This year I’ve done a decent amount of fiction experiments that will never see the light of day because they’re either sketches/studies or bad, or both, but I’ve learned a lot about myself if not about storytelling.
Conversation
One thing I’ve learned is that I don’t like manufacturing surprise out of a god-view of a story through staging and sequencing of information reveal. It feels like bad stage magic or fiction equivalent of clickbait.
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I’d rather just straight up tell the reader whatever I know the minute I know it, as efficiently and compactly as possible. If there is surprise it us because I actually surprised myself while plotting the story. Nor because I played tricks with words.
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Certainly there are genres where perhaps the stage magic approach is both justified and leads to good results. Like cozy mysteries. But I don’t enjoy writing it and it shows. The prose feels phoned-in.
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