: Hooking the reader by omitting a piece of information I'm writing a short story. I decided to opening it in the following way: We were in Y, doing Z when she mentioned X. I wasn't sure whether

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" It sounded to me like something she had taken from an ancient Chinese tale, or a bad marijuana trip. Surely, not something that belonged to this world. "

My personal opinion as a somewhat would be writer and reader,
I don't like the line 'bad marijuana trip' in this context. You talk about something taken from an ancient chinese tale, then use the line 'bad marijuana trip', then use the line something that didn't belong in this world.

If its your intent to portray something that didn't belong in this world I would say rather that line is doing the opposite effectively grounding us in this world. I think its anticlimactic.

I liked the rest :)

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I like it. I would want to read the rest of this.

I think it makes sense for the narrator not to be thinking about what the Flying Stone is immediately, when she's known about it for a while and is focused on something else (news). So it works for me. If it went on about how amazing the thing is without telling you about it, that would be irritating, but it doesn't.

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This does not work for me at all. It feels highly inconsistent to be invited deeply into the character's head for almost everything, but not for this one thing. It feels like a storyteller's trick. The storyteller is trying to manipulate me.

Most of the time it feels condescending. When I see this trick, I've come imagine some storyteller telling a story to a bunch of kids. "And can you guess what happened next, kids?" And we (kids?) are all supposed to lean forward, wide-eyed with wonder, hanging on whatever the storyteller says next.

Also, storyteller's tricks make me wonder why they are necessary. Isn't the story interesting enough without this manipulation?

This trick bothers me more when the narration is third person. It means that the person pulling the trick is not the POV character, but the narrator. It tells me that the narrator is going to try to manipulate me with storyteller's tricks. If I have a strong interest in the story, the storyteller, or the POV character, I might keep reading. But when the storyteller opens with tricks, before I have a reason to invest in anything, I have no confidence that this story will be worth my time.

With first person, I can at least attribute the manipulative, condescending style to the POV character. This might be an interesting bit of characterization. But again, if this is the opening, then the first thing I learn about the character is a desire to manipulate me with children's storytime tricks.

I have ranted about this before, so clearly this is a hot button for me. Perhaps the key for me is not so much the desire to keep something secret, but the deliberate inconsistency in POV. I can see everything in the character's head except this one thing. There had better be a very good reason that I can't see that one thing in the character's head. The desire to manipulate me, to coax me to lean forward in wide-eyed wonder, is not a reason that endears me to the storyteller.

So the problem is not that this is a storytelling trick per se. All storytelling is trickery and manipulation in some way or another. It's that this trick feels condescending. It does for POV what melodrama does for plot.

I often forgive this kind of trickery, but only once, and only at a certain moment in the story. In a mystery, it looks like this: And suddenly Lily knew who had killed Baron Stimpypants. In other stories, it looks like this: And then Winston knew what he had to do.

It's still a trick, and it's still manipulative. (Why am I privy to Winston's every thought except the most important one?) But I can forgive it... if I'm deeply invested in the character and the story. And then only one time. And then only if it's not horribly clumsy.

These nearly-forgivable instances have a few other common characteristics. First, the thing that's being hidden from me is not only crucial to the story, it is the answer to the main story question. Lily's identification of the killer is the main story question. How Winston will save the day (or whatever) is the main story question. Second, if I were told this hidden thing, it would diminish my enjoyment of the rest of the story.

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I think it's a good technique. In my opinion, to resolve the mystery too quickly. If you're going to create a mystery, resolving it in one paragraph just seems too fast for me.

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I like the concept of what you are doing, and I think the concept could work well. It looks like you are intending to build a brief bit of mystery about the Flying Stone, but you also create a brief mystery about their location. The double-confusion was too confusing for me.

I suggest making their location clear BEFORE you bring up the stone. A hotel and a cheap Italian wine do not, to me, suggest China. Perhaps you could mention the Chinese mountains (or the specific name of the mountain) as creating a beautiful view out the window in the opening sentence/s. As a reader, I am much more willing to accept one mystery at a time. Not only is it less confusing, but it also builds my trust that the writer is creating mystery on purpose.

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