How To Intrigue Your Reader—The Right Way

Is your writing confusing? Or are you just a bad writer? Someone is rarely a “bad writer.” Instead, many novelists and memoirists struggle with similar, fixable problems—ranging from “evasive protagonist syndrome” to challenges with dialogue.

I recently taught a class, “First Aid for Your Fiction,” where we examined eight common concerns — we examined symptoms, diagnosed the underlying problems, and then applied solutions.

Here’s the first one. Emerging writers, in their zeal for hiding information, often end up hiding too much information or the wrong information. Hiding the wrong information is often caused partly by a flawed balance of scene and summary (too much scene) or a problem in point of view or narrative distance (not enough interiority, which makes it difficult to quickly and attend to necessary set up).

Why Does My Writing Confuse Readers?

Symptom: Readers keep asking logistical questions and seem confused about the basic setup (“Wait, is Tom his brother or his boss?”). Readers seem to be stuck on factual questions. Where are these characters, who are they, and what is their relationship to one another?

Diagnosis: Oops, as a writer, you hid the wrong info (the difference between suspense/tension/intrigue and actual confusion).

Suspense is created by hiding hidden information (what will happen, for example). In general, books have to hide a lot of information, and when this goes well, readers are excited to discover the answer to the questions that these information gaps leave.

If you said EVERYTHING to the reader all at once, of course, the opening would be just a wall of information, and it’d be boring. But what information should be hidden, and what information does the reader need to enjoy the opening of your book or story?

This problem is especially common in genre fiction, namely science fiction and fantasy, which either get mired in unnecessary world-building, which is boring or ignore the world-building, and the reader ends up confused.

An Example of Confusing Writing

We enter a book in a scene with two people in a kitchen, a man and a woman. The woman asks the man to clean up after he finishes making pancakes. He seems aggravated, responds, “Don’t start now…” and insists he will clean up soon.

The scene continues like this, and then the woman goes to the garage, where she calls another man “honey” and asks him when he’ll be done with the car.

By now, the reader is confused in a bad way…who is that first man, “honey” in the garage, and what the hell is going on? Bad confusion is when the reader doesn’t understand what’s going on. They don’t know what they’re supposed to be looking at or worried about. There’s not a lot of tension because the entire situation is simply confusing. Readers tend to give up fairly quickly.

What if you told the reader that the first man was the sister’s adult brother? He’s had trouble with the law and is staying with her and her husband. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and the two siblings haven’t seen each other in three years after a huge blowout at a reunion…NOW, the interaction in the kitchen makes sense, and so does the one in the garage.

how to get the reader’s attention—The Right Way

As writers, we must provide only the necessary information to help readers understand the protagonist’s emotional problem. Information unnecessary for understanding emotional context can be delayed. Much “important” information can be delayed for quite a long time.

Good confusion occurs when the reader is very curious or worried but feels sufficiently oriented that they’re not confused. For example, we might be confused when an elf refuses to do as his boss, a human shopkeeper demands, and the other humans who work in the shop are cruel to the elf.

Is this because elves are generally treated badly in this world, or is it this elf in particular that is being mistreated? We need more information, specifically information that will help us interpret the elf’s emotional problem. We do not need five pages about how the government is set up.

In another example, perhaps the narrator is intimidated by an attractive high-school senior. Then, we discover the narrator is a ninth-grade nerd and outcast. We need to know all this information upfront to understand the scene emotionally. We don’t need to know that the narrator’s parents are on vacation, that the attractive senior plays tennis on Saturdays, or that the narrator was born in Austin.