When telling a story, is there a point when the release of a vital piece of information comes so late that it’s considered deceitful?
As storytellers, knowing when to give information, when to hold it back, and what should remain hidden is a vital skill. Good comedians make great storytellers because the ability to pace the release of information is fundamental when telling a joke. Sir Peter Ustinov is said to have been one of the world’s most sort after and admired after-dinner speakers. The key to his awe-inspiring tales was this ability to master the release of information: what to illustrate, what to leave up to the imagination, what to repeat in order to reinforce or mirror for comic effect, when to deliver to punch-line.
In previous posts I have cited the book ‘The Reader’ as a good example of information architecture at its best. Michael, the story’s protagonist, had an underage affair with an older lady. He kept it a secret. She, the object of his obsession, hid the fact that she cannot read. After their separation she became a guard at a Nazi death camp. She took the blame for a heinous act, an act she was not solely responsible for, being unable read or write; but took the blame regardless, unwilling to admit to her illiteracy. During her trial Michael worked out that she was unable to read but could not tell the tribunal in fear of revealing his own secret: their illicit affair. The drama unfolds with the slow, deliberate release of information and, equally as important, the unveiling of secrets between characters. If either of the main characters were more honest and vocal, the story would not have worked and would not have been told.
In who-done-its and other related crime writing forms, vital information is often withheld until near the end of a story. It’s expected that details will be withheld by the author. In other story forms, hold-back detail can be considered deceitful. Readers can become annoyed, feeling they have been manipulated. This deceit, however, is sometimes based on prejudices. An example: we get a chapter or three into a book when we are told that the main character “pushes down hard on the tires of his wheelchair and exits the room.” What? He’s disabled? The side-swiped reader feels betrayed because the mental image of the character that they have slowly built over thirty to forty pages, a character they have begun to associate themselves with, has been shot to pieces in less than a sentence. But… why? Is the character defined their disability? Surely not. Has the author hidden something or just added a minor detail? Is the fact that the character is in a wheelchair significant to the story up to this point?
Let’s use another example: race. As writers we can suggest ethnicity without being as explicit as offering up skin tones. A person’s name, the country they were born in, the country they live in, colloquial terms of suggested accents in reported speech can inform readers about a character’s outwards appearance. As readers we are, I hope, advanced enough to acknowledge that the colour of someone’s skin does not define who they are as a person. Skin colour might only a small part of a character’s identity (unless, of course race relations, ethnicity or identity is a core theme of the book). Let’s say we have a main character with a multicultural name, in a multicultural city, with a strong character, opinions that she is prepared to stand up for and protect, and three quarters of the way through a four-hundred-page novel someone insults her with a racial slur. Would this unnerve a reader? Even if the reader is ‘perfectly at home with multiculturalism’ (for the want of a better phrase), would they start to question what other information is being held back by the author? Why introduce it now? Why introduce it at all? What else is likely to be revealed at this late stage? Most importantly, as with the examples above, does the redrawing of a well-formed mental picture destroy the association between the main character and the reader? Is the storytelling illusion broken? Or is it a device? What if we had a bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads who goes around terrorising minorities in the neighbourhood and it is revealed, near the end of the book, that the protagonist is black? Or outwardly gay? Or Jewish? How about all three? There is, of course, other reasons (some outside of an author’s control) why race is avoided, hidden, or disguised in literature, but that’s a whole different post.
The point is this: it is not just a question of profiling. Take the wheelchair example. When describing the physicalities of a scene a writer might have to go out of their way to describe a character, their movements, actions, and interactions without referring to the chair. And the outwardly gay neo-Nazi? How can the author reveal that they are outwardly gay, having carefully avoided any reference to the fact during the vast majority of the tale? Is this not, by definition, an act of deceit? This argument against basing stories around a delayed twist is best embodied in the critical responses to the films of M. Night Shyamalan, which were described as being poorly constructed and “gimmicky”, reviewers correctly predicting that audiences would soon tire of the format; diminishing box office returns proving the critics right on this occasion.
In conclusion, if you do choose to release important information at key stages of a story be sure to make the release seem timely (e.g. as a consequence of pressure, trust or investigation) or, if released quickly or forcefully for dramatic effect, that the detail is foreshadowed (hinted at or introduced in a different context at prior points in the story).
Written by Adrian Robinson
15th August, 2011
