Every story has a bit of mystery to it. Readers want to know more about a character, how they’ll solve a problem, what drives them to their goal. Keeping some details ambiguous is key to keeping your reader intrigued. In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Harrison Demchick offers advice on when to inform your reader and when to hold back.
Demchick suggests picturing your story as a maze. “The trick to a maze is that it’s not about the paths. It’s about the walls,” Demchick says. “Without clearly defined walls to guide you in the right (or wrong) direction, a maze is nothing but empty, undefined space.”
It’s the same in a story: you define what the readers do know with what they don’t, but want to, know. “In other words, the walls of a good literary maze are built on bricks of specific detail,” Demchick writes. “It’s just that the specific detail in question isn’t yet explained to readers.”
One common area of ambiguity is the use of prophecy in fantasy (and occasionally other) novels. Prophecies tend to be a big vague and open to multiple interpretations. Some are so vague they are meaningless to a character until a great deal of additional information is revealed, and sometimes not even then. However, great prophecies thread the needle: they are vague enough to create a mystery, but concrete enough that a meaning can become clear. Then the ambiguous becomes cryptic. “We have a prophecy we can believe will have meaning in time,” Demchick says. “We’ve constructed the walls solidly enough for readers to start navigating the maze.”
In a different setting, characters may refer to people or places your hero hasn’t yet encountered, or discuss details of an event that don’t yet make sense because the full picture isn’t revealed right away. This pricks the reader’s curiosity, but it’s also authentic. In normal conversation, people don’t spell out every detail of a person or event. They assume the information is known to the person to whom they are speaking. The trick, according to Demchick, is to write the conversation as though the reader also knows this information. Then you can choose the details your characters would naturally convey, without revealing too much too soon.
