Why do I use single-panel cartoons for so many of my posts? Because they are excellent demonstrations of how much work the reader does on his side to partner with you. By interacting with them yourself, you can think like a reader, too, as you write.
Let’s take the one above as an example.
The panel needs a few things from the reader to work. First of all, it helps if the viewer at least knows how whales were hunted. It’s even funnier if he has some familiarity with the basic plot of Moby Dick, or at least as much as “whale can beat harpooner sometimes”. If he knows more, he can visualize Ahab himself, peg-leg and all, inside the belly of the beast, fuming in fury as he dies, thwarted of his revenge. As a bonus, to my eye there’s the suggestion of a successful catch from a handheld ball-tethered-to-cup toy to provide the whale with ultimate satisfaction.
On the other hand, the joke is rather lost as humor (or a comment on hubris) if the viewer doesn’t know the before-and-after of a man (mortal enemy of one whale) doing everything he can to seek revenge, and failing.
So, in your fictional world (esp. in SFF), what have you told the reader to make sure he’s in on the joke (or other reference)?
First of all, there are general assumptions… (“Of course everyone knows enough about Moby Dick (whale/harpoon), just as I can assume they recognize Hansel & Gretel (breadcrumbs/edible house) or The Three Little Pigs (straw/brick houses).”) Alternatively, you may have supplied old tales of your own in the story to make sure the reader is prepared to recognize them later. You may well be right that those stories are common knowledge in the intended reader culture, just as you can expect a random reader to understand why a vampire might recoil from fresh blood seasoned with garlic. But are you sure? Maybe you need a foreshadowed reference to the original to prepare the reader for the encounter, or something similar. Maybe your reader only skimmed the in-story old tale, and you might have to remind him.
Then there are the off-hand references between characters, talking about old experiences, local history, and so forth. Can you be sure the reader understands what isn’t explicitly said? He might not have the background of his own (“they’re talking about horses, why do they want to get carrots?”) to supply the missing bits, or maybe he just didn’t pay attention as the necessary hints passed by.
Speaking of characters… is the POV character presenting the “story/joke” someone the reader is familiar with, so that he can add some of that character’s internal flavor, or is it someone new, and the story he tells is part of how the reader comes to know him better?
Then, in a “meta” fashion, does the narrating character even understand the external reference of the joke, or is it only the reader who understands, via his outside knowledge? In other words, is the allusion “to the point” for the story (functional), or just a humorous boasting aside to the reader (breaking his reading trance)? That’s a common issue for parody, where the reader knows more about the humor than the characters do, by way of external reference. Someone like a Terry Pratchett can keep us laughing that way, but the more we laugh at characters from our external perspective, the less we may sympathize with them from the inside. They become puppets we move around for our amusement instead.
What sorts of challenges have you faced, balancing the necessary knowledge of both the characters and the readers in referring to stories they already know?
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “How much of your story does the reader already know?”
Using those cartoons is going to get the Mad Genius Club nailed with a takedown notice at some point. The lawyers for that cartoonist keep an eye on the ‘net and will come after those who use them – and no, it doesn’t matter if you link back to the site of origin. They don’t want them being shared.
So you may want to find a different cartoonist who might like the publicity.
Yes. We used to post single panel excerpts from comic strips on our Instagram account (comics without context). No money asked for or received. We’ve got less than 1,000 followers so it’s not like we’re some impossible to miss whale.
We got a cease and desist letter and scrubbed our entire account.
It’s not worth the risk.
Yes, and then there’s this. https://www.facebook.com/groups/franksthefarside/
But I do take your point.
What level of literacy can you assume with current generations as opposed to those forty to sixty years ago? Familiarity with the classics such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer, or even Biblical stories has greatly diminished, and references that would be understood by prior generations may be passed over by modern readers.
Bill and I annotate classic Agatha Christie (out of copyright in the U.S.), vintage Sherlock Holmes fan fiction (1888 – 1930), and are now working on Dorothy Sayers who enters the public domain in entirety on 1JAN2028.
We run into the exact same problem. We have to assume that our audience doesn’t know anything! We have our kids — who are reasonably well-read — read the books first and underline everything they don’t understand.
It’s a lot. At the same time, they completely miss references to Dickens, Shakespeare, the bible, and so forth. Those zip right by.
We have to be extra thorough, even if it’s annoying to old hands, because we simply don’t know what the newbies know.
One can’t just eliminate all references in passing in adult writing to, say, famous Shakespeare quotes… might as well eliminate all literary quotes of any kind, and then what sort of continuation of the long stream of writing do we become?
We may have to underline the emphasis, a little, when it’s plot/motive critical, to make sure the readers understand the instrumentality of it (to satisfy the lowest common denominator), but if the adult reader can’t handle, say, 12th grade references, then maybe they should be encouraged to look things up. Reading isn’t just entertainment — it’s also education (where needed). It certainly was for me and, I bet, for most of us, too.
What it means for us is LOTS and LOTS of footnotes to explain what Agatha or Dorothy were referring to.
Our motto is “the history behind the mystery.” That phrase gets a real workout sometimes.
You are doing yeoman’s work. And honestly, you dig up a lot of info that I didn’t know, even though I thought I had caught _almost_ everything.
The madrigal references in Gaudy Night are pretty fun, because the chances are high that a singer with any interest in early music will eventually have to sing one of them.
Thank you! Bill’s been a Dorothy Sayers fan going back 40 years. He began the Wimsey Annotations to explain to himself what she was saying. That and his ancient Greek is nonexistent.
We use numerous sources, cross-reference, and check and recheck to get everything. That said, there’s specialized things like madrigal singing that neither of us have any experience with.
As an example, my sewing, gardening, and fashion experience help me spot points Bill glides right past.
If there’s something YOU’VE noticed that we missed, email us! The plan is to annotate all 12 Wimsey properties plus Montague Egg. We want to be as complete as possible so send us your updates and corrections.
I don’t know about others, but being born in 1969 to a working-class I wasn’t all that literate. I did figure out many of the classical references I read and saw eventually. I should be ashamed to say that it happened more from watching cartoons like Bugs Bunny that often used these references than from my schooling!
If all you knew about classical music came from Warners Bros. cartoons, well, it would be… incomplete… but not really wrong. (“Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit!”)
Carl Stalling would be pleased and proud, I think.
He should be. Had me in stitches all my life.
I’m listening to the Karen Savage audiobook of Mansfield Park on Librevox, and just got to the point where they decide on Lover’s Vows for the play. There’s some excellent summaries of the play on the web (one on reddit from some months ago but I think also one from elsewhere, maybe one of jasna.org’s publications) but if you don’t at least vaguely know the plot and the characters, the machinations about who gets which role are pretty incomprehensible.
(I will spare you my rant about how the abolitionist references position Sir Thomas, Edmund and Fanny as more or less all on the same side, and how much more interesting and how much more characteristically Austenesque the situation is if Sir Thomas is both on the right side of that issue and kind of a pompous jerk in his domestic life, instead of just the all-purpose Eeeee-villllll Male Tyrant of popular criticism.)
It’s not the only thing this novel has going against it – it suffers from a lack of plot momentum and a refusal to let the heroine do stuff, even stuff appropriate to her situation, except in summary.
Not to mention what they pick up from modern movies! (Which might not stay around very long, so don’t count on them to carry the load alone!)
Readers also have genre expectations (at least avid readers), and pick up the stereotypes quickly and . . . at some point, unless the writer is trying to impress the readers with their literary credentials, the writer has to forego a lot of their favorite old references and just spell it out.
I had a creative writing teacher tell me that you can’t say someone has telepathy without defining the word telepathy.
Not, “Please explain the rules of telepathy in this science fiction world,” but “Assume the person has never heard words like telepathy or mindreading.”
It was really bizarre, like saying you had to explain the word kiss in a romance novel.
One thing I’m running into in WIP is that the book might be released in parts, not a single volume at first, so as I move into Pt. 2 I have to retouch some of the in-world references from Pt.1 without wading into the explication that works for the first volume but here threatens to derail the pacing. I don’t know what order the reader is picking them up, nor the interval between.