I was mad to try it, but y'know - being a little sister and all, I wasn't exactly welcome among a crowd of twelve-year-old lads. Regardless, when my brother finally hosted a D&D party at our house, I crept downstairs, desperate to see this game in action.
What I saw was a bunch of boys sitting around a card table with pieces of paper in front of them, talking to one another. Hey! Where were the dragons? Where were the stinkin' elves?
My mom explained that the game took place inside their imaginations. That was a new concept at the time; D&D was the first role-playing game to become that popular. I remained disappointed, but even at that age, I recognised that the game was probably waaaaaaay better when played in the imagination than it ever could have been with cardboard pictures or plastic figurines.
In a previous post, I discussed the power of "showing" rather than "telling" in writing. It boils down to you forcing your reader to actively imagine what's happening in your novel.
Just like in D&D, you couldn't possibly describe the scene any better than the reader could imagine it unassisted. Thus, your task as the writer is to sketch in just enough detail for the reader's imagination to get excited, jump in, and finish the job.
An interesting twist on this idea occurred to me today. Some of the most charismatic characters I've come across are the ones where I didn't have enough detail for my imagination to finish the job. I had enough hints for it to get started, but that was all.
The result was that my imagination scurried wildly, trying to sort that character out. I became hooked, obsessed. I was desperate to find out more.
That's a good state to get a reader into; it keeps the pages turning. The tension caused by having too many viable possibilities to decide which one is correct is quite delicious.
Obviously, the reader is going to want some satisfaction by the time the book ends, but you can leave that to the last page. You can also leave the reader with only a likely hunch, not a definitive understanding of the character. That will keep the reader
I think this technique works best with villains, who are a bit removed from your protagonist's world-view (and thus the reader's), but it could also be applied to an unreliable narrator .
What characters have you run across in books/movies/television/games that drove you wild with curiosity? Which ones had you pondering their mysteries long after the story ended?
And what sorts of hinted backstory got you fascinated in the first place? Repressed pain? Hidden gentleness? Unrequited love? Concealed malevolence?
4 comments:
I think one of the most famous examples of this is good old Hannibal Lecter. Thomas Harris's albatross/mealticket became a monumental avti-hero (I don't know if I'd call him a true villain) from just a few minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter, and only the occasional chapter in the novels. With the book Hannibal, Harris made the mistake of giving the audience what they wanted - even though commercial principles say that's what you should do. He gave us more of Hannibal, and he allowed the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice cross the line into the sexual bond the previous novel teased us with. Once we got it all laid out, the magic dissipated.
In Hannibal the movie, they chickened out, which was worse. Then in the later adaptation of Red Dragon they added extra scenes with Anthony Hopkins to pad out Hannibal's role, which wound up detracting from what was otherwise a taut, effective thriller. Then of course we've got Hannibal Rising, which further erodes the appeal of the monster (as well as both the movie and the novel being clumsy hack jobs that Harris should be ashamed of).
In my own writing, I tend not to give a great deal of detail on the physical appearance of characters, other than possibly build, if they're tall, stocky, gaunt, wiry - maybe hair or eye colour, but not often that. I know when I read I want to get a picture in my head fairly quickly, usually of an actor I could see in the role based on the way they speak and their actions, but if the author throws in some specifics later on, it breaks the spell.
I've just finished reading a huge bestseller from a few years ago, one that got a record breaking advance, and it drove me mad with description. Every minor character that popped up got a little biography, a hair-by-freckle physical description, and even rundowns of the labels they were wearing - as if the first person narrator was having a peek down the back of their waistbands to see what designer they favoured! It ended up annoying the hell out of me and it was a real struggle to finish the book - but, again, it was a huge bestseller from a debut author that got a massive advance, so what do I know?
In my own writing, I tend not to give a great deal of detail on the physical appearance of characters
Interesting! And that might actually help your readers get into the story.
I read of an established writer who wrote a one-off romance. Women who read the book tended to like it, but they also complained that the author hadn't described the heroine (which is pretty standard in romance novels).
The author would then ask these women if they had pictured the heroine anyway. Most said yes, and when he asked them what they had pictured, they invariably described themselves!
The author found it fascinating and wasn't convinced describing the heroine would have improved the reading experience. He was happy to have his readers put themselves into the story.
While I enjoy being descriptive about my characters and the world they're in, I like giving lots of loose ends throughout the story...little niggling bits of description or quips of dialogue that I never fully explain and that give the sense of a much larger world or sense of magic than what's shown throughout the story. I guess these are more like quick walk-on bits in a movie, or where you glimpse a scene through a half-opened door right before moving on. It's fun for me as well, because it gives me lots of little hooks throughout the prose, places I can either come back to and expand or later, while stretching my imagination to see if I can come up with something new and weird to keep the reader's attention sharp.
For characters, I like to know them well. Sure, there are parts of them that I get to know as the story moves along, but I enjoy being familiar with them so that I feel like I'm under their skin more as they walk the streets and talk with people. Sometimes I write mock interviews between myself and the character, just having a mental discussion about this or that so I can know them better. I do realize the importance of not acid-etching every detail, because the reader needs something to engage their minds with, though. I try to paint with a few brief, but vivid strokes, and then leave the rest to be filled in.
All of the above and more.
Josh describes it well.
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