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08/24/2007: Whispers in the Dark


Ever have a fan of a particular movie watch you watch it for the first time? They're rarely able to resist helping you watch it. "Ooh, there's a good bit coming up." "Watch the girl in the background." "Oh, this guy shows up again later." Or, even worse, "He's going to turn out to be a jerk," or "Later on, you're gonna find out she's his daughter." It can be very tempting to fill in information that a first-time viewer doesn't have, thinking that it will sort of jump them ahead to the connoisseur-type enjoyment of a repeat viewer.

It can also be tempting to do this when you're writing -- wanting to let your reader in on information that the imaginary "viewer" of the piece doesn't yet have. For example, let's say you have a character, call her Barbara, and you have her look at a photograph of a young girl. You don't want the viewer to know yet that this is a photo of Barbara herself as a child. But you write a stage direction like, "Barbara's eyes widen as she recognizes her younger self." Your reasoning is that you're doing the reader a favor by letting them in on this fact before the "viewer" knows it.

The only problem with this is that it makes your reader have a split personality. From this point on, they have to remember what they know as a reader versus what they know as a viewer. They're also going to wonder if it was an oversight on your part, if you meant for this fact to be suggested in dialogue but forgot to put it in. Overall, you're going to have a distracted reader.

If you want to do this kind of thing, at least mark it clearly, so the reader knows exactly what the status is of this piece of information is. I remember once writing a piece of stage direction that went something like this:

Outside the gate, a VAMPIRE lurks, although we don't yet recognize him as such.

I'm letting the reader in on something, but I'm making it clear that the future viewer won't know it. The reader still has two separate trails of information to keep track of, but at least she knows I want it that way.

Lunch: Chinese noodle soup with pork