In a post on the Nelson Agency’s Pub Rants blog, Angie Hodapp says writers of speculative fiction need to find the right balance between explaining your unnatural world and leaving a few things mysterious. “In broad strokes, stories ask questions and then answer them,” Hodapp writes. “The human brain has some hardwired, logic-based pathways where story is concerned. Part one: Set up the pins. Part two: Knock them down.”
It might be tempting to leave everything unexplained, especially if your story has a Twilight Zone vibe. But that’s also one reason a lot of novels get started but never finished. “It’s fun to set up lots of evocative, compelling, mysterious, hooky questions at the beginning of a story,” Hodapp says. “Then you get to the halfway point, and you must come up with answers. And not just any answers, but satisfying answers.”
Of course, your answers don’t have to be based in our reality, only in the reality of your story world. “They can defy the laws of our natural world,” Hodapp writes. “But that’s also what makes writing spec-fic more challenging. Since spec-fic writers can leave some things unexplained, they must search for their story’s best ratio of explainable to unexplainable.”
For example, your readers might suspend their disbelief to accept the existence of your story’s unnatural phenomenon, but they’ll want more concrete answers about its origin, its connection to your hero, or other issues. “Leading readers down a path that ends with ‘it was all supernatural’ is too easy—and whatever is too easy for writers is often not satisfying for readers,” Hodapp adds.
Real life mysteries, like the Amityville house or the cases on all those unsolved mystery shows, are both fascinating and frustrating because we can never find out the full answer. But we can in fiction. ‘The author answers all the hard questions in ways that our logical story brains accept—at least for as long as we are inside that story world, and sometimes longer,” Hodapp says. “Sometimes, with the very best fiction, forever.”
Unfortunately, here’s no simple ratio of mystery:explanation that will work for every story, but Hodapp says you need to give readers something. “Readers won’t suspend their disbelief if you’ve given them nothing to suspend it from,” she says. “The more suspension of disbelief you’re asking of readers, the stronger your story’s logical, rational, realistic framework has to be. Build plausible conditions in which your speculative conditions can thrive, and tie up all your loose ends. If you want happy readers, that’s a good place to start.”
