I love mysteries.  Well, any story where I have to figure out who did what by the end.  Last night I finished a novel by a very prolific author that my husband and I like.  I’ve read all of his books, and this one last night was written about mid-way through his career so he wasn’t a beginner by any means.  And yet, the antagonist at the end turned out to be a character that was never introduced until that final moment.  I say that’s cheating the reader.  How can a reader know what subplots are relevant, which threads to try to unravel, which embedded clues should be remembered, if none of that points to a known character?  And why should I spend the time it takes to read a whole novel, if I don’t have a chance of figuring out what’s going on?  That’s like playing poker when you know the hands everyone has.  Why play and where’s the fun? 

Two favorite authors of mine, Karen Slaughter and Cornelia Read, are masters of the mystery.  They are able to insert clues, misdirect the reader, and suck you into caring about even villains, with such a subtle pen that many times I have to reread the book in order to see what I missed.  A recent book of Karen Slaughter’s opened with the point of view of a police officer.  I inherently trust the police.  I wanted to like this guy as the main point of view, but little things in his dialog, tiny ways he responded to people, made me not like him a whole lot.  As the book moved along, more characters and more points of view were introduced, and eventually I found out Slaughter had done a fantastic job of tricking me, while at the same time giving me enough information that I should have been able to figure it out.  Unlike the previous author who cheated me. 

I love that subtle, very experienced way of drawing me into a story, into a character’s mind, and most importantly, into having to think and pay attention.  The other style of writing just makes me question whether or not to pick up another book by that author.  He’s lost my trust because now I won’t know if I’m being cheated again.  I do like the way he draws characters though so maybe I’ll just have to read the ending first.

So what are your thoughts on building trust with a reader?  Have you ever felt cheated by techniques an author employed?  What are the personal ways you  balance giving just enough information to the reader without giving away the ending?

When does description become too much in a story?  Writer Patrick McManus said that if you have a character going upstairs in an old house, and you describe it as thirteen steps, ending at a landing three feet by four, with two doors on the left hand side and a two by three window at the end of an eight foot long hallway…you’re obviously going to lose the reader.  But if you write that the character climbed creaking stairs to a cobweb-draped landing and crept through a doorway, the reader can see the setting just as easily.  Patrick pointed out that most readers want to visualize the setting themselves and only need a little description to drop them into the scene.

The same holds true, I believe, for character description.  I recently saw a posting where someone wanted to know what eye color to give the character in their story.  This person was trying to decide between ‘blue-violet’ or ‘stormy grey’.  Have to say the person lost me there.  First off, preceding ‘grey’ with ‘stormy’ makes me think of romance novels.  While my sister loves them, I personally don’t.  Second, why couldn’t a character simply have grey eyes?  Now that I think of it, I’ve never seen grey eyes. 

I agree with Patrick.  I want just enough description to point my imagination in the right direction.  I want to spend time with a character that I recognize, not one that is described down to the color of the hair in their nose.  And I guess I also want to choose my own shades of grey.  Which makes me laugh because earlier I mentioned pulling out a story I wrote years ago and starting to rework it.  So many parts make me cringe.  I admit I gave the character grey eyes.  Although I spelled it ‘gray’ and wrote about wind blowing black hair into ‘slate gray eyes’.  I’m laughing as I write this, because why can’t a character ever have just plain blue, brown, or green eyes?  Tell me a character has brown eyes, and I’ll immediately picture the shade I want to look into as I read. 

So what do you think about description?  When does it become too much, when does it destroy the reader’s imagination, and conversely, when is it not enough?  Any favorite descriptions you’ve come across?

Around ten years ago I wrote a story that was my first complete mystery novel, the first I had professionally edited, and the first I tried marketing.  It’s been sitting in a computer file since.  I learned a great deal about writing from it, and even more about editing.  And I still love the story.  Since I’m in the middle of a dry period for new stories, I recently pulled this old friend out.  Looking at it from a position of ten years of writing and learning, there are just so many things wrong with this one.  And yet, like the best friend you love in spite of her faults, I still love this story.  So I’ve started playing with it, more to force myself to work with words than anything else, but I realize I’m enjoying renewing acquaintances with old characters.

The first thing I noticed was that  I opened the story with a dream sequence.  Most writers will tell you that’s a symbol of a beginning writer.  After much thought I realized I wanted to impart information about the protagonist’s character, about something that happened to her in her past that now follows her.  And I wanted to do that without giving away current information that would be fed throughout the story.  I chose the clichéd dream.  Reading it I realized I was cheating the reader, dropping them into action, pulling them into involvement with the character, only to yank them back as if saying, ‘Fooled you, it was a dream, you can’t care about this character yet.’

In my current revising, I still want to impart that important background scene, but the dream had to go.  I pulled out my favorite book on writing, Between the Lines, by Jessica Page Morrell, and read her section on prologues and epilogues.  And then I rewrote the dream as a prologue, cutting over half of it out.  Why?  Because as Jessica points out, prologues work best when they are very short.  They also work only when the information in them is vital to the coming story, and yet not part of the story.  If they were integral to the story, then they would happen within the story.  As with this one, I had a specific event that completely changed the way my character thought, acted, and lived.  But my story starts a few years after this event, which is important only because it foreshadows the person she becomes.  Throughout the story the character will respond to an event or act a certain way, and the reader will share that with her, understand why she is who she is, while the characters around her will not.  For me, that adds tension between the characters, but also pulls the reader into the story, allowing them to have something private they share with the protagonist.

I’m not sure if the prologue will meet all those ideas, or even work.  I’ll find that out as I continue to revise.  But for now I like it better than that dream sequence.

So have you used prologues?  Why did you choose that device?  Did it fulfill what you wanted it to?  Any thoughts on prologues?