Honestly I don’t think this is a case where making the audience work for it is really useful. The actual answer is revealed in the next chapter, so it’s not like you’re keeping it a secret for any length of time, but most people probably won’t connect Albus’ “my own father was in Azkaban statement” with Minerva’s truncated though. The people wanting to solve the mystery don’t have much payoff, the people who assume it’s writer-error will just be confused.
Honestly I think “Albus’ own father—” would works better. There are places for clever, mysterious writing but this isn’t it.
FWIW, I like the more elliptical version. I thought it was fairly transparent iff you read the chapters relatively quickly (much more so than the release schedule) -- there are references to his father in earlier chapters.
It wasn’t a matter of I forgot about his father (although no, I wasn’t thinking about it at that particular time). It was that I didn’t even perceive it as a sentence that needed completing.
It should be done with no space and an em-dash:
If em dashes aren’t possible on ff.net, then use two hyphens in a row.
Honestly I don’t think this is a case where making the audience work for it is really useful. The actual answer is revealed in the next chapter, so it’s not like you’re keeping it a secret for any length of time, but most people probably won’t connect Albus’ “my own father was in Azkaban statement” with Minerva’s truncated though. The people wanting to solve the mystery don’t have much payoff, the people who assume it’s writer-error will just be confused.
Honestly I think “Albus’ own father—” would works better. There are places for clever, mysterious writing but this isn’t it.
FWIW, I like the more elliptical version. I thought it was fairly transparent iff you read the chapters relatively quickly (much more so than the release schedule) -- there are references to his father in earlier chapters.
It wasn’t a matter of I forgot about his father (although no, I wasn’t thinking about it at that particular time). It was that I didn’t even perceive it as a sentence that needed completing.
Yes, you’re probably right. I wanted to comment only on what could be done with the grammar while keeping the same basic text.
If he did want to preserve that, yeah, I think your take on it’s the best bet.