How-to-write books and blogs and groups and forums are all over these days. Most of them focus on basic writing skills like dialog and plot and characterization – things that are key building blocks for nearly every piece of fiction. But there’s one that doesn’t get nearly as much air time, even though it’s one of the most important skills for a writer to have. And that one is earning the reader’s trust.
Readers who don’t trust the writer are likely to hold back from the story and be less involved. Being less involved means they have the mental room to be more critical of what they’re reading. They’ll notice the slips, the plot holes, the tiny inconsistencies that they might otherwise gallop past. All of this makes it much easier for them to put the story down and not pick it up again, which in turn makes it much more likely that they won’t buy anything from that author again.
So how does a writer build trust? In much the same way as it’s done in real life: by making promises and then keeping them in a timely manner. The catch is that the “promises” are all implied, and what “a timely manner” is can vary wildly, depending in part on how the promise is eventually kept.
For instance, a story that begins with three characters fighting a huge mountain lion is promising several things: this is going to be a story with action and adventure and danger, and any survivors of the fight are going to be important later on (that includes the lion). If Scene Two opens in the hospital emergency room with a doctor saying “Lion bites? We have three patients with lion bites? How the hell did that happen?” there’s a minor payoff right away. Since the first scene is clearly relevant to the second one, the writer has built a tiny bit of trust, and even if the rest of Scene Two involves a romantic encounter between the doctor and one of the orderlies, the reader will likely be willing to wait a bit for further developments.
If, on the other hand, Scene Two opens with the romance and no sign of the lion fight, the reader may get restless. If the romance is even more interesting than the fight was, the reader will likely keep going for a while, but there’s still going to be that niggling question what was up with that lion fight? The longer it takes to come back around, the less likely the reader is to be satisfied with “We just admitted three patients who’ve been mauled by a lion” as anything other than the author signaling “Remember that fight with the lion? It’s going to be important; remember it!”
The longer the reader has to remember an incident without there being any payoff – some relevance to the plot or subplot – the bigger the payoff needs to be to be satisfying. Big payoffs are good; they move the story forward. You still have to get your reader to stick with the story long enough to get to them, though, and that means trust…which means lots of little payoffs and tie-ins.
Little payoffs build trust; they reassure the reader that the writer knows what he/she is doing. Little payoffs can be anything from a character getting a mysterious letter on Page One and opening it on Page Two, to linking the lion fight with the ER at the hospital. The important thing is that the payoff happens quickly: the writer presents the reader with a small question (“Who is phoning the main character?”) and answers it almost immediately (“She glanced at the caller ID, flicked the phone on, and said, “Hello, George.”)
The flip side of this is that an apparently-small question (“Who’s on the phone?”) can be built up into a larger one by withholding the payoff. (She checked the caller ID and answered the phone. “Hello? Yes, I know. I’ll be there.” She flicked the phone off and turned to Carol. “I have to go.”) Now the reader has several questions – not just “who called,” but “where is she going? Who is she meeting? Why isn’t she telling Carol?” Again, the longer the questions go without being answered, the bigger the payoff needs to be in order to keep the reader’s trust.
Because it’s not just earning the reader’s trust that’s vital; it’s keeping that trust. If the writer breaks trust in mid-story, a lot of readers will have a far more negative reaction than if the writer had never earned any in the first place. Building up a letter or phone call until it seems like something important, something that will have a major payoff, and then having it turn out to be an electric bill or a telephone salesman, is the sort of thing that nearly always does this…unless the writer is doing a parody like Northanger Abbey, where the gothic atmosphere is largely in the protagonist’s overheated imagination and the letdown is the payoff for the reader.
I just read a book that frustrated me this way. (I’ve read several books by this author, and most of them have been very good, but recently enough have been disappointing that I’m beginning to suspect ghost writers.)
The protagonist has a backstory that you get bits of throughout the story, and there are all these hints, both small and large, that something she’s unaware of in her past is important and even the cause of her current troubles. The obvious and known antagonist (a brutal, abusive husband) didn’t really seem all that sinister, to me, despite the protagonist’s terror of him–he’s just a contemptible bully. And then, after all the hints, it turns out that the death (an accidental death, what’s more) of the husband solves all her problems.
Basically, the story seemed to be building toward something, and then it just…ended. Very annoying.
I think a lot of authors try delaying the payoff when they do unreliable narrators – we’re left wondering what’s really going on. I’ve seen this work really well before (The False Prince) but also have seen it fall flat when that trust isn’t reached, that the payoff will be better than the delay.
The first book I read by Joanna Russ involved the protagonist heading off on a sort of quest and because of circumstances had to take her little brother along—which complicated things immensely. So much so, that the author could no longer deal with it and ejected the little brother from the story by tossing us the line, “I didn’t really take him. I made that up.” This did not come across to me as a witty literary trick but rather as a slap in the face of the reader. It felt to me that Russ was saying, “I don’t respect my readers enough to bother rewriting my first draft.” I dropped the book two-thirds of the way through and never picked it up again.
Maybe I missed whatever point she was trying to make, but that rug-pulling act caused me to lose trust in her entirely, and I’ve never bothered to purchase another of her books.
This post and comment thread are pretty interesting, but I’m wondering how some of them might intersect. For example, one of the things Patricia C. Wrede does really effectively in her excellent Enchanted Forest Chronicles is to sort of intentionally destabilize the reader and their expectations about character types and narrative patterns. The fun of those stories, for me and I think for a lot of people, has a lot to do with watching an entire carpet store’s worth of rugs being pulled out from underneath not only the character’s expectations for their world and for each other (for example, Cimorene herself makes use of this strategy on the wizards when she puts on a performance in an attempt to lead them to believe that she’s a princess as silly as their stereotype says they are) but also the reader’s. This seems like quite the feat to pull off in terms of trust. For example, I don’t think Wrede ever breaks my trust in the EF Chronicles. I never feel betrayed by the narrative. Similarly, I also don’t think that that’s because an absence of trust is somehow the default experience that comes with deconstructing fantasy and fairy tale elements– I don’t think that she makes me suspend my trust because I’m waiting for her to twist and spin expectations on their heads. If there were no trust operating in the story, I wouldn’t feel connected to the characters and invested in their journeys, and the EF Chronicles have remained favorite reads of mine not because they are only fun for the head, but because they are also still fun for the heart. As this blog entry makes clear, that heart element can’t happen with an absence of trust. So, the question is, how do you keep that balance between head and heart? How do you maintain a kind of trust while letting your reader know that you are going to be messing with them, and does it then need to be its own special kind of trust somehow? Is this balancing act a unique kind of writing in some way? How do you toy with reader’s expectations, and how do you tease narrative and thumb your nose at genre traditions AND keep those activities in line with some kind of fundamental trust? Or is it simply that when it comes to these strategies, there’s a different kind of promise at work, a different kind of trust or a trust in something more muddied and complex? A trust me as I show you the lies around you kind of thing, which still allows a certain kind of authority or guidance? Or what? What do we think?
I think at least some of the time, trust hinges on consistency of characterization. To take EF for an example, you know right from the beginning that Cimorene is a certain kind of character. If at the end of the story she’d given up on all this independent thinking stuff and gone back to the castle to live the way her parents wanted her to — *that* would have been a betrayal of the reader’s trust. And we would all likely not be here reading this blog. 😉
The story could have been constructed in such a way that Cimorene went back to her parents’ castle in the end, but on her own terms. Or probably a number of other ways, but the key is that at no time does what Cimorene does betray who she is. Because if you betray your character, you betray your readers’ trust too.
THIS WAS HELPFUL. Wow. Thank you. 🙂