Let me tell you, in brief, a story.
A man gets on his moped to deliver pizzas; he brings along someone named Agatha. He picks up the pizzas, he drives along, he talks to Agatha and tells her about his day. He remembers his fifth birthday party, and tells Agatha about it. He notices that it’s getting colder and worries he should have brought a coat. People answer the door to receive their pizzas, they pay the guy, they say hello to Agatha. This goes on for fifteen pages. Eventually the guy drives home, parks his moped, and carries Agatha into the house. Because—we finally learn, on the last page—Agatha was a cockatiel, this whole time! The End.
There are many reasons this is a terrible story, but let’s talk about the two biggest problems, which are related.
Absolutely nothing happens in this story. Our buddy is going about a very normal day, with his bird. He has known that she’s a bird the whole time. So, presumably, has she. The only thing that changes is that we, the readers, suddenly learn something. But we aren’t in the story. We don’t count. Nothing happened in this story.
If we are in this guy’s point of view, remembering what he remembers, seeing what he sees… then we should know what he knows. And he knew damn well all along that he was talking to a bird. (As did everyone who answered the door to get their pizza.) So why was this one thing kept from us? Obviously, the author wanted to trick us, because… apparently we’ll be charmed by such manipulations? (We will not be.)
Let me tell you another story! (Oh boy.) Here’s the opening of a fake novel that will never be published:
The night that it happened, we were all waiting. Waiting for it—yes, the thing. But there were three of us—three, if you count the spirits. It happened shortly after The Sorting occurred. And it happened in the place where it usually happened. But never like this. No, not like this. They’ll never be the same.
And let’s figure out why this one also sucks.
We have absolutely no idea what to picture. Maybe a laundry room, where laundry is being sorted? Maybe a prison? Maybe Neptune?
The narrator knows what’s happening. The narrator is, ostensibly, telling us (or someone) a story. Then why the hell would the narrator not actually explain what’s happening?
It reeks of desperation. This author seems to hope that we’ll be drawn in by the mystery of it all, when what we actually get is vagueness. And when was anyone ever drawn into anything by vagueness?
What’s going on in both these stories is “withholding”—and yes, that can mean what your father did when he refused to show you affection, but it also refers to when a narrator or point-of-view character withholds information from the reader. And while there are times when this works (we’ll get to those later) we usually use the term when we’re pointing out what’s not working.
We can define narrative withholding as any time the reader is not filled in on important information known by the narrator or the point-of-view character, in a timely manner.
This absolutely does not mean that you need to fill us in endlessly on every possible detail. If you say that someone sat on the couch but don’t tell me the color of the couch, that is not withholding—largely because it doesn’t matter.
Here’s the litmus test: If two readers could come away with wildly different guesses for what’s happening, and if those guesses would change the meaning of the story, you’ve got a problem.
So, reader 1 imagines a blue couch, and reader 2 imagines a red couch. We’re fine. But if I said He kept a secret stash in his sock drawer, one he only dared to look at on occasion—and then I didn’t immediately explain—some people are picturing drugs, some are picturing money, some are picturing porn, some are picturing Skittles. And the difference matters.
Why would anyone do this?
Given that this is among the top three problems plaguing student work, I’ve developed a lot of theories over the years for what’s going on, and I believe there are six major reasons a writer might attempt it:
1. We learn it from film
When you watch a movie, you are fundamentally a voyeur, looking in from the outside and trying (especially in the first few minutes) to catch on to what’s happening. Here’s a guy crying over a pair of socks, and we don’t know why, or who he is. That’s fine because we aren’t confused about what to literally picture (here it is, right in front of us) and because film tends to move a lot faster than prose; it’s only a minute or two before we’re fully filled in.
But this does not translate well to the page. That’s because reading is harder than watching a screen; the reader needs to do half the work, picturing the right things, and choosing to read the next sentence and the next. Without enough information, we can’t do our work. And we won’t want to do it, either.
Plus, one of the main advantages text has over the screen is that on the page, we have access to people’s thoughts and perceptions and memories. We aren’t stuck in that voyeur role. But if we’re supposed to have that access and then you limit it for no good reason, we feel betrayed.
2. We’re insecure about the elements of the story
You know how a body language expert will tell you that people tend to (subconsciously) cover their mouths when they’re lying, as if to mask the faulty words? This is similar. You don’t believe what you have is good enough, or you think it’s too little or too much, or you worry the reader won’t buy in. And so you obfuscate. I promise, it does not help.
Rather than luring the reader in with confusion, how about luring the reader in with the actual elements of the story? If you start a story and there’s a guy on a moped, a cockatiel on his shoulder, delivering pizzas, I’m going to be fully on board. Now of course if that’s the full extent of your ideas you’re going to have push yourself to see what happens next, but that’s a good thing. When you play all your cards early, you usually discover that something new and amazing that was hiding behind them. If you don’t play your cards till the end, you’ll never know what else the story could have been.
And it doesn’t matter if the the elements of your story are absurd or complicated or even simple and dry; at the beginning of a story, we’ll accept just about anything. It’s a story about people waiting for the mailman to land in his hot air balloon? Okay, great! It’s a story about a woman doing needlework and watching the news? Fine! Bring us in with those things, not with fog.
3. We’re desperate for intrigue
If a story lacks a conflict, or tension, or friction, the writer sometimes reaches for mystery instead. And that would be great if it were a mystery within the world of the story—like there’s a guy who’s dead on the Orient Express, and a pizza delivery guy and his bird must solve the case. Or the mailman hasn’t shown up for five days, and everyone’s wondering why. But if the mystery is just for the reader (that mystery being, basically, “Huh??”) that is no substitute for your story having a plot.
4. We’re excited to write a story with a Big Reveal
I addressed this one in more detail in a recent post, but briefly:
Okay, maybe you grew up on O. Henry. Or you love it when you’re sucker-punched by a story. I love that too! But when these things work, it’s almost always* because it’s also a surprise for the point-of-view character, too—not just for the reader.
*We’ll get to the exceptions below.
5. We feel super awkward about filling the reader in on all the details of this world
It’s impossible to tell your readers everything they need to know on page 1, so we’re going to have to hold some things back. But that’s not the same as withholding.
He approached the house and smelled the lilacs. A middle-aged woman in an apron came out the door and waved at him. “Hi, Mom!” he called.
Here’s the problem: We were in his head, right? Did he actually think “Here comes some random middle-aged woman. Oh wait, it’s my mom!”…? Or did he think “Here’s Mom”? Unless he’s dealing with cognitive issues, probably the latter.
It’s absolutely fine that you did not tell us about his mother on the first page. It’s fine if we meet her for the first time on page 30. But we should know what he knows as soon as it’s relevant.
6. We want to talk about this world as if the listener already knows it
This can be a useful move, pretending that the reader/audience is already in the story with you. Maybe you don’t want to start your story with Once upon a time, I was working at a movie theater and then I got fired. You’d rather start with I was so good at tearing those tickets in half, and go from there. That’s great! But then you’d better work fast to drop us enough clues. Maybe your next sentence is Whenever some hotshot handed me two tickets, his and his date’s, I’d rip through them both and hand them back only to the date. I’d say, just to her, “Enjoy the film!”
It’s a popular tactic in speculative (fantasy or sci-fi, etc.) fiction for the story to pretend we already know and live in this world; it makes it feel more real, perhaps. But of course the more unusual the world of your story, the more work you have to do then to orient us along the way.
Bonus reason: It’s unintentional
There are times when it looks like a writer is withholding information, when the real issue is that they thought they were clearly showing us where we were and what was happening, but they didn’t get what they needed onto the page. You can read more about that here.
When does it work?
Occasionally, intentional withholding works brilliantly. I’ll give some examples, but the governing principle here is that there should be a damn good reason for what you’re doing. And I don’t mean a reason like “I want to be spooky!” or “People will be so surprised when she turns out to be a bird!” I mean a reason that makes narrative sense, a reason the narrator would present the story this way.
(All of these are 1st person examples, but a 3rd person version of these would be possible. It would entail the invisible narrator really having a personality of its own, though, which almost makes it 1st person again, even if it never uses the word “I.”)
The narrator is keeping things back out of guilt or something like it:
Consider Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Our narrator, Merricat, is 18; she and her older sister are the only two surviving members of the Blackwood family. When she was 12, all her other relatives were poisoned at dinner. Either she or her sister did it. And she is not (until very late) ready to reveal to us which of them it was. The narrative is sometimes teasing, often cagey, as if she’s talking to someone she trusts a little but not enough to spill it all.
The narrator is having a hard time admitting things even to himself:
Taylor Antrim’s short story “Pilgrim Life” (which, sadly, I believe you can only find in Best American Short Stories 2012) is narrated by a young man who was responsible for a car accident. He only slowly reveals what’s happened, as if admitting it not only to us, but to himself for the first time.
The narrator is engaged in self-protection:
The delightfully unhinged narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire might or might not have murdered the poet whose poem he’s annotating In the copious footnotes to that poem, we start to get clues, ones that seem mostly accidental. He doesn’t totally realize what he’s revealing.
There’s a specific addressee, to whom not everything would be revealed:
Let’s imagine a story that’s written like a letter from a woman to her ex. At some point she says, I had a great date last night. I’ll spare you the details. His name is Joe.
We really are being cast as voyeurs, even though this is on the page:
We don’t have access to any character’s mind, so we don’t wonder why we aren’t being told what they know. This is a very unusual move, but Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is a good example.
And there could be other reasons, too. Shame, embarrassment, playing coy, etc. But in every example above, there is a logical reason.
Anyway…
If I’m hurting your feelings because person-turns-out-to-be-a-bird was the whole premise of your novel, I’m sorry. But not really.
Listen: Get your act together. Stop being cute. Don’t be afraid to actually tell the story, up front, unashamed, no hiding. Don’t worry that your readers will have to be lured in by trickery. Don’t let “Haha, gotcha!” be the whole point of your story.
(And now is when I reveal that this whole post was written by a cockatiel. My sincere apologies.)
Thank you for exactly saying why I am suspicious of many highly promoted or popular mystery/thrillers (a genre I love) that are called "compelling," "propulsive," or "can't put down" because they often rely on a form of this: you have to keep reading to find out what the hell is going on but not in a fun way.
You said this is one of the top three problems plaguing student work. What are the other two?