Open Door Critiques [CLOSED]

🚪 Readers, Not Mind Readers

You see it. The scene. 

The elf princess is dueling the dragon lord on the banks of the lake, and sparks are flying from her magical staff as she charges up her ultimate attack, and it's epic, and cool, and the readers are totally going to love it. It looks so amazing in your head, after all.

See? They're sprinting across the lake now. How? Isn't it obvious? The lake is iced over. Oh, I didn't mention that? Well, I'm mentioning it now.

And look! The dragon lord is taking off his mask! Wait, you didn't know he was wearing a mask? Well, now you know, and it's such a dramatic reveal! The princess can see that he's really just a tortured soul underneath there.

And now as they fight, the moonlight glints over their blades and—you didn't know it was nighttime? So you were imagining it was morning this entire time?

Honestly, readers. Pull yourselves together. Can't you see how clear everything is in my head?

***

As authors of our stories, we already have an innate sense of our world and characters, of how things look and feel. We've a silent understanding of the workings and rules and laws of things, even if those things aren't wholly fleshed out yet. But you know who doesn't?

Our readers.

On some level, this may seem inconsequential, and aesthetically speaking, they really are. The colour of the elf's hair or the exact weather in the scene won't drastically change the trajectory of the story.

But what a jarring experience this is for your poor readers!

They're forced to fill-in-the-blanks for themselves because they're given no details to hold onto, and yet when they do this, they're told by the work itself later on that they're wrong! That's a bad place to put your readers.

And remember what I said in the beginning, that reading is a wholly visual endeavour? By keeping your readers in the dark on the visuals for too long, you're confusing them unnecessarily. Confused readers equals readers that believe your world less and less.

Foggy details equals a foggy world.

On that note:

As readers and foreign guests of your world, we're going to have a lot of questions. Who has the power and why? Why are these groups of people hated? How does this kind of magic work? On and on and on.

It's the author's job to anticipate these questions and to give readers the necessary information so that they can walk through your world with confidence. 

Questions that are left hanging will, at best, create readers that are confused but willing to wait it out. At worst, you'll create readers that believe you – the author – are as lost as they are. And that's a bad place to put yourself.

No writer wants their readers to think that they're clueless.