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Q&A How should I "remind" the reader of something that they may have forgotten?

Storytelling is about sequencing. If you have a big gap between a detail and major events that depend on that detail, that means you have got the sequencing wrong. This is a pervasive problem in ...

posted 8y ago by Mark Baker‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2020-01-03T20:41:50Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T05:38:02Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T05:38:02Z (almost 5 years ago)
Storytelling is about sequencing. If you have a big gap between a detail and major events that depend on that detail, that means you have got the sequencing wrong.

This is a pervasive problem in writing. Most of the impact lies in how the story unfolds. But often we have put months of work into creating a story in a particular sequence, only to find that some effect that we want is not working. We don't want to redo the entire sequence of the novel so that the effect is produced naturally, so we look for some local way of pulling it off, some trick of language or some way to sneak something in.

Perhaps there are occasions where we have no choice but to resort to these cheats. But the real answer is almost always that you have got the sequencing wrong, and the only fix that is really going to work is to go back and fix the sequencing.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-01-01T16:16:19Z (almost 8 years ago)
Original score: 1