: Re: What is the balance between 'stating a problem clearly' and Hemingway's literary iceberg? At a writer's critique group, one piece of feedback to me was: people didn't understand where I was

@Steve161

Vote Up Vote Down

I agree with what others have pointed out: That your readers probably were confused because you either didn't set up reader's expectations well or you didn't set them up at all.

Let's say you're writing a love story where A and B first hate each other, but then slowly fall in love with each other. The first half of the story contains lots of dialogue between A and B where they fight and insult each other. Now let's assume that one of your readers for some reason thought this would be a horror story. They are bored by all the dialogue, because they're expecting the monster to show up and kill everybody. To them, it feels like nothing's happening. They feel let down. However, if they read the same story actually expecting a love story, they might have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Reader's expectations influence how they percieve the story and how much they are able to enjoy different elements of the story. Going in with false expectations can destroy the entire story. Going in with the right expectations helps readers to root for the right characters and to care for the right things.

Of course, that doesn't mean that you have to spoil the ending before it happens. But you should let your reader know in which direction you're going.

So how do you do that?

In your story, the ending is probably an answer to something. Figure out which question the ending is an answer to. In the love story example, maybe A is very arrogant and has to overcome their arrogance in order to be with B. So question and answer in this scenario could be: "How does A overcome their arrogance? - They love B so much that they are willing to put their ego aside." Another example: "How does Harry win over Voldemort? - By being willing to sacrifice his life for others the way his mother sacrificed hers for him."

After figuring out your question, reveal it to readers as early as possible. And this is something you can do by showing, not telling: In Harry Potter, it's very clear from the beginning that eventually, Harry will have to face Voldemort. And it's also very clear that with Voldemort being one of the most powerful wizards the world has ever seen and with Harry being completely new to the wizarding world, he is just not equipped for that. So the question comes up naturally: How?

Same with the love story example. If we've seen A be a jerk in the beginning and be very arrogant towards other people, we'll naturally wonder what's going to become of this character trait.

So you don't have to state "this story is going to be about XY". You just have to reveal a question. And if the end of the story is an actual answer to the question that the readers had in the beginning, they will feel that the story made sense and didn't lead them on. The kind of response you got is in my opinion only possible, if your story answers questions that the readers never had in the first place.

Sorry for bad English, I'm not a native speaker.

(0)

Login to post a comment!