Orient Your Readers ASAP!
If they don't know where they are, they can't imagine where your story is going
Hello Loreates,
The events of this week are so unspeakably egregious that I’m tempted to go on a verbal rampage here. It’s Grand Theft America week, from the Looter in Chief’s $1.8 Billion heist of your tax dollars to reward his thugs and exempt himself, to the ongoing depletion of the nation’s water reserves to quench the billionaires’ insatiable thirst for AI profits. If you haven’t already called your representatives to DEMAND ACTION, I urge you to do so now.
But our collective sanity requires us to learn how to write our stories and scream bloody murder at the same time, and writing is the business of MFA Lore, so I’m going to pivot now from my political panic to one of my pet peeves as a reader: disorientation.
I recently read an early draft of a story that had excellent bones. Strong characters, complex motives, powerful backstory, and an intriguing premise. But for several pages, I could not figure out where I was, when the story took place, or who the main characters were, much less what was at stake. This was understandable in a piece that was still in its formative stages, but it reminded me just how essential it is to orient readers as soon as possible, and to check every page to make sure you don’t accidentally disorient them.
So that’s what we’ll focus on today, using excerpts from stories by Lauren Groff, Graham Greene, Katie Davis, and Shaily Menon for illustration.
Read on!
Aimee
Save the Dates!
Saturday, May 30 at 9am PT
Take 5 Writing Workshop
This monthly workshop for Premium MFA Lore Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different 5-page submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today:
Tuesday, June 2, at 10am PT
Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin on her new book ‘Famous Men
I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin, whose new novel, Famous Men, is forthcoming from Random House in July. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
What Does It Take to Orient Your Readers?
When you write a story, your goal is to transport your readers. In other words, you must take them on a trip. But you’re not just the driver. You’re also the conductor, the navigator, and tour guide. It’s your job to welcome your readers aboard, get them situated, introduce them to the narrative amenities, and identify the important landmarks and signals they should watch for as the story gets underway. If you neglect this orientation, your readers will soon feel lost. And you never want to lose your readers.
At the same time, you don’t want to bombard them with complicated maps, irrelevant details, and insignificant trail signs. Too much information, and readers will get so overloaded, they won’t remember any navigational markers, much less the important ones.
Effective orientation primes memory to both notice and remember what will matter going forward. If handled deftly, your first lines will transport readers so swiftly and efficiently that they’ll never need to stop and look back to get their bearings.
Just as you orient yourself in space and time and social circumstances when setting off on a journey, so must you orient your reader in these same dimensions. But the emphasis required in each story will be different. Memoirs generally have a single easy-to-identify narrator but multiple timelines that need to be signaled. Mysteries must quickly gesture to an event that’s already happened, while suspense must hint at a danger that looms ahead. Novels often have large casts of characters to locate and trace. Sagas usually navigate historical eras that must be represented.
Macro/Micro Orientation
One principle that’s important to remember, even if it never rises to the reader’s attention, is the fact that stories take place on both macro and micro stages.
