You Lost Me, Part 2

When orientation goes overboard

I wrote last week about the importance of orienting your reader. About how no one is going to get into the book in any way at all if your barrier to entry is too high. (Or low? Or big? I’m not quite sure what the worst placement would be for a barrier to entry.)

But! But but but! It’s absolutely possible to go too far.

A subscriber sent in the following question:

I sometimes find it challenging to introduce orienting facts in first person or close third*.

…In my opening paragraph, I have a sentence "She let the door to the locker room slam shut" and am torn on whether to specify that it's the varsity basketball locker room, since the character herself thinks of it as the locker room. I guess the trick is to include the orienting clues without breaking the illusion of the character perspective?

*close third = it’s third person, but we only see, sense, know, think what the point of view character does.

While this writer pretty much answers her own question here, there’s a lot to discuss.

What can go wrong

First, let’s talk about orienting details that break the realism of your point of view.

The character wouldn’t be thinking, in the moment, about:

The way they look

Let’s have fun with some really bad writing:

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The doctor’s face grew blurry as my eyes filled with tears. I brushed my auburn hair out of my blue eyes. “He’s really gone?” I asked, woefully.

There are several layers of cringe here, but one of them—perhaps the cringiest—is the shoehorning in of hair and eye color at a moment when that’s the last thing this character would be thinking about.

The historical context

Dylan looked up at the 1873 edifice, built by architect Hawley G. Parkins right after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and wondered if Marissa was still at her desk.

Unless Dylan is running one of those architecture boat tours, this isn’t terribly believable.

Her heels clacked on the wooden sidewalk.

If we're in an era when the sidewalks are made of wood, then they aren’t “wooden sidewalks,” anymore than today’s sidewalks are “concrete sidewalks.” They’re just sidewalks.

Other stuff they already know

Maybe it’s what someone is thinking about:

He walked down the hallway, musing about how this high school had been founded in1962 by the Jesuits, and how it had gone coed only three years ago.

Or maybe it’s the terminology they use:

She sent out an All Points Bulletin (APB) asking everyone to look for a white Ford Focus with Louisiana plates.

Who is being this awkward with the terminology? The cop? Or the author? Clearly the author, trying to communicate with the reader, but then what is the author doing in this story?

My Babcia set down a plate of pierogis, which are boiled dumplings often filled with potato or cheese, and asked how my day was.

Similar to the above, but with the added fraught awkwardness of glossing cultural references as if for an outsider—when that’s not the vibe of the rest of the piece.

How can we fix it?

Make up a reason for them to think about it

Let’s fix the hair color example above.

I brushed my hair out of my face. I’d dyed it a deep and unnatural auburn the night before, in the hotel bathroom, thinking that my stepfather would appreciate seeing me less haggard than I felt. It seemed so frivolous now; I should have been here instead, sleeping beside his bed.

(A note: Writers use mirrors for this work far too often. A line like “I gazed in the mirror and noticed how tired I looked. I brushed my auburn hair from my blue eyes…” feels awkward and forced. If you’re determined to use a mirror, it has to feel like it’s there for a reason other than telling us what someone looks like. So you might go with “In the bathroom mirror, I ran a damp paper towel under my eyes to fix the smeared mascara. The lady at the makeup counter had been right; black mascara with blue eyes was too much. I’ve never been good at receiving sound advice.” Even so… if you can avoid the mirror, you probably should, just because it’s so overused.)

She has a pretty solid plot reason to look in the mirror.

Find a higher perch

Maybe in general, you don’t actually want to be quite as stuck in your character’s head, and in the moment, as you are.

Maybe there’s the distance of retrospect:

My heels clacked on the sidewalk. The sidewalks were all made of wood back then, something I don’t think about much these days except when I remember that summer in New York.

Or maybe the narrator is telling the story as if to an outsider:

The thing you have to understand about the varsity basketball locker room is that until last year, it was literally a janitor’s closet.

Or maybe there’s a narrator high up above it all, able to fill us in on context at will.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

I wrote that one just now, on the fly. It’s good, right?

Employ the stealth gloss

You can find infinite ways to fill us in on things through context clues.

“These ones are filled with sauerkraut,” she said, “but I boiled them too long.” I didn’t mind; I love a gooey pierogi.

There was a statue of the Virgin Mary at the end of the hall, by the vending machine—a statue the boys used to molest in various sacrilegious ways, until three years back when there were finally real girls to bother.

She let the locker room door slam shut. It smelled like feet and mold and general varsity basketball sweat in here. She was jealous of the swim team locker room, which at least smelled a little bit like chlorine.

Make your POV character more of an outsider

If there’s a ton that you need to get across about this world, it’s hard if your POV character already knows it really well. Hence Dorothy Gale and Nick Caraway and Alice and Luke Skywalker and Gulliver and Harry Potter and Cady Heron and The Little Prince and and and…

Use another character

It could be an outsider character—someone for your POV character to explain things to—or it could be someone who does the explaining or commenting. This can be particularly useful in letting us see a point of view character physically from the outside.

Rufus showed him around the science wing. “It used to smell worse,” he said, “before the girls came.” Rufus explained that his brother was a senior three years ago, when the school first went coed, and that he’d been one of the kids to protest by tying neckties onto the St. Ignatius of Loyola statue out front.

Or:

The time traveler looked at her in confusion. “The walkways are made of wood?”
”Yes,” she said. “What else would they be made of? Pierogis?”

Okay, that was not my finest. But you get the point.

A more serious example

Okay, enough with the pierogis! After the paywall, I’ll break down a passage from The Great Believers in which I used several of the methods above (and several I haven’t mentioned yet) to get information across about a POV character.