or, what does the reader know?

A few weeks ago, I nattered on about information silos in-story. What do your characters know?- and how did they learn it? What are they ignorant of? How does this affect their interactions with other characters?

Today, I’m going to stretch the metaphor even further and apply these same questions to the readers- a much slipperier topic, and a more wide ranging one.

Information silos are formed in real life when a government or corporation has secrets and wants to keep them, well, secret. Everyone not in the know is carefully kept out of the know, and people can work for years on one part of a project without having any context for what their work is accomplishing. Readers form their own information silos based on what they know and, sometimes more importantly, what they think they know. Context- and sometimes logic- are not required.

Things the reader knows are also called tropes. Everyone knows that green eyes and black hair go together, two opposite sex characters who run into each other on a crowded street will fall in love, children are adorable (or hellions), and fat people are always funny.

None of that’s necessarily true in real life, but fiction is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. The author has to assume the reader knows some things, appropriate to the genre and age level of the story, or the story turns into a boring slog because it stops every other word to explain what’s going on. Fortunately, most readers don’t need that much hand-holding, and a good author will recognize when to hand-hold and when to use a trope as shorthand for a larger concept.

Tropes are a post all on their own- a series of posts, even- and there are other, non-trope things a reader might or might not know, especially in older books. I bumped into this phenomenon in some of Georgette Heyer’s works, which have a lot of untranslated French, and some untranslated Latin. Nowadays, the internet can translate for a confused reader, and I know enough French to guess at most of it, but back when these books were written, almost a hundred years ago, it was very common for educated Brits- Heyer’s main audience at the time- to know enough French to get by, and enough Latin to know what ‘vae victis’ means (I had to look it up; it’s ‘woe to the vanquished’). Modern readers might have more trouble. Some will seek out answers; others will read on, vaguely dissatisfied but not enough to do anything about it; a small number will wall the book. As usual.

The reader’s age can also play a role in ‘what they know’ and how they relate to a story. We’ve all known- or been- that kid who knew everything about dinosaurs, but, lacking the necessary temporal context, expected to see them at the zoo, and was sorely disappointed not to find T-rex lording it over all the other animals. Adults know that Jurassic Park isn’t real; kids might not.

A reader’s personal information silos have to be considered alongside political, current events, or pop culture references. Sane and rational people can have wildly differing understandings of the exact same event, and will make inferences about characters (and sometimes the author, unfortunately) based on what they know- or what they think they know. Yes, this subject recently came into my head around the time of the recent US elections, and the ridiculously polarized media coverage of same- how did you guess?

On the fictional side, I recently put down The Malta Exchange, a thriller by Steve Berry and walked away from it because a character introduced in the second chapter was shown to be a devout Catholic. At first I was mildly pleased to see an openly religious character- the guy was a Cardinal; he should be openly religious and have strong beliefs in accordance with Church teaching- in this case, a moral opposition to gay marriage. Then I realized, by the way he was presented, that he was going to be the villain of the story, and I couldn’t finish the book. The author was probably trying to show that this character was strong-willed and implacable in his morals, so the reader would take him seriously as a strong-willed villain, but it came across as, ‘this character takes his beliefs seriously and refuses to compromise on a matter of conscience; he’s obviously evil.’ Not a great way to present your villain.

As a writer, you can give a lot of thought to your readers’ most common information silos, a little thought, or no thought at all. As with so many aspects of writing, there’s no right or wrong approach, but how you treat the subject will affect your readership, your bank account, and the emotional fulfillment you get from writing.

Most popular best sellers are not particularly intellectual or controversial; the writers, editors, and publishers pay a lot of attention to readers’ information silos, so they can put out a product that conforms to ‘what everyone knows’. Even a book like Fifty Shades of Grey, which was supposedly oh-so-controversial, was, according to people in the know, an extremely tame and vanilla look at BDSM. ‘What everyone knows’ turned out to be curated to the point of falsity. Which, if you’re a writer who does a lot of research and likes to get the details right, can be incredibly frustrating.

What is a poor author to do with readers who are determined to wall themselves into an information silo of their own making? Well, there’s only so much control you have over your readers and their weird obsessions and blind spots- that is to say, hardly any control. But there are some things you can do to mitigate misunderstandings.

Doing your research is important, especially if you’re writing historicals, military fiction, or harder sci-fi; those readers tend to get annoyed at mistakes, but if you’ve done the research and left an ‘error’ in your work for the sake of the story, you can at least point to the research if anyone calls you on it.

Reading in your genre is also important to the point of necessity, so you internalize the same tropes as your readers. Otherwise, you get my Hartington trilogy, which is regency in space, and was written at a time when I knew a decent amount about regencies but nothing about space, and it shows.

Beta readers are also useful; they’re even more useful if they’re on a spectrum of familiarity with the genre. People who read a lot of that genre will notice different things from people who are less familiar with it, and they’ll all notice things that you, the author, skipped right over.

Subject matter experts are also a good resource, and if they also happen to read in your genre, so much the better, because they can point out common places where the author and reader might disagree.

You may also have to accept that some books have a smaller audience than others, because they don’t match well enough with what the readers know- or think they know. It’s a depressing realization, but there is a bright spot- a niche audience can be somewhat mitigated with appropriate marketing.

But that’s another post altogether.

Discuss- what’s the weirdest blind spot a reader’s ever had?- and told you about? Have you ever written something that should’ve landed, but didn’t? What are some of the more common things readers ‘know for a fact’, only they don’t?