I’m generally content not to look them up until I start wondering if somebody’s going to die, or any time the suspense is being laid on with a ladle, or when I’m confused about what I have already read. I read really fast and I’ll get to the relevant part soon enough. I don’t know about fractions, and it’s usually not the ending I’m itching to read—endings need lots of plot setup, I could read them and not understand what was going on. I just want to know if so-and-so lives or if such-and-such disaster occurs.
Once I stopped a TV show my best friend was showing me in the middle, when she wouldn’t tell me a spoiler answer to a question I asked, so I could leave the room and look it up on Wikipedia. She knew all about me and spoilers, she just couldn’t bring herself to say it.
How much does this inform your fiction-writing? In most story-telling there is some pretense of unpredictability. Some TV shows are exceptions, the kind where the producers basically promise the audience that nothing will change over the half-hour.
Another sort of exception is history. Some readers might be upset to have events of The Surgeon of Crowthorne spoiled for them, but for the most part it is not regarded as cheating to put down a history book to look up a character bio on Wikipedia. I think it would be an interesting constrained writing experiment to structure a novel in the same way, where the author couldn’t rely on suspense to keep you interested in the plot. Perhaps there could be appendices with an encyclopedia style entry for each main character and each main event in the book, that the reader was encouraged to skip to as they pleased.
Oh, I’m perfectly capable of inflicting suspense on other people. I’ve seen it done enough. (But there are spoilers available to be clicked open on all the character pages on http://elcenia.com and I’ll provide spoilers to anyone who asks nicely.)
I’m generally content not to look them up until I start wondering if somebody’s going to die, or any time the suspense is being laid on with a ladle, or when I’m confused about what I have already read. I read really fast and I’ll get to the relevant part soon enough. I don’t know about fractions, and it’s usually not the ending I’m itching to read—endings need lots of plot setup, I could read them and not understand what was going on. I just want to know if so-and-so lives or if such-and-such disaster occurs.
Once I stopped a TV show my best friend was showing me in the middle, when she wouldn’t tell me a spoiler answer to a question I asked, so I could leave the room and look it up on Wikipedia. She knew all about me and spoilers, she just couldn’t bring herself to say it.
Interesting. For more evidence of human diversity, I often have difficulty not telling people unrequested spoilers in otherwise-similar situations.
How much does this inform your fiction-writing? In most story-telling there is some pretense of unpredictability. Some TV shows are exceptions, the kind where the producers basically promise the audience that nothing will change over the half-hour.
Another sort of exception is history. Some readers might be upset to have events of The Surgeon of Crowthorne spoiled for them, but for the most part it is not regarded as cheating to put down a history book to look up a character bio on Wikipedia. I think it would be an interesting constrained writing experiment to structure a novel in the same way, where the author couldn’t rely on suspense to keep you interested in the plot. Perhaps there could be appendices with an encyclopedia style entry for each main character and each main event in the book, that the reader was encouraged to skip to as they pleased.
Oh, I’m perfectly capable of inflicting suspense on other people. I’ve seen it done enough. (But there are spoilers available to be clicked open on all the character pages on http://elcenia.com and I’ll provide spoilers to anyone who asks nicely.)
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