In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Marissa Graff identifies three ways you may be losing your reader’s trust. “Strong storytelling is rooted in trust,” she says. “Trust in the person who has crafted the story, but also trust in the viewpoint character. If we feel as though the character shares with us everything they know and allows us to be along for all critical moments of their story, we can feel as though we are that character.”
So, how can you lose that trust?
- Show your character reacting to something before you show the reader what it is. You’ve probably seen this unforced error: “Mary screamed. She heard a gunshot.” That structuring pulls the reader out of the story. The writer had told the reader what’s happened, instead of showing it happening. “Bottom line: Present sensory-based action and observation first, and build in character reaction second,” Graff writes.
- Withhold a character’s name/identity just to perpetuate tension. This mistake is more subtle than the first, but equally annoying. In this example, the writer describes a POV character’s reaction to another person, without telling the reader who that person is. This is another way of keeping information from the reader, when they should learn its simultaneously with the character. “When we use this type of writing, we aren’t keeping the figure’s identity unknown for a reason rooted in logic or plot,” Graff notes. “The figure isn’t wearing a disguise or hidden for some other reason. So why not just use their name? Why not tell us all that the character knows when she knows it?”
- Tell the reader what’s happened with your POV character since the last scene. Sometimes, you need to skip forward in time. The reader doesn’t need to see your character getting ready for bed or driving to work in the morning. However, important plot points should be shown. Thriller and mystery writers can get away with this to a certain extent, but used badly, this also throws the reader out of the story. “When the character has seemingly made a choice during a gap of time—a choice that relates to the pursuit of their goal—we should have access to it as it occurs,” Graff notes. “In other words, we should be in the scene whereby the threads of the new decision start to emerge, and we should even see hints of what the character might do next. Or, we should simply and fully know what they plan to do by the time we leave one scene and get ready for the next one.”
