasy. Why is this?

When I pick up a romance novel, particularly one that does not have any sci fi or fantasy elements, I have a good sense of about what I’m going to get. The setting will be more or less familiar, for one thing: It might be the United States (I’m pretty familiar with this setting) or it might be another part of the world (I’m less familiar); it might be set in the 2020s (I’m very familiar) or in the 1800s (I’m less familiar), but it’s set in a world I know. It’s set in the real world more or less. I can safely assume things like “the laws of physics are those I already know” and “society is more or less going to be what I expect for the time period.” I will have to learn the characters and their situations but the world they live in will feel familiar to me.

When I start an urban fantasy, I will have more to learn. It might be set in the United States but, for instance, there is a secret society of werewolves. This is not the world I know. I can still expect that the laws of physics exist and are familiar, but I should not expect the world to follow other rules I’m used to based on the real world I live in, for instance, in the real world people don’t turn into wolves. This setting is more unfamiliar to me than the setting of a contemporary romance novel.

High fantasy is about ten steps further in direction. Magic? Yes, probably. Geography? Completely different than what I know. Society? Could be anything. Creatures completely different than those in the real world? I’ll have to wait and see. When I go into a new high fantasy setting I don’t know very much at all about the world I’m going into. I need to have more tolerance for (or enjoyment of!) this feeling of unfamiliarity and finding my footing in the new setting than I need when I read a romance novel or even an urban fantasy novel.

As it happens, I enjoy reading all those kinds of novels—but, my expectation for what I’m going to experience when I start a new one is not the same across the board. When I have less mental bandwidth to enjoy a challenge in my leisure reading, I might reach for something that is less likely to need a lot of figuring out and footing-finding in the early part of the book. This is also why I like to reread books I’ve read before: There’s no bar to entry. I already know what I’m going to get and no acclimation is needed. This is the most “comfortable” reading I can do. My fellow clinically depressed humans will almost certainly understand this feeling.

Depending on what type of book I’m picking up, I expect there will be more or less acclimation needed to get comfortable in the text. However, not every author makes it equally easy to engage with their text right from the start, irrespective of genre.

For instance: Some fantasy writers bring me into their world at a comfortable and engaging pace and some don’t. The two things that are likely to make the book too uncomfortable for me to want to continue are:

1. They’re infodumping too much exposition on me right from the start to try to force-acclimate me. Reading all that exposition is boring for me and I find it hard to tell which details I need to remember for later. All of them? You can’t dump all the critical details on me in a blob of exposition in Chapter 1. That’s too many all at once and I can’t retain all that. DNF.

2. They’re giving me nothing to acclimate with, no life preserver to grab. I’m dumped in on Chapter 1 page 1 and I’m flailing. Action is happening. Dialogue is happening. I have no idea who these people are or what they’re doing and the story is just charging ahead without giving me any insight to start making sense of it. DNF.

Let’s talk about infodumping first. I will candidly admit that my first drafts are full of this. I want to give the reader all the information they need up front and center so when the story begins they immediately understand what’s going on. I have to actively work on taking this out in revision because most readers won’t engage with this type of writing.

Take The Fellowship of the Ring, which begins with this line:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Tolkien then goes on to talk about how Bilbo is aging very gracefully, about what the other Hobbits think of him, and about the upcoming party that he’s going to throw. Even without reading The Hobbit for background, from this first sentence you can pick up on the fact Bilbo is turning eleventy-one, which is both an unusual age for someone to live to be (human or otherwise, because Tolkien hasn’t said this is a Hobbit yet) and an unusual way to phrase the number 111. 

A lot of writers, and especially novice writers, want to back out and do one of these:

Once upon a time in a place called Hobbiton, which is where the hobbits live, hobbits being a short and peaceful race of gardeners who live in Middle Earth, a particularly old hobbit named Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, that’s his 111st birthday to those who don’t know, and that’s a suspiciously old age for a hobbit to be and might be attributed to the fact that Bilbo once went on a journey with a company of dwarves and stole an enchanted ring.

Oh my god nobody wants to read that version. The writer of that version (in this case me) wants to pile on too much information to make sure the reader doesn’t have any questions about what they are reading. This is always a terrible move, as having questions about what the writer is saying is what propels readers through a book. Another thing I see fantasy writers do is this one:

Miralanna wore a black satin cloak, the cloak only worn in the Ancient City of Lalabrora by members of the thieves guild. Moreover, her cloak was pinned with a gold brooch encrusted with three black gems, signifying a master thief: Apprentice thieves wore one gem in their brooch, while journeyman thieves wore two; only master thieves wore three. Her gold brooch signified that she was part of the Council of Thieves. Regular thieves wore a silver brooch.

Okay listen it’s great that you worked out this whole symbolism system for the thieves guild but this is not the way to tell the reader about it. Sometimes we get carried away with worldbuilding and we make up details the reader will never need. Is this brooch pecking order one of those details? Will there be a part of the book where the reader needs to know which brooch details signify what? Probably not, and even if so, the time to give those details is then and not on page one when you’re introducing Miralanna because nobody will give a fig about these brooch specifics until they’re already invested in the lore of the thieves guild of the Ancient City of Lalabrora. 

The reverse of infodumping is giving the reader not enough to make sense of what they’re reading. This is a mistake that good beta reading or peer critique can help you out with—and over time, if you have this habit, early feedback can help you stop making the same mistake.

Sometimes as writers we have things so well-fleshed out in our mind that certain details seem like they’re just given. I’m going to start with a dialogue scene between these two characters and readers will intuit that they are siblings. Are you sure about that? Readers will intuit all kinds of relationships for two characters if you don’t tell them. Maybe you feel your dialogue is so characteristic of sibling banter that no one could mistake these two for lovers but people will mistake them for lovers.

You have to give enough contextual information that readers aren’t totally in the dark, without giving them so much that they can’t absorb or use all of it. Readers don’t want to drown in your text. Most readers can tread water for awhile till they get comfortable but you can’t leave them out there treading forever. If you don’t throw them any flotation device, they’re gonna sink eventually. If you throw everything in your boat at them hoping one or two of the things will float and they can hang onto it—probably still gonna sink. The trick is to get them floating. 

Give them details as needed, just don’t frontload the information. Don’t be afraid to let readers experience a little discomfort with the unknown world of your story. If you try to hard to protect them from that, they will never have the pleasant experience of growing to feel at home in the world you’ve created.

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