Advice from Readers

8 - Being Mysterious

Some authors seem to think that by leaving out information, it's being 'mysterious' and keeping people interested.  It's not.  Having a mystery and having the character follow clues and figure things out is great.  That's what a mystery is supposed to do.  

But when you have vital information about a character or a situation and you're just not telling us.  Like you have the character mention it, and think about it, and talk about part of it, but not tell us what is going on, it's just annoying.  That's not mystery, that's you leaving out vital information in a sad attempt to be mysterious.  It doesn't work, it just creates a feeling of anxiety and annoyance in us.  Because we know you're doing it just to fake a mystery.

The characters have the information, they all think about the information, or reference the information, it's just the reader that's left in the dark.  That's not good story telling, because you're not actually telling me anything.  

I recently read a story where the character would start having a conversation with someone and stop or get cut off.  That's ok, once or twice...AT MOST.  But you don't do that chapter after chapter, and that's what this author did.  A conversation would start, someone would give a sentence or two of incomplete information and there would be an interruption.  This happened until the 27th chapter.  By the time I got a third of the way into the book, I was just skimming, I wasn't reading, I would read a few words of every paragraph, searching for info.  That was it.  I wasn't actually reading the story.  

It defeats the purpose, because it distracts us from the story, because instead of paying attention to the story we are just searching for information that we know is purposefully being kept from us for no other reason than to ATTEMPT to create a false mystery.

It's so so so so annoying, it makes me not want to keep reading.  I know you're trying to manufacture some mystery here, but all it's doing is creating frustration and irritation.  So stop it.  

Mystery is finding clues and figuring things out, not just keeping information from the reader.

An example of what I'm talking about, at the beginning of the book someone told the main character they were the 'prophecy' but the character never asked what they meant.  Never tried to find out what the prophecy was, never followed up on the conversation, and never tried to research the information.  That's not realistic.  No one.  NO ONE would ever do that.  So all this crap is happening that you're confused about and you know for a fact that someone has the information and all you have to do is ask them but it never occurs to you to do it?  Really?  No.  It's frustrating and annoying for the reader.  

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