All story-telling requires a good guess (at the very least) at what our likely readers know and understand already, and how much we can use that in telling our tales.
That is, are they old enough to understand passion or regret? Are they educated enough to understand logic? Are they experienced enough to understand human behavior in its extremes? Do they understand history, or technology, or business? Can they guess at potential motivations?
I’m not so concerned about communicating the situation and logic of a story per se — that’s the sort of thing I should be competent at — but I can’t know who’s reading it, can I?
I’m not concerned about readers who are simply too young, where “adult” concerns will merely wash over them — they will self-select and cease to be my readers (or grow older). But I struggle all the time over what I should explain to readers… not about the story events and logic, but about how much of what I think of as “common knowledge” overlaps with their background, since if they don’t understand my general references, I’m not really properly “telling” them my story. But if I try to ensure that everything is clarified in adequate pedagogic terms, it destroys the rhythm of a story. No one wants to hear a tale told by a pedant.
How much do you need to explain, and to whom? Yes, they’re your dragons, and you need to explain the rules for how they work. But it’s everyone’s generic thunderstorms, and they can pass without comment. Over-explain, or let the readers grasp at the concepts through subliminal or barely present clues?
What really stumps me is being confident that my overstuffed head doesn’t really need to unload in detail on readers (for my own enthusiasms: “Ooh, look — shiny! Did you also know that…..?”), for the purpose of reader entertainment, which has to be my primary goal. That means I have to keep a handle on “knowledge related to structures/worlds in the story” vs what “everyone (of a certain age or experience-level) knows (or maybe doesn’t, so give them a free clue in passing). (Summary: Put the character on a horse for a reason and ignore “how one rides a horse” unless that supports something important that prefiguring or “everyone knows” can’t accommodate.)
It sometimes works out that you can use proxies in your story to bridge a potential or suspected gap: explaining something to a story character to get the info/message (and how to understand it) to a reader. (“As you know, John, the hounds won’t be able to track that scent forever…”)
My own self-warning is to apply caution in my tendency to project “surely everyone knows” assumptions beyond reason without indulging in “common knowledge” info dumps. What’s yours?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Age / Experience in Characters vs Readers vs Writers”
As both a reader and a writer, I’m mostly with John Campbell on this: your story is a contemporary story to the characters within it. Would they explain? If so, explain. If not, let the reader figure it out. But then, as a reader, I enjoy stories where I get to learn about the world and its rules as I read. The world has always had islands in the sky, and the characters have always known islands in the sky. So the islands will be reported as in the sky, but will not be explained except in the sense that we see them do and where we seem them may or may not explain them.
In writing an alternate ending to ‘The Chrysalids’ by John Wyndham, I have one of the characters from Labrador lay out some limitations of travel by horse to people from Zealand where they have mechanized transportation. Horses can’t just gallop for 17 miles, and not all horses can travel at the same speed. A slow horse slows the whole group down. Extra weight will slow a horse down, too. If the horses have already traveled many miles that day, they’ll be tired. And so on.
Yes. What I take for granted “Doesn’t everyone know . . .” is probably safe for most SF readers, but when I veer a bit toward something that might draw in Fantasy fans or younger readers I have to watch myself.
I think Sarah’s latest is a shining example of this dilemma. I had no trouble getting fascinated with Skip’s story. It was easy for me to swallow whole from the Roman Republic similarities to the Schrödinger Gates.
The chapters on Elly OTOH were almost completely incomprehensible to me for quite a while. Everyone referred to each other by 3 or 4 different names or titles. The assassination and attempted coup part were clear, but I could not comprehend the myriad of interrelations she was describing that everyone on Elly takes for granted. It’s their world after all. I even considered skipping the Elly parts, but instead just turned my mind off and waited to comprehend (like Skip and his nanites struggling with Elly’s language, oddly enough).
It was only in chapter 19 where Skip shows up on Elly that the reader starts to get some real exposition, cleverly, of course, through Skip’s eyes as the alien dropped into a strange land. As someone who’s already a fan of Sarah, I trusted her to make all this make sense, but I’m curious to find out if readers new to Sarah will plow their way through this. For the name confusion, I should have checked the table of contents and found the DRAMATIS PERSONAE section, but I’m stupid like that.
The last time I had this sense of disorientation was with Patricia McKillip’s Riddle Master of Hed. Fortunately I had bought the book on the recommendation of a bookseller at the late and much lamented independent bookstore The Amber Unicorn. It indeed turned out to be a great read, much like No Man’s Land is.
The Riddle Master of Hed was pretty much the very first significant book by an author to show up, with that subject matter and setup, after we were all stunned by Tolkien’s LOTR and its feeble imitators. No one dared to do this seriously, for quite some time, as I well remember.
So it was with raised eyebrows and hope for the best that I picked it up when it came out and I… bounced off of it. I recognized that she had successfully produced an independent-from-LOTR-imitation work in the same genre, and that was to her credit, but I couldn’t engage and had to force myself to complete it.
Only just a couple of months ago did I stumble across it again, and I determined (after the passage of decades) to reread it and figure out what the problem was. And, not entirely surprisingly to me, it was a different reading experience.
I still had problems with what I will now confidently argue was insufficient explanation for the reader of the various non-standard capabilities/expectations/classes/powers/ etc. The difference was, I could be less irritated by it. Knowing the frustration on the way in made me pay more attention to each “personal title/profession/class/etc.” as it turned up as if it were a lifeline that I had to cling to for the next time it appeared elsewhere, in order to form some hypothesis of what the designation implied, and determined to finish the work again, which I did.
My final judgement was: inventive world building, but significant unnecessary barriers to helping readers understand relationships between civilizational entities. Since they weren’t (apparently) designed to be mysterious, the eventual clarifications, when (if) they occurred, still engendered irritation on the part of the frustrated reader (it’s not supposed to be a quiz). But I can understand what happened, and in particular how (as a writer myself now), much better than the first time.
In the one thing I’ve written and let loose, it was immensely helpful to have someone else, completely unfamiliar with the thing read it and mark out where they were confused.
The pudding was the funniest one. I’d sort of, completely blindly, assumed that it would obvious that it would be an English Christmas style pudding. You know, one of those dense boiled bread puddings rather than, say, what one gets from a Jello branded pudding mix box.
Yeah, no. Nobody caught that until I actually described what they were making. Oops…
The only thing i have that is complete is a portal fantasy where I get to have people have to explain like he’s five years old things that he *should* already understand. Literally have his friends tearing out their hair in frustration. So things get explained but the annoyance at *having* to explain is there as well.
And when his friends come to earth, the tables are turned.
Slithering in knowledge subtly has its trade-offs. I put into The Maze, The Manor, And The Unicorn that unicorns can neutralize poison, sent it off to a readers’ group, and found at least one reader had no clue about the whole unicorn/virgin bit. I threw in a few more bits, but I didn’t overdo it because readers who knew already shouldn’t suffer through infodumping.
Now, in Queen Shulamith’s Ball, the oddball viewpoint let me put a schoolgirl on the spot to recite her history lesson early in the story. Then, that was something no reader would know.