Lead your readers · 12:56am Aug 23rd, 2013
[Summary: Think of each line of your story as being like a movement made by a man leading a woman in a dance. The lead must be congruent to what has come before, yet not predictable. It must be strong enough to be followed, yet not obvious. And you must eliminate extraneous movements that could be mistaken for leads.]
I see dances as metaphors that societies create for romance. In most dances older than me, the man “leads”, and the woman “follows”. The degree to which the man really leads can vary from a circle-sweeping Viennese Waltz, in which everyone knows more-or-less when to step where and the man’s "leading" is a mutually-agreeable fiction, to salsa or swing, where the woman may find herself spun in a circle or turned upside down with less than a second’s notice.
But whatever the dance, the man doesn’t drag the woman around the floor. He senses where they both are already going, and adds a flourish or twist. His movements should be congruent enough with what they're both doing to be anticipated, but not so predictable as to be expected, for the same reason a woman might anticipate a present from her boyfriend on Valentine's Day, but doesn't want to tell him what to get her.¹
(In club dancing, by contrast, there's no leading, no following, no synchrony of movement, no interaction other than eye contact sometimes followed by grinding bodies together. Make of that what you will.²)
Let’s see how far we can take dance, and leading in particular, as a metaphor for writing.
Leading in writing isn’t just foreshadowing. It’s leading the reader through the mutual creation of a story. If your character’s throwing a pot away symbolizes a rejection of love, you’ve got to draw the reader’s attention to it. Just tossing it out there is like trying to spin a woman without lifting your arm beforehand. (The arm lift says, "Get ready to spin.") But having a character look at the broken pot and think it was “broken, like my heart”, is like yanking the woman’s arm to make sure she makes the turn. It gets you both through it, but it's more work and it isn't much fun for either person. Following has to be challenging, or it isn't really dancing. A proper dance, like a proper story, is the work of two, not one.
To lead well, you must learn how to follow. Dancing the woman’s part teaches you which parts of the man’s movements are the leads, how obvious they need to be, and how irritating they are when overdone. It’s easy to know when you’ve missed a dance lead, because you stumble and run into people. But you can't tell when you’ve missed an author’s lead; you just think the author is being stupid. So you need to pre-read for other authors and ask them to tell you what you missed.
Dancing the woman’s part also teaches you that the key to leading is not doing anything that feels like leading when you’re not trying to lead. That’s the TL;DR of this post. When I fail to follow some clue the author planted, it’s not usually because the author planted that clue poorly. It's usually because I'm stupid. But when it's not because I'm stupid, it’s because the author wrote many other beautiful things that looked like clues, like a dancer who keeps tugging at the woman’s arms even in the middle of a step.
Things look like clues if they’re vivid, unexpected, or repeated; if they stand out stylistically; if they get a lot of words. When William Gibson wrote, “The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel,” it wasn’t just to say that the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. Writing “The sky was grey” in such a long and unexpected way was like highlighting it in yellow and writing “Symbolism!” in the margin.
Have you ever bought a used book from the college bookstore and found it had every sentence on some pages highlighted? Don’t do that. Seriously. It makes photocopies and scans hard to read. Also, don’t highlight everything in your story with a vivid or startling description. If you have a loving description of how the tramp handles his cigar, but it’s just a cigar, you may want to dial it back a bit if you don’t want to foreshadow a certain narrative turn. After the reader’s wasted enough time puzzling over red herrings, she’ll assume everything that stands out is just another meaningless yank on her arms. (5)
All this is doubly true in fan-fiction, where the reader assumes—justifiably!—that anything that sticks out in your story is probably just a mistake. When I had Celestia go ballistic on Trixie in “Trust”, readers didn’t say, “Oh, that’s very strange; this issue must be especially emotional to her right now for some reason” as often as they said, “That’s too out-of-character.” Many times I’ve missed clues planted by other fan-fiction writers because they were fan-fiction writers and I assumed they just screwed up. Aquillo’s stories are loaded with subtle clues, but if you read them in fan-fiction mode, you might not find them unless you already know his stories are loaded with subtle clues, which you won’t know unless you… you see the catch-22. Just being on fimfiction rather than in a Norton anthology makes leading the reader more difficult.
It doesn’t help that rather than relaxing in the tub with a single paperback, I’m reading on a screen that has a large icon at the top telling me I have 182 stories queued up to read after this one. Fast reading, like fast dancing, makes subtle leading harder. I'm afraid faster and faster reading is in store for us, as the supply of free fiction keeps increasing. Getting on EqD, or getting followers, doesn't just bring you more readers; it brings you readers who will cut you more slack and take more time to look for your leads. The more reputation you have, the more you can get away with, and the more people will like your stories. (This is just one of the reasons that if you're a new writer and you want to be as popular as me, you have to be better than me.³)
The better you get at dancing, the fewer people you can dance your best with.⁴ The most exciting dance moves require a great lead and a great follower. There are writers, like James Joyce or e. e. cummings, who seem to me to have been very good, and then to have become unreadable. Whether that's because they were corrupted by too much praise, or because they went beyond my ability to dance with them in their own specialized style, is probably unknowable, if it's even the sort of question that has an answer.
1. It's not my fault that we have a "sex" tag, but no "sexist" tag.
2. I count it as a victory for the men.
3. Except for GhostOfHeraclitus. That was obviously just luck.
4. I speak from observation, not from experience.
5. No one has challenged me on this yet. This might be bad advice. From what I know of paperback romance novels, they take a different approach: Describe everything vividly all the time, and compensate for this by laying everything out explicitly for the reader.
(ADDED: If you found this post sexist, please let me know in the comments. I knew footnote 2 implies men are... unromantic, but I thought it was funny enough to keep.)
Hey!
But, no, seriously:
I just have to say -- that's one beautifully crafted metaphor, right there.
Managing reader expectations--all the better to lead them--is a tricky thing and fanfiction makes it all but impossible. Anything goes on FimFic, and so you get no slack by publishing there, and absolutely no assumption of quality. Fanfics don't even have examples of paratext like blurbs and forewords and such. You click on a link--one of thousands--and the story start with nary a copyright page or publisher imprint[1]. Every fanfic goes out there all but naked. The one advantage it has in this area is rich layers of hypotext--three in fact: the show, fanon, and whatever the author wrote before.
[1] And there's more than one book that makes heavy use in narrative of the fact that you are unmistakably reading a book. There's Calvino's superb If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, and of course the harrowing House of Leaves, too.
This is something that is important in all storytelling. It is common sense that you enjoy walking down a wooded trail not knowing what your destination is or when you will reach it far more than either trudging across a plain or stumbling about in the dark.
Personally I feel the ultimate expression of this is in the Half Life 2 videogame series where you are surprised constantly by every new find but never really feel like you are being led by the hand. You are simply guided by the story, as a part of the story.
And that's why I don't write.
Joke aside, this blog is exceptional. As a reader, this is something I'd never have noticed consciously. My brain is rearranging a bit around everything I've ever read. The comparison to dancing is really great, but the basic lesson here is something that's foundational.
Thank you! That really is a beautiful metaphor, and for me an extremely useful one.
And on the flip side of this, it seems that having a pre-reader or two of your own who are NOT authors, but "merely" readers, can go a long way towards showing an author where he/she has failed to lead properly.
1302864
^This.
The analogy is flawed. Dancing is just s-x with all your clothes on and in public with one (most of the time) individual.
Writing is like Composing is like Dancing is like Painting is like Farming (wait, bear with me). You pour your heart and soul into the project, and then sit back and lurk to see who appreciates it, and how they appreciate it. Farming counts only because that same glowing look of joy that you get when you tell a painter, "I really like that one." is the same look you get after hunting quail in a farmer's field and you tell him, "Dang, that's a pretty crop of milo you've got growing. Mine ain't half that high."
(Could you tell I used to farm?)
1302987
I think you might be a little off-topic with that second paragraph. And I'd disagree with your first statement if it wasn't obviously a joke.
1302987 Dancing is just s-x with all your clothes on and in public with one (most of the time) individual.
Except sex, which is itself.
Well, of course, everything humans do is a metaphor for sex.
You have me at a disadvantage. Farming is a richer source of metaphor than computer programming.
I've done swing, salsa, and waltzes. I've done literally only the examples of dancing[1] you raised in your point, and no others. None of the dances I've been involved with had a "male role" that I'm aware of. Dances that use flourishes permit suggestions from either partner, and a dancer who isn't paying attention to the signals from their partner is going to end up battered[2]. Dances that use formulas are 'led' by whoever came up with the dance, not by anyone participating. The idea that you need to lead your reader is great, but your metaphor was more confusing than illuminating.
[1] I have not danced in a club and do not consider this a violation of my statement. Also, calling club dancing "a victory for men" is discomfortingly sexist.
[2] This doesn't require any hostile sentiment on the part of their partner. Mistakes in swing dancing are their own punishment. It's magnificent.
1303187 None of the dances I've been involved with had a "male role" that I'm aware of.
Sorry, I don't like to be this contrary, but that's just... totally and completely wrong. In salsa, swing, and the waltz, one partner leads. You can get away without realizing that in a waltz, but you would start off in any dance school by learning the "man's part" or the "woman's part" of the waltz. If neither person is leading in salsa or swing, you're doing it wrong.
Also, calling club dancing "a victory for men" is discomfortingly sexist.
That's why it's funny.
1303202
Okay, I looked up something I half-remembered, and salsa does have a strong lead role. My memories are blurred because the classes were years ago. I was taught a rather universalized style, though. Heavy emphasis on general skills, constant swapping of lead and follower roles, and I don't remember ever negotiating who would lead or follow on a dance, even when stomping on gender roles in the assignment of partners and roles.
My point stands for swing and waltzes. Have you ever actually done them?
EDIT: Oh, and if sexism is funny to you, I'm *really* uncomfortable with the fact that this conversation is occurring.
1303204 Yes, I've done swing and waltzing. I haven't done West Coast Swing, which I hear is pretty different. Waltzing can be done with a simple box-step, or with a Viennese rotation, just going around and around, in which case nobody really needs to lead, but traditionally the man begins by stepping forward and the woman by stepping backwards. Google "waltz dance steps".
1303208
I'd rather not. I'm never doing a waltz again in my life. Sedate pacing and formulaic steps are an invitation to nightmare if you don't have trust in your partner. The dance is not going to occupy your attention. The person you're dancing with is the only focus you have... and the last several times I did a waltz, it was under duress. Brrr.
Swing is interesting. I've never been so happy to pay close attention to someone's body language - and I have enjoyed swing dancing with my worst enemies. Since sabotaging a swingdance is its own punishment, I could relax in spite of the company.
Don't have much to add for this one except a thoughtful nod, which means that I really ought to thank you for coming up with such a meaty analogy and expressing it so well.
1303208 1303213
I won't step into this debate except to add a data point: the west coast swing lessons I attended very much had a lead and a follower role. You were either going to learn to lead or learn to follow, because the alternative was double the work. It was basically acknowledged up front that these were traditionally thought of as the men's and women's roles respectively but nobody was going to make an issue out of gender, we were all just there to dance. (Most of the students were a paired (married) man and woman, and most of the leaders were the men.)
1303204 I think humor often requires making people uncomfortable, but I appreciate hearing your opinion on when I've stepped over the line. If believing that men and women are, on average, innately different means you're sexist, then I'm sexist. If my remark had been wrongly sexist, invoking a stereotype that didn't have an element of truth to it, it couldn't have offended you because it wouldn't have made any sense.
1303227 1303202
I'm thinking the teacher who taught the swing dance classes was doing it wrong, actually. Or rather, he was doing it in a politically correct fashion that required extensive rewriting on his part. Not that it failed me in the field. For all I know, the few times I ended up in a dance after that class, negotiating by gesture seemed charming. It is kind of uncomfortable to hear that one has been 'doing it wrong' when nothing ever happened to bear that out in practice.
I wouldn't do it anymore without retraining.
1303228
That's a dishonest debating tactic. This issue in question has nothing to do with innate differences. The existence of innate differences is an empirical question and beyond sexism. The club issue, by contrast, is all about an arbitrary assignment of roles that has nothing to do with biology. It just made you seem creepy and perverted.
Ha! I've only got 171! WOULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP WRITING FOR A FEW WEEKS.
I may not have enough dance experience to appreciate the analogy you're making, but your point about the participatory nature of storytelling is brilliant. Some works, despite widespread agreement that they are "good literature", simply do not resonate with me, even if I enjoyed their authors' previous works. I wonder if it isn't some fault of my own; if they aren't trying to appeal to a better-read audience. References that I don't get, words and constructions that I cannot grok. Even within genres, there seem to be different tiers of material for respective tiers of readers. I guess this goes back to what you said about the subjective quality of literature — different strokes for different folks, or something to that effect.
P.S. You neglected to capitalize Cummings's initials.
1302987
Not sure I like farming as a metaphor. If your work is your crop, as a whole, and the observer your audience, the flaw is that you have grown your field completely independent of the observer's anticipated input. You want healthy crop and a good yield, not admirable plants. And if the plants are your audience and the process of growing them is your art, that doesn't work for me either. Farming in my mind is about large batches of individual experiences in very different conditions, what to plant where and how to treat the different areas of crop differently. It may work as a metaphor for managing your writing life at large, but for me it lacks the sense of personal interactive attention.
Writing is like building a grape arbor. It is a work of solid craftsmanship designed for the sole purpose of letting something organic grow across it, in this case, the audience's understanding. You must visualize how the audience's understanding will progress across the structure as time goes on and build accordingly, so that the the grapes' own innate rules will guide them along the paths you yourself have chosen in advance.
That growing feeling you get when you feel an entire post is written with you as the main focus.
I have that feeling.
I think whether or not people pick up on your subtle clues comes mainly down to what style of expositions you most prefer. I generally identify three main methods that don't require breaking the fourth wall in order to work:
The first is direct exposition, which we commonly call telling when used on conveying character emotions. Example: Applejack's ball was stuck in the tree.
The second is exposition through dialogue, which is the one most people use because it's clear without also being overt. Example: "Rainbow, I told you you were hitting that ball a mite too hard. Now you've gone and messed up Bloomberg's hair!"
The third is indirect exposition, which is essentially broken down direct exposition or clarifying things around an event without ever directly stating it. Example: Applejack's eyes looked this way and that. Turning, she marched back, a guttural 'Uh' stuck inside her throat and a frown notched into her forehead. There was a snap as her hoof cut into a branch; she looked down. Leaves littered the floor, and the sunlight was stronger, piercing that little bit more through the treetops. She looked up to a flash of pink inside the green, and smiled.
What's happening in event number three seems obvious if taken with the basic concept of "There is a ball stuck inside a tree", but if we don't have that, it's unclear what's going on. We can figure out that Applejack's looking for something; we can figure out that Applejack's pleased at the pink inside the tree. But all we need is an extra piece of information to change the meaning entirely: "Applebloom! You seen Granny Smith anywhere?"
Method three is unstable, in other words. And vague and prone to misinterpretation. All three convey information, but the third method conveys it in the least clear manner. I like to think there're advantages to it, but that may just be because exposition in either one or two for important things feels too much like giving the game away for me.
Most writers use a blend of the three to convey information, with the first being primarily used at the start of stories, the second throughout the run of it and the third to deal with the main plot. My style's different: I use the first barely, the second rarely and the third mainly, and the problem with this is that I try and convey too much information through the third. I count Make You Feel Better as the only story I've written successfully, and I count it as that because it only tries to tell one thing.
Whether or not the audience gets what you're saying depends on the blend that you use, and what you use each one to convey.
I think-slash-hope.
1303556 I was afraid you might interpret it that way. Your most-recent story was one of several recent instances where I missed big things in a story, which got me thinking about the problem, which led to this post. But the advice I gave (which might not be good; I'm making it up, not speaking from experience trying to apply this metaphor) isn't directed at you.
1303561
I wouldn't worry: I didn't take any offense, and the part about "But when it's not because I'm stupid, it’s because the author wrote many other beautiful things that looked like clues, like a dancer who keeps tugging at the woman’s arms even in the middle of a step." is pertinent.
Beside, I've given out the "You're writing fanfiction: people won't give you the benefit of the doubt" advice myself plenty of times. I don't really follow it, but I know what it is.
And I think the most amusing thing about that story was that I'd originally foreseen it as taking place at the edge of a building, then scrapped that because I felt it was too unsubtle.
1303239
If Bad Horse had made his bad joke in person instead of through emotionless text, it might have been more apparent that his intention was to mock sexism. It's meant to poke fun at the earlier mentioned sexist dancing traditions and club dancing because club dancing is generally terrible. I highly doubt that Bad Horse is in this case being sexist.
1303228
I think that it's much more likely that Casual Quill made an error in understanding your joke, not jokes in general. Granted, this is much more apparent after seeing Quill's second statement.
1303569 Thanks, but I am being some kinda sexist. The comment implies that men prefer "eye contact, sometimes followed by grinding bodies together", to a relationship. There's some truth to that, but it would sound bad if a woman said it.
I knew when I wrote it that it was questionable, but I have the habit, when writing as Bad Horse, of throwing questionable stuff out there to see whether people laugh or boo. It's supposed to help me learn where the boundaries are. But I just realized that if everybody did that, the boundaries would get pushed back very quickly.
1303575
Well, I almost got you to apologize.
I used to try and use 'Derpmind' as a pony who could throw stuff out there that I personally wouldn't try saying, but then stuff I said had an actual impact on other people. I still get away with sub-part comment writing and joke crafting skills, but when I've gone beyond cracking jokes and comedic sarcasm to actually helping some people while wearing this avatar not-mask, throwing caution to the wind and saying something stupid feels like a waste.
A little closer to what you were saying: There are general cultural boundaries, and personal boundaries. You're always going to occasionally say 'questionable' stuff that will make some people uncomfortable. I'd suggest just being yourself. Offending people by accident isn't nearly as (something something; I can't find the right word) as intentionally doing so.
1303479 Now I feel like a grape.
Let me take another shot at this. Close your eyes. (well, figurativly. If you close them now, you can't read the rest of this) Imagine driving through a farming community. There are farms where everything appears to be square corners and perfect lines, where shining tractors and combines head out on a tight schedule and even the cows line up to be milked. Then there are farms where the tractor is under a tarp being worked on while the kids run barefoot through the grass, and an old horse long past riding years sits under an apple tree, eating the buggy ones that fall. All the trees have convient limbs that beg to be climbed, the cows walk placidly from where they should be to where they need to be chased out of, and a dog runs around the whole thing, barking in anticipation of a thrown stick. Then there are farms where the buildings have never seen a paintbrush, and the roofs threaten to cave in, the tractors are covered in rust and sit in oily puddles while more weeds than grain grows in the field.
Writers are like that.
Bad Horse has his grapevines, all carefully pruned on the correct side of the hills to produce the finest wine that you have ever tasted, Skywriter has that little corner of a field with an old grist mill(1) that still turns the wheel when the kids pull the right cables, the rabbits are so tame you can almost touch them, and the trout come to the surface to beg for breadcrumbs when you walk by. Ghost has that little patch of pasture that is too rocky to be planted, but provides the most delicious wild strawberries(2), raspberries, gooseberries and little bunches of wild garlic, where you can sit back on giant sun-warmed boulders and watch the puffly clouds drift by, or explore the little paths the deer have made in the cedar trees as they search for things to browse (normally my apple trees, darnit) ShortSkirtsandExplosions has that long creek that you can lose track of time while walking, and find yourself miles away from the house as the sun goes down, and Cold in Gardez has a corner of the field where you can find arrowheads, beads, grindstones, and little bits of treasure left by indians and settlers, all of which you keep in a small box and get out every time you need to feel better by looking at them and remembering.
Me? I've got that big collection of tractors and impliments, all of which are missing one critical bolt or nut. (That's why I need a mechanic whenever I'm writing :)
[1] There's one out at Rock Springs Ranch, just a few miles away from here.
[2] Wild strawberries are ten-thousand times better than any from the store, and only about a half-calorie each.
1304475
I get the mill? AWESOME.
1303635 I'd suggest just being yourself.
But I'm not myself here. I'm Bad Horse. The person who wrote these words is not exactly me. Stepping out-of-bounds sometimes is part of the persona.
Offending people is like scaring people on Nightmare Night. We like to be offended sometimes, playfully, just as we like to be scared sometimes. Most people insult their friends frequently, affectionately. A place where you might get offended feels more like home to me than a place where you have to be polite. Of course, I was raised by wolves, but I hope you see my point.
1304475 Then there are farms where the tractor is under a tarp being worked on while the kids run barefoot through the grass, and an old horse long past riding years sits under an apple tree, eating the buggy ones that fall. All the trees have convient limbs that beg to be climbed, the cows walk placidly from where they should be to where they need to be chased out of, and a dog runs around the whole thing, barking in anticipation of a thrown stick.
I love finding a farm like that! Usually they're so destitute you can buy the place out for twenty cents on the dollar.
1304988
Well, are you doing that because it feels like what you'd say, or because you're experimenting? You made it sound like the club dancing joke was part of some experimental social-radar. Also, when I said 'be yourself' I was referring to you and yourselves, obviously.