How much to reveal to the reader?

Summary

The web content discusses the art of balancing information revelation in storytelling to maintain reader interest.

Abstract

The article emphasizes the importance of strategic disclosure in narrative writing, comparing reading a story to assembling a puzzle. It outlines the necessity of providing just enough information to pique initial curiosity without satiating it, suggesting that a story should continually raise new questions as old ones are answered to keep the reader engaged. The author advocates for a careful distribution of clues, character backstory, and plot twists, using techniques like foreshadowing and gradual revelation to maintain suspense and avoid predictability. The piece also warns against overloading the reader with irrelevant details or excessive exposition, which can lead to confusion or disinterest.

Opinions

The author believes that the key to keeping readers engaged is to balance what is revealed with what is kept hidden, creating a sense of intrigue and anticipation.
Revealing too much too soon can diminish the reader's curiosity, while not revealing enough can prevent emotional investment in the story.
The use of a bomb metaphor by Alfred Hitchcock illustrates the effectiveness of building suspense by letting the audience in on impending danger, rather than surprising them without context.
The author suggests that writers should avoid dedicating too much time to a protagonist's backstory initially, instead integrating it through flashbacks and dialogue.
Overly expository dialogues are seen as unrealistic and detrimental to the narrative flow.
Writers are cautioned against focusing on irrelevant facts that do not contribute to the story's development.
Necessary explanations that cannot be shown should be used sparingly to avoid weighing down the narrative.
The article posits that intuition and iterative editing are crucial in determining the

How to hook the reader when he is not very involved

Reading a story is a bit like putting together a puzzle, piece by piece, as the author provides us with all the elements on each page until we get the final picture. I think this is a very fascinating aspect of storytelling (not just in written form, of course), even for the writer: revealing the story step by step.

After all, what keeps us glued to the pages of a novel is the curiosity to know “what comes next,” and conversely, the main cause of boredom is when we can too easily predict what will happen or when we have no interest in finding out.

The author must be able to balance clues and information because if we communicate everything we know immediately, the reader will not have much interest in knowing more. But, if we leave too many shadows, they will not have enough material to be curious or a sufficient connection with the characters to identify with them.

So how much to reveal, then?

When introducing a story, it is important to provide all the necessary coordinates so that the reader understands who the protagonist is, what their goal is, and what the main conflict is. This information is essential to arouse initial interest. However, at this stage, we must also hide something, because:

The protagonist does not know it.

We decide to deliberately hide something from the reader.

We need to constantly raise new questions to keep the reader’s attention. When we reveal something or resolve a conflict, we must also create new ones. It is very unlikely that curiosity can be maintained over a single mystery to be revealed or tension over a single conflict. We need to continuously stoke the fire.

I refer to an old analogy, that of a bomb. You and I are sitting here talking. A trivial conversation, completely devoid of meaning. Boring. Suddenly, boom!, a bomb explodes. The audience is shaken — for fifteen seconds. Let’s now try a different approach. We show the same scene, revealing that the bomb has been placed in a specific location. We show that it will explode at one o’clock sharp. It’s now quarter to one, then ten to one — we focus on a clock hanging on the wall, then return to the same scene. At this point, our conversation becomes of vital interest, in its extreme banality. Come on, look under the table, idiot! Now, the audience, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds, actively participates for ten minutes. By Alfred Hitchcock

One method I use for this is to write down all the questions that a reader could ask chapter by chapter and make sure to answer them gradually, deepen them, and possibly complicate them to raise the stakes. Until everything is resolved…

A major danger in a writer’s game of telling and not telling is to exaggerate with information and leave the reader without interest in discovering more, or even overwhelmed and confused. For example, it is a mistake to immediately delve into the protagonist’s past, perhaps even from the first chapter. Even if their personal history is of great relevance (after all, it always is) because it conditions the present and the future, we should not dedicate pages and pages to it right away. It is better to ration it with some flashbacks here and there, some allusions in dialogue, possibly always leaving some shade to be illuminated later.

Speaking of dialogues, here too the risk is to exaggerate with telling. I am always very annoyed by those exchanges (especially in TV series) that aim to summarize facts or inform about something, resulting in facts that are unrealistic and unpleasant. A good author is recognized by their ability to mix a natural conversational tone with what they want to convey to those listening to the dialogue.

Saying too much can also mean overwhelming the reader with irrelevant facts. Even if we intend to mislead them, it is not correct to attract their attention to details that will have no weight in the story.

Regarding necessary explanations (those that we cannot show but only tell), we must also be careful and use them sparingly. This is, for example, a crucial knot for me because there are clarifications necessary at a certain point, and I am always afraid of making the reading too heavy.

All of this is not only valid for specific novels that make mysteries their core, such as mysteries, but for all genres. In the end, I do not believe that there are formulas to establish how much and where to say something; perhaps one can use intuition and proceed by trial and error. In the novel I am writing, I have often gone back to remove information and place it later, realizing that by revealing too much, I was leaving little suspense and little room for future revelations. On the contrary, continuing with the story, one can also realize that a little anticipation is needed to make what comes after more credible.

Do you ever consider how much to reveal to the reader? Let me know in the comments.