Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal?
In the story I am writing, I have a character who is working on a project and will present it to a group of judges who will mark it in a sort of examination. The project is a source of stress for the character, and also provides a sort of paradigm shift for them.
Though the story takes place across the project's creation, from conceptualisation, through creation, to presentation, I do not want to tell the reader what the project actually is until it is revealed in the presentation.
The problem is the narration is usually coming from this character's perspective and I want to show the character's thoughts and the elaborate process in which they are creating the project. They become a hermit for a time to get it done, moving furniture, skipping meals, bringing in many odd materials to their bedroom and more.
My question is: what are the effects of intentionally omitting obvious information from the reader for a bigger reveal later? What can be done to minimise any damage it could cause?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/34303. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
One solution is to keep the protagonist from even knowing the answer. Make the project a kind of an exploration and discovery so small accomplishments accumulate to larger things, that suddenly coalesce into a finished project.
The other thing to do is keep their thoughts, when working on the project, not on what it does but what it means, what the results would be. Not how to cure cancer, but the idea This will cure cancer. Focus on the implications or consequences of the project.
In fact, I would focus on both ends of the spectrum, the extremely fine details of the project, and the extremely large.
A mathematician / statistician like me isn't thinking "I'm inventing a new distribution that does XYZ for fracture prediction", that's the middle ground.
We think "I'm going to save lives and keep aircraft from falling out of the sky. [consequences,] I just have to find a way to narrow this error range a little more, maybe I can use a conditioning equation... [microscopic details]."
The trick is, the consequences of the project do not really tell the reader what the heck the project is, and the microscopic details worked on each day are "a tree" instead of "the forest", so they don't tell the reader the nature of the big idea either.
But still the reader feels like they are somehow privy to the thoughts of the inventor, it is just the original inspiration for the project occurred before the book began (like many other thoughts the protagonist has had), so the big idea is never discussed.
In fact trying to see the forest from the trees could be played as a kind of mystery, the clues being the "big consequences" and "microscopic details."
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A story has to be interesting all the way through. There are many cases of authors withholding information that could be given earlier in order to create a big reveal later. But it has to be done in a way that does not make a big chunk of the story leading up to the reveal boring or frustrating.
The best tool that authors have for withholding information without making the rest of the story boring or frustrating is the manipulation of point of view. If you can tell as story from a point of view where the information in question cannot be seen, then you have successfully withheld that information from the reader.
The problem today is that so many writers are fixated on first person narrative. Rather than choosing the point of view that best suites the sort of story they want to tell, they decide on first person narrative before they decide on anything else. (This is often based on the entirely false notion that first person narrative is more intimate. The great thing about prose is that you can be as intimate or as distant as you like regardless of the narrative point of view.)
Given this fixation, we get all kinds of questions here which amount to "I have chosen to write in first person but I want to achieve some effect that is incompatible with writing in first person. What do I do."
The answer is: either don't write in first person or pick a different person.
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When I am stressed out my clear thoughts are usually taking a backseat because I am focused on whatever is stressing me out. You can try to omit the stuff by simply not explicitly talking about it:
What do I need now? I need... I need... macaroni! Yes, macaroni! That's perfect! And... Yarn! Where do I have my yarn?
or to make it a bit less hectic:
I am trying to find the materials I need. Luckily I have most of it in my kitchen: a knife, butter, my trusty old microwave and a rubber band. I feel like McGuiver when I am running back to my room with all the stuff that I need for the first stage of the project. I just hope that it will all work out the way I am imagining it so that I can start with the hot glue and the insulant material by tomorrow evening...
The effect of this is that it's obvious that your reader is not supposed to know what is happening. Some people may like this, some people may not. You will never be able to please everyone.
But you should make sure that this is not too long or at least regularly interrupted by normal scenes, for examples conversations in the pub with a few friends. Reading multiple chapters of such vague descriptions like I did here would be extremely boring and your readers would anticipate something grand.
It's already enough to have a couple paragraphs of this style to have your reader anticipate something grand - a few paragraphs of weird descriptions should yield a couple pages of important plot where these things play an important role. If it's not that important that you will talk about all the weird little details you should think about whether you really want to do something like this or just skip past it with a bit of description.
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