How to write hidden details
In movies and TV shows and the like, there are often details that the writers work in that are hard to catch at first sight, but can be found if you happen to look for those details. For example, Character N always wears a necklace as it was a gift from his brother, but during the last few episodes (or minutes, or movies, etc.) he hasn't been wearing it because he got in a toxic fight with his brother and none of the other characters notice it until much later.
Is there a way to work something in that the average reader might not notice while reading through unless they were specifically looking for it?
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There is no background in prose. The reader receives every word and they receive them one at a time. Thus there is no place to hide anything.
Where you can be more subtle is in the connections between things. If you mention a rose, it is a foreground rose for the moment the reader is reading a word, but if you mentions roses several times and in several contexts throughout a work, the reader may not notice the significance of that motif being repeated.
On film, the director composes an entire scene but it is left to the viewer to decide what parts of that scene to look at. In prose, the writer dictates exactly where the eye falls at all times. All readers see the same thing when they read, but that does not mean that they all remember it, or even that they grasp its significance the first time it is seen.
So, you cannot obscure things in space, the way you can in a film, but you can hide (or reveal) things in time, just as you can in a film.
This means that you actually have far more control in prose than you have in film. You can control what the reader sees with much more precision and therefore control the effects of realized connections much more closely.
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I disagree with the first answer. The core of the problem is the writer's individual style. Essentially, we're discussing the well-worn subject of 'show don't tell'.
Showing leads the reader to derive or conclude based on the presented information.
"Can you get the Wok from the top cupboard, please?" said Mrs Smith. "You know I can't reach." "Stir fry, again?" said Mr Smith. "Why can't we have some good old American food?"
- From this brief exchange the reader will make assumptions that are not stated facts. e.g. The characters are married. Mr Smith is taller than Mrs Smith.
Let's examine this on a more complicated level . . .
We have a mixed race female character "Charlie". Throughout school she identified with the blacks and Hispanics. Charlie's world is music, from a very young age she could rarely be found without earbuds blasting Hip-hop into her ears.
In random scene, earbuds in, Charlie's doing her homework in her room. Her stepmom shocks her by taking her by the shoulders and turning her around to tell her that her dinner is ready.
You've been shown (but are unaware of the fact) Charlie has two superpowers.
We come to a critical scene: Charlie's in a nightclub, dancing. Music is pounding. A huge narcotics deal is about to go down. But the Colombian drug-dealers are plotting to kill the undercover cops and steal the cash. How do we know this?
You were told . . . On the balance of probability Charlie can speak Spanish, and based on all the previous conversations that had taken place with her earphones in - Charlie's pretty adept at lip-reading.
With your character, perhaps put them in a situation where the absence of the necklace exposed by its omission whilst you through in a red-herring to further distract the reader. e.g the character has a brief meeting or is required to deliver something to a person in a courthouse or, at an airport, or inside an embassy. She's required to pass through a metal detector so hands her phone and watch to the security staff. She returns five minutes later and curses. "WTF? Five missed calls!"
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28027. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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