What is the balance between 'stating a problem clearly' and Hemingway's literary iceberg?
At a writer's critique group, one piece of feedback to me was: people didn't understand where I was going until the very end. They suggested stating something explicit at the very beginning so they knew what it was I was trying to convey. My thought at the time was agreement "Yeah, we can all use having things spelled out for us - we're all tired and overworked."
Later I was thinking about the idea that when you write, try to move the story without hitting people over the head with it. This is sort of 'show, don't tell'.
My preferred way of showing, not telling is to bring to mind Hemingway's advice: the written words are the visible portion of the iceberg, and the way those move tells the reader what is happening beneath the surface, which is most of the story. Unwritten but implied and understood. Don't underestimate your audience.
How does one balance these two ideas? How does one 'state explicitly' as the group suggested to me, without hitting the reader over the head?
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This is an interesting question. The answer, I believe, lies in remembering that people read for pleasure. And when it comes to our pleasures, we value predictability very highly. This is not to say that surprise has no role in pleasure, but it is a very confined one. When we read a mystery, we want to be surprised when we find out who the killer is, but we read mysteries because we predict that we will have that pleasurable surprise (and only that particular surprise) at exactly the time and place we expect it.
In that sense, a piece of writing is like a cruise ship. The passengers don't need or want to know what is going on in the engine room (OK, I want to know, but I trust you get my point). They don't want to know the details of navigation and ship handling or how things run in the galley. But before they buy their tickets, they do want to know the exact itinerary, the exact cabin they will be occupying, and the kind of meals, amenities, and entertainments that will be provided on the voyage.
The pleasure, in other words, in in the voyage itself, and in the ports of call, not in any mystery about what they will be; it is in the food and the wine, not in any surprise about how and when you get to eat.
A genre is a promise of a certain kind of literary pleasure. Most readers stick to their chosen genres because they are looking for the specific pleasures that those genres promise. That is why it is harder to sell a story that does not fit an established genre: such a story asks the readers to take a risk on a book that may not deliver the specific pleasures they are looking for.
So, the part you want to conceal is how the sausage is made, not the fact that your are serving sausage. The pleasure lies not in surprise but in superb execution of the experience the reader signed up for. So the reader is always going to ask, what am I signing up for here? If you don't tell them, they are not going to read on. So it is essential to make it very clear where this is going, and then to make the journey unforgettable.
I once heard an agent describe what publishers are looking for as "the same, only different". "The same" is key here. The same is the guarantee of the familiar experience I want and am accustomed to. The different part is a modification of that experience that safely keeps it within the bounds of what I expect while giving a pleasing but safe variation on that experience.
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Without having seen your piece, of course, I can only speculate, but I wonder if what you were doing was the opposite of predictability: You signaled you were going straight, or right, when your goal was to go left.
I disagree that every book has to be a safe, predictable "the same but different," as Mark's agent said. There's certainly a market for that, but I wouldn't use it as a guiding principle for every story. What your readers may have been asking for was a flag that something was going on.
Let me use a TV show as an example, because I can't think of a written one at the moment. The BBC's wildly successful Sherlock aired its fourth season at the beginning of 2017, and it was almost universally panned. People actively hated it. The cinematography was gorgeous, the acting was wonderful, but the writing was... like we were watching the wrong show.
The previous three seasons plus a Christmas special taught the audience to expect a mystery or two per episode, clever banter, Sherlock as brilliant and pretending to be cold but actually very sensitive, John as brave and telling himself he's normal while chasing after excitement, Mycroft as a cold-blooded government spymaster, Mrs. Hudson as the affectionate and exasperated friend, Sherlock and John as the closest of friends (and probably in love with each other but unable to admit it), and a realism-based narrative.
But the fourth season went absolutely off the rails from all of this. Sherlock ignoring John, John barely speaking to Sherlock, Mary constantly in the middle of the two of them, Sherlock claiming to openly prefer Mary to John, John assaulting Sherlock and beating him bloody, Mrs. Hudson drag-racing an Aston Martin, Mycroft vomiting in distress after seeing violence, a mysterious mind-controlling secret sister in a secret government installation who is somehow in league with Moriarty who's been dead for years, an explosion which blows two men out a second-story window without a scratch and destroys the flat but not the rug, a character leaping in front of a bullet after it's fired and having a Hamlet-length death scene when it's established that a chest shot puts you out in three seconds... I could go on.
My point is that the fourth season of Sherlock was so inconsistent with everything else we'd seen in the previous three years that a large chunk of the online fandom has spent the last eight months trying to figure out What Really Happened, Because That Wasn't Real. Is it someone's fantasy? A mind palace vision? John or Sherlock is dying and hallucinating? Did reality separate at the end of Season Two?
At the end of The Reichenbach Fall, John leaves Sherlock's "grave" and the camera pulls back to show Sherlock watching John leave — so he's clearly not dead. That was the flag which the showrunners gave us so we knew something was going to happen. We didn't know what, but we knew it was something.
We didn't get an explicit flag anywhere in S4 to tell us "You are not supposed to accept these events at face value. Something Else is going on." Maybe Mofftiss didn't intend to tell us what's going on until S5, but they didn't warn us that we'd have to wait for S5. So we're angry and confused because we don't know where all this is going. Is it just bad writing? Is it layers of subtext? Is it meant to be symbolic? We don't know.
Perhaps what happened with your story is that you knew where you wanted it to end up, but you didn't signal to your audience that Things Are Not What They Seem. Some little bit of foreshadowing, signaling, flagging, or other direction was missing. Your readers need a hint about your endgame. The hint can be as vague as "Even though this is set up like a sitcom, it's not actually a comedy." You don't have to spell out on page 3 that it's going to be horror/drama/mystery/sci-fi/alternate history/southern gothic. You just have to let people know that their expectations are being deliberately subverted.
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I think a story needs to be consistent.
Consider "The Sixth Sense" [*Spoiler Alert, I give away the Twist], the "I see dead people" movie with Bruce Willis. For myself, I made sure I saw it early, I knew from rumor there was a killer twist, and I did not want it spoiled.
I was not disappointed: Bruce was dead the whole time! Holy crap! I watched it again immediately, the entire movie. It was expertly done, on second watch I did not see a thing inconsistent with the premise of how the dead were represented; Bruce was dead, did not know he was dead, his wife's harsh words and refusal to speak to him were all her speaking to the air in grief as if he were there to hear her: His spirit was, but he was not. And so on.
There was definitely some odd behaviors going on, but we ignored them, and on second viewing later realized they made more sense than we thought.
If your final revelation does not seem to follow with a 2nd reading, then that needs improvement. You don't need explicit hints, like The Sixth Sense this can be atmosphere and feelings. The hints need to be there, the idea it will be a transformative revelation does not.
What would help is a feeling that a transformative revelation is needed or desired, an air of frustration, boredom, unsettlement or loss. It is okay if the mundane task being performed turns out, for the character, to provide the metaphor they need to understand their larger personal problem and move beyond it. But we need to know they need or want a transformation, in the first Act, (roughly 1/2 a page or 2/3 for you, so no easy task).
In The Sixth Sense, we see all of Bruce's problems in the first Act, his utter failure to help Vincent (who also saw dead people, and kills Bruce), his despondent wife, his inability and confusion with Haley Joel (the kid).
We are misled into assuming these are normal life problems, but we aren't lied to. It makes the twist satisfying and entertaining to have missed the clues! If we were lied to, or the twist was completely hidden, then we would be miffed. The author didn't play a fair game; they cheated to pull a surprise.
You don't have to start with "This is a story of Alice's unexpected transformation." You need to start with Alice being troubled, emotionally adrift, dissatisfied. In her thoughts, reflexively cynical and critical, barely able to resist being mean and hurtful. You need to show us that Alice needs a transformation, a solution, a new way to understand the world that makes her (in the eyes of the reader) better than the unhappy bitch she has become.
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