Thought: Authors Withholding Info.

The title of this post seems a whole lot more sinister than I meant it to. I don’t even mean mystery authors, really. Who I mean is Tanya Huff, and her newest book The Enchantment Emporium.

Going along with the theme of talking about books I’ve read recently, yes, I just read this book. (I thought it was fantastic, by the way, so if anyone is looking for a really neat fantasy book to read, I highly recommend this book.) And by far the most interesting thing about this book was the author’s way of divulging information. We’ve all heard of the dreaded “info dumps” and been told not to do them. The phrase that I’ve heard often is that info should be “slipped in like spice.” (No Dune puns intended, I believe.) I’m not sure that info dumps aren’t something an author should do, necessarily, as I’ve seen them used well.

But this book.

Tanya Huff seems to mostly just assume that the reader knows what’s going on. Or that if they don’t, they’ll just sit tight and piece together the small clues until we have something that vaguely resembles a Big Picture. For instance, the Gales—the main family in The Enchantment Emporium—is a family of magic users. The reader sort of gets a hint at that in the beginning, but there’s no description of what type of magic, of how they use their magic, how their magic differs from those they oppose, nothing. (With the sole exception of one character, but even that is vague.) It’s not until way into the meat of the book that someone actually uses their magic and it’s up to the reader to catch it and work it out in their mind and decide what just happened.

I loved it. And it made me think about what sort of things the author has to tell their readers. Part of writing a compelling story is, in a lot of ways, withholding information to begin with. That’s how you get to the climax. But somewhere there’s a line. You know, a really fuzzy line that no one can really discern—until, maybe, you’ve already crossed it.

But it made me think about some of my own writing. Maybe you don’t need to explain how your magic system works. Maybe you don’t have to explain why the world is the way it is. And, hell, would that make writing or world building any easier?

(I ought to mention, also, that a big part of loving this book was all the geeky references. I know I didn’t catch them all, and I still caught a lot of them. There was a whole list of “Jacks” at one point, and the list absolutely included Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Jack Harkness. That’s the only geek reference I remember, but I know there were bunches more. It was awesome. I almost want to get my own copy and read it again so that I can highlight all the geek references.)

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