How’s your awareness? Let’s test it. Click on the arrow below and watch the short video.
Did you see it?
You didn’t? How could you miss a freakin’ moonwalking bear walking right through their game–even stopping to wave at the camera. You didn’t see it…?
Don’t feel bad. I didn’t see it, nobody I know did either. Why? Because they don’t want us to. In fact, the whole thing was designed make us not see the obvious. And we didn’t.
Our attention was misdirected, purposefully, to make a point.
Fiction works best when you’re not obvious, and yet demands clear, accurate information. So we are constantly using various kinds of misdirection to steer the reader’s attention away from the obvious. This is true on so many levels, from the global to the minute. But take exposition.
Which of the following two ways of revealing Jose’s history of timidity are more satisfying to read…?
(1) Jose had always been fearful of conversations with girls. His reluctance was so bad that he repeatedly missed out on opportunities to go to prom with the girl of his dreams, Delilah Santiago. It was so bad, in fact, that the one time he had really tried to ask her, he found he couldn’t pronounce the word "prom." His attempts to say it–"p-p-prrr"–made her laugh, and soon she had told a couple of her friends, and then everybody was laughing at him.
Awkward. The situation alone is probably mortifying enough to grab a reader’s attention, even if the writing is of no interest. But contrast that version with this one:
(2) Jose’s therapist had been talking to him about trust for weeks, telling him if only he could trust someone–anyone–it might change everything. Pick someone at random, she told him. Who would that be? He knew who he wanted it to be, but he couldn’t make his lips say the sounds of her name. It was the same old thing. Like he hadn’t been able to make form the word "prom" that day he’d tried to ask her. "What?" Delilah kept saying. "The what…?" And then, behind her, they were laughing, her whole crew, and so he stopped trying.
Obviously the second one is a more satisfying read. Why? Even though it’s really about Jose’s almost phobic inability to say the significant words to Delilah, what it appears to be about is the challenge from his therapist to "trust" someone. The trust challenge, however, is not the real job of this passage: placed here, it’s a decoy, meant to divert our awareness of the real job. And in fact in this version, Jose’s fear of talking to girls seems like only a sidebar.
Misdirection is going on all the time. If I want to say Jake had an anger problem, I don’t just SAY it, I talk about his red complexion, or "that thing" in his attitude that made you feel he might haul off and pop you in the mouth at any given moment. ANd on and on.
And as with all the most powerful tools in fiction writing, the efficacy of it transcends fiction. Magicians use it most, creating effects "over there," when they don’t want you to watch what their hands are doing "over here." Politicians rail about minor outrages, like littering, so you won’t notice their hand going in and out of the till.
For fiction writers great scene writing involves a two-step thinking pattern:
1) How should I say it.
2) How can I say it even more powerfully by saying something ELSE?
Paradoxical? Of course, but this is fiction we’re talking about, and when you write fiction you enter the land of Never-Be-Obvious, Imply-Don’t-State, and Show-Don’t-Tell.
