Monday, December 2, 2013

Pulling Your Reader Out of the Story

Have you ever read a really great book that made you think: “This would be absolutely perfect, except….”
I read a book like that recently.  It was a fantastic book, full of emotion, tugging at the heartstrings.  It appealed to my nursing side as well as my writer side.

Except.

I really wanted to overlook it.  I wanted to pretend it wasn’t there, but I couldn’t.  The author made a mistake.  He forgot his own timeline.  A chapter jumped forward in the future, then he had to scramble backwards and for a second, it took me out of the story.  I was confused about the timeline of the plot and I couldn’t figure out why the author had jumped like that.

I hoped that I had made a mistake, or that I read it wrong.  So I reread it.  But I wasn’t wrong.  There was a continuity error that not only pulled me out of the book, but it also dropped my opinion of the story because no matter how much I liked the book, there will always be that nagging whenever I think about it.

When writing a story, there’s so many elements that go in, setting, characters, objects, etc.  There’s a lot of stuff to keep track of.  But it’s the small details that we need to pay attention to if we want to keep our readers engaged.  Small things make the difference.  Has the main character already learned another character’s name?  If not, then he/she shouldn’t use their name. 

In one of my stories, I have a character wear a necklace.  In several first drafts, she carried it with her everywhere, but in later drafts, she gave it to someone else to keep.  But I had one scene where she still had it with her. One of my betas pointed it out to me, asking how she got it back.  Such a small detail, but it pulled my beta out of the story.


Anyone else noticed this before in their own writings or books you’ve read recently?

1 comment:

  1. These things will come back to me even YEARS later, regardless of how much I try to let them go. For example, I was drying my hair a few days ago and thought, "You know how the Architect in the Matrix said that Neo was a revolving character that keeps being reincarnated to come back and try to take down the machines all the time? Why didn't the machines just kill all of the people that wake up early in the little pods instead of flushing them down the toilet WHILE STILL ALIVE to be picked up by the ships at the end of the tunnels? This would take what, one or two lines of programming code? If the whole goal is to get the human race under complete control, why not kill the rebels that wake up from the matrix when they are naked, scared and captured in a little bubble incubator??? Problem solved." The Matrix. This was forever ago.

    Also - a huge timeline issue in a comic that I was reading called Avenger's Arena, where the first book had a fight scene with a specific timetable, then said "28 days previously..." but never re-enacted the fight at the proper time. These things bother me.

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