We’ve all been there at one point in time or another. We’re fully immersed in a story, eagerly anticipating what’s going to happen next, when something happens that yanks us out of the story world and leaves us feeling discombobulated and perhaps (more than) a little bit grumpy.
As writers, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about the external distractions in a reader’s life that can make it difficult to connect with or finish a book (phone, email, kids, parents, beeping timers, etc.). But there’s quite a bit we can do to make sure that we aren’t adding unnecessary distractions within the pages of our book.
One of best ways to do that is by not overtaxing the brain with too many or too few details when we set the scene.
I don’t know where I am!
You’ve heard it said, “Sometimes less is more.”
That’s especially true in writing. Gone are the days when authors need to spend paragraphs and pages telling the reader exactly what each character and piece of furniture in a room looks like. It kills the pacing of the story, and today’s readers have no patience for it.
However, there is a fine line between giving readers enough information for their own imaginations to populate and decorate the story…and not giving them enough detail to work with at all.
One of the most common things I’ll point out to writers when working on an assessment or developmental edit is having a sense of disembodiment when the story transitions to a new time, place, or POV character.
This often happens in chapters or scenes beginning with a line dialogue that then goes on to focus primarily on the characters’ conversation. Then, several paragraphs (or even a couple of pages) into the chapter—and after I have already begun forming my own mental images—the author starts pointing out things about the characters or their surroundings that has me scrambling to re-center myself in the story.
A recent client that I worked with had a scene with a stake out. The scene itself was well-written, but based on some of the author’s word choices, the limited description, and my own past reading experiences, I pictured the scene taking place in the hours leading up to midnight. It was dark. It was rainy. And I pictured it being chilly inside the car.
Then halfway through the scene I discovered that the stake out was taking place early in the morning, just before the shops begin to open. It was cloudy. It was rainy. But it wasn’t dark. And I had to complete reframe the scene in my mind in order for the events taking place to make sense.
Setting the scene in the right place
As writers, we have the perk of “seeing” every aspect of our story in our mind’s eye as we write, which sometimes makes it easy to forget that our readers don’t have that same access to our story world.
Adding in key details after the fact doesn’t only make the reader work harder at the onset of the scene, it risks jarring her out of the story later on—especially when what she’s picturing is suddenly at odds with what you’re now spelling out on the page.
One of the easiest ways to check for this in your manuscript is to re-read the first few lines of each chapter or scene and then ask yourself, “Did I set the stage by anchoring my reader to a person, a place, a thing, and a moment in time in these opening lines?”
For example: If your POV character is hiding out in an old hotel, let the reader see that within the first paragraph by showing the character’s disgust about the rat droppings she’s spotted on the floor between the wall and the questionable bed with the ratty pea-green cover. Indicate her physical response to the smells of mold and mildew and remnants of take-out and bad coffee, or have her brace herself after a midnight freight train speeds by, shaking the building in its wake.
Whether it’s an utterance of disgust, a sarcastic quip, or a physical reaction, the reader now has a clear idea of where she is in the world—and you can dive back into the current conflict (sprinkling in additional elements to the setting throughout the chapter as necessary).
Good luck!
—Jen