How to Pull Readers Into Your Story: Fictionalizing Your Audience

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Here we go, episode one, fictionalizing your audience, how we can be intentional about engaging our readers and drawing them into our stories by giving them a role to play. Welcome to the new podcast. This is episode one. If you haven't had a chance, I invite you to check out the prologue to the show.

Introduction to Engaging Readers

I uploaded at the same time as this episode, so you'll find it at the show's website if you want to take a listen, find out a little bit more about who I am and what we've got planned for the show. But today we're going to jump right into a subject that I'm really passionate about. It's something I've done a lot of study of and research into over the last couple of months and has really changed the way that I approach my writing. And I think it just might for you too. And it really has to do with how we approach our audience in our writing, how we approach our readers and how we involve them in the stories that we're telling. In order to really set up this conversation, though, I want to take a step back and look at the history of how we have been taught to approach our audience.

And really this goes back to our earliest days in education. Now we're talking elementary school, middle school, high school here. And it's important for us to understand how we were programmed in those early years to think about our audience so that we can identify how we're doing it today. We'll make this real quick. I understand history lessons aren't the most entertaining things, but I think you'll find this fascinating. And I really want to start by asking you this question, which one are you?

Understanding Writing Approaches

Are you a current traditional writer or are you an expressivist writer? Now, if you're unfamiliar with these terms, they've really defined the way writing has been taught in our school systems for many, many decades. And I wanted to find each one so that you can identify really which way you're wired. It's important for us to understand.

Current Traditional vs. Expressivist Writing

So at first I want to talk about what's called current traditional teaching. This is really the formulaic way to approach writing. This kind of gave birth to the much maligned five paragraph theme that you probably remember from your years in school. And I'm not going to go into great detail into this teaching methodology, but I do want to talk about how it taught its students to approach audience. And basically it said this, that if you approach your writing with the right form, with the right elements, then your audience will automatically be effectively addressed.

Now to use kind of an example, I think we still see a lot of this current traditional approach in writing today. You pick up a book, especially on screenwriting. It's going to talk a lot about formula. It's going to talk a lot about the rules for engaging your audience. And the assumption is, you know, as long as you have this three act structure, as long as you have your inciting event, as long as you have pinch one, pinch two, as long as you have rising action, falling action, all these terms that if you've studied writing at all will be familiar to you. These are all really current traditional ideas about teaching.

In a way, it's formulaic. Now it doesn't discount the artistry, of course, but it does place a lot of emphasis on having the right formula involved. So if you were educated to write in a very formulaic way and understood that as long as you got that formula right, that you were probably addressing your audience and involving them well, then then you're in kind of the current traditional camp.

Now, on the other side of that is the expressivist approach. And this is really a kickback or a movement against the current traditional idea of writing. And the expressivist writing basically said this, ignore your audience. Don't think about them when you sit down to write. If you write something true, if you write something authentic in your voice, then that voice will come through and connect with the audience. If you're anything like me, then you've had teachers in your life.

Maybe you've taken classes or read books by people who come from both of these almost opposite views of how to connect with our audience. But here's the problem. And this is what I want to talk about today. The problem with both of these approaches is that both of them see audiences as passive.

In other words, they both kind of envision an audience as, you know, a guy sitting on a sofa reading a book on a Saturday afternoon. And he's not involved in the story. In the current traditional aspect, he's responding to the formula of that book. He's not playing a part in creating it. An expressivist approach, he's responding to only that author and that author's authenticity. He's not playing a role.

Engaging Readers Actively

We want our readers to be engaged in our writing. Have you ever wondered what it is that is at play when you pick up one book and you just feel completely disconnected from it? And yet you pick up another and all of a sudden you're just sucked into it. You're drawn into it. You feel like you're living in there amongst the characters. That's what we're talking about today.

We're talking about engaging our readers on that level, stepping away from these ideas of current traditional or expressivist to really give our audience an active role in entering into our stories. A lot of what I'm going to talk about today is based on an article written by Walter J. Ong many decades ago, 1975, in fact. It's called The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction. It's an amazing article. If you haven't read it, I will attempt to find an active link for it and put that in the show notes.

You'll be able to find those at the show's website. That's just the number one. Don't spell it out. Slash one. And hopefully I'll be able to find a reliable link for that article. It's worth reading, especially if what we talk about today interests you.

But basically, his argument in that article is that, as the title says, the writer's audience is always a fiction. And he approaches that from two different levels. The first level is that when we sit down to write, our audience really is a fiction. We have to go through a process of kind of imagining who they are, maybe demographically, what age might we be envisioning, what gender might we be envisioning, sometimes what political bent or social bent might they have. We invent these audiences in our mind as we sit down to write.

But I think what Ong focuses on that's so transformative for our writing is that our readers actually fictionalize themselves as they read. Now, if you're not familiar with this concept, that may seem a little abstract. And I'm tempted right now to give you examples.

Techniques to Draw Readers In

But I think the examples are better served in examining how we can do this intentionally. So just keep that idea in your head for just a moment as we move on here. There's basically three ways that I want to talk about that we can be intentional about how our audiences fictionalize themselves. And by that, I mean, how do we make them play a role almost as a character in our book that they are not? You know, they are not characters in our book, and yet I'm sure we've all experienced books where we where we feel like we have become a character in the book.

So there's three ways really to draw our readers into these books, three that we're going to talk about. And I'd love to hear your comments about about these three ways and certainly about other ways that you have discovered. And you can do that through the website. Go to the talk to us link on there. Call and leave us a voicemail, a voice message. And we'll get your voice on a future show, kind of in a follow up to this discussion.

But the first of the three ways that we can really draw our audiences in and allow them to fictionalize themselves is through the use of frame stories. Rather than offer a description or an explanation of what a frame story is, I think it's best just to use an example. And I'm going to try to use examples any time in this podcast, either of books that are widely read and often of movies, because let's face it, more of us see the same movies than we do read the same books.

So I'll try to keep the examples that I use widespread. The first example of a frame story that I want to talk about is Heart of Darkness. As we approach this story, it really is a frame story. We become a shipmate of Marlow's. We sit with him in his ship called the Nelly off the coast of England. As this frame story begins, he's he gathers these shipmates around and he begins to tell them his story of entering into the heart of darkness to find Mr.

Kurtz. By using that frame story, we're transported from being just a person on a sofa reading a book to being a sailor, a shipmate of Marlow's. And we begin to envision ourselves not as we actually are, but as a character in the book.

Another example that I really like, and it's I guess I could say a guilty pleasure of mine, but one of my favorite movies, depending on the mood I'm in, is William Goldman's The Princess Bride. Now, if you've if you've read the book, if you've seen the movie, you'll recognize it as a frame story. It begins with with this sick little boy and his grandfather comes to visit him and opens up this book, The Princess Bride, and reads to him. Well, it's a great frame story. It's a great way for us to fictionalize ourselves when we encounter it. No longer are we, you know, in my case, the 42 year old man sitting down to read a children's book or to experience this fantasy adventure.

But I get to become I hope it's a book you've read. We all kind of recognize Hemingway's style as being sparse, and I think there's more to it than that. He's doing something with the way that he writes that allows us to enter into his work. I'm just going to read from you the very first line of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and see how he uses description to enable us to fictionalize ourselves into his story.

Here's the way it reads. In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Now listen to what he's done there. In the late summer of that year, the late summer of what year? He doesn't tell us. He's assuming that we already know.

We already know which year. He says we looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. What river? What plain? What mountains? He doesn't go into a long description.

He doesn't assume that we're just that guy sitting around on the sofa that he's got to explain everything to us. Suddenly, we're there with him. Picture in your mind where you're standing in this story.

Now this is an abstract concept, so I hope you follow me. But are you standing next to Hemingway as he's telling you the story, or are you standing in front of him where he's basically telling you the story when he says in the late summer of that year, we looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. He's placed you literally next to him in this story. He's not talking to you on the couch. He's saying, you've been to this river before. You've seen this plain.

You've seen these mountains. You know what year it is. We're asked by Hemingway to fictionalize ourselves as somebody who's already been there in a way. And it's a part we're happy to play. It's a part that really engages us in the text. Counter that with a book that starts with a lot of description.

I see this a lot with the writing of people who are just really starting out, just finding their feet as writers. And they'll introduce a character and they will describe him so fully that you become painfully aware that you don't know this person. In fact, you don't know this person so much that I have to describe every detail about this person or this place, this setting. In a way, the more we describe something, the more we're reminding our readers that they're not part of the story. Hemingway's writing gives us a real insight into that fine balance of too much description and that really sparse description that invites people in. You know, it reminds me of another concept.

I spent many, many years as a songwriter. And one of the methods that I always kept in mind, I called the three-quarter circle. So if you imagine a song or even a story as being a complete circle, in songwriting, I always approached it as drawing that circle only three-quarters complete. You leave a quarter of that circle open so that the listener to the song can fill in their own details, so to speak, can have room within that song to connect their experiences to it. If you've ever heard a song that is so specific that there's no room for you to play a part in that song, well, the same thing holds true with our writing, with our description. Let me use an example here, and this is kind of off the top of my head, so forgive me if it's not a perfect example.

But let's say that we're going to describe a homeless person in our book. Let's say our main character stumbles across him. And if we were to say our main character, we'll call him Johnny, meets a homeless man on the street. Well, as soon as I say that, homeless man, we get an image of one in our mind. The problem is it tends to be very stereotypical. In fact, it's almost a cartoon, kind of a clip art version of a homeless man.

But watch what happens as we add one compelling detail to that description. I'll say a homeless man whose gray eyebrows knitted together and hung low over his eyes. As soon as I give you that one vivid detail, all of a sudden that homeless man turns from the stereotype, kind of the cartoon version, into somebody who really lives. And your brain fills in all the rest of the details. I'll bet you can see him right now with incredible detail.

But if I go on to describe him too much more, I tell you the clothes that he's wearing, and I tell him the way his teeth look, and I tell you the way his teeth look, or that he's not wearing shoes and he's got toes poking out through the holes in his socks, and I tell you the condition that his jeans are in, and I tell you that maybe he's got a dog with him and the dog looks like this, and the more I describe this person to you, the less place there is for you in the story. In fact, I'm taking back this character that you've just imagined. I'm taking it back from you, and I'm saying, no, this is my story and he looks like this. Well, what are we accomplishing by that? We're taking our readers out of the story. The same place happens with setting.

It tends to be that the more we describe setting, the less our readers can put themselves there. If we stick to a few really compelling, really vivid examples, then our readers fill in the rest and they become part of that story. So I think that's just a really key thing, a key element in including our readers in our stories.

Using Unexplained Terminology

The third way that we're going to discuss, and like I said, there's probably many more, and I'd love to hear from you and the way that you do it, but the third way is also related to description, but it has more to do with terminology, dropping in terminology without explanation. I think a great example of that is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. If you haven't read this, go read this book. It teaches me so much about writing every time I pick it up. I love that it's taught so often in high schools now.

But Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, as I flipped through just the first chapter, these are some of the terms that O'Brien gives us. SOPs, C-rations, the RTO, PFCs, LSA oil, KIA. He talks about Chi-Coms and LAWs. He talks about a CS and AOs. He talks about toe poppers, bouncing Bettys, and Sterno.

But here's the thing, he doesn't explain any of those. Unless you are in the military and possibly even in the military in the Vietnam era, you may not know these terms at all. They may be completely foreign to you, and yet he doesn't take any time to explain them. He just kind of throws them out there on the page and says, you know, good luck with that.

But here's what that does. Now, for a few people, maybe it isolates them from the text and they can't enter in. But for most people, and certainly for me in my experience, I got to fictionalize myself. When I heard a phrase like Chi-Coms, I had a choice. And I chose to say, you know what, I'm going to fictionalize myself as a person who understands this. I'm going to pretend I'm somebody that I'm not.

I'm going to pretend that I know this lingo, that I am from this military culture, and even more so, that I in some way experienced the life of a Vietnam soldier. Now, that's dramatic for a guy who wasn't there. But it's incredibly compelling to be able to fictionalize yourself in a way that you are right there alongside O'Brien during the story. It's a really powerful technique. I think we're afraid sometimes to throw these phrases out without explanation. We feel like we're going to lose our readers.

But a lot of times it's the exact way that they can fictionalize themselves into our stories. Another example, not nearly as well known probably, but something I just happened to recently read, so it's on my mind, is Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. His first sentence, it goes like this, Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

Now, listen to how much is not explained. Even the first name, Lyra. Is it Lyra? It's L-Y-R-A. Is it Lyra? Is it Lyra?

We don't get any clue. And her daemon. I understand it's actually pronounced demon, but it's spelled D-A-E-M-O-N. And yet we get no explanation for what this is. And then they're moving through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. We're not told why.

We get the sense of danger, and yet it's quite a while into the story before, or into that chapter at least, before we understand why that is. Pullman has given us a first sentence full of unknowns and made no effort to explain it. And this is a children's book. He's giving his children, his child audience, more credit than sometimes we can give an adult audience by just laying this terminology out and letting them fictionalize themselves as if they understand it, as if they're part of this world. When we make that move and our readers follow us there, they become part of that world. It's so powerful.

Closing Thoughts and Challenge

So here's the thing I want to close with. Your readers are going to fictionalize themselves. It's not a matter of if they're going to. They're either going to fictionalize themselves poorly as just the guy on the couch reading your book, or we can be intentional about how they fictionalize themselves and use it as a way to draw them in to our writing. And here's our first wise words segment. And today's comes from me.

Since it's our first episode, we haven't had a chance to get any listener feedback, but it comes from John Steinbeck. Actually, a is not interesting, only the deeply personal and familiar. That's tempting to go in and really analyze these wise words segments, but we're not going to do that. We're going to let them stand on their own. We're also going to be kind of collecting these on the website. If you go to the show's website and click on the wise words link, you'll find this one and in the weeks and months to come, you'll find one from every week, along with a link for the Twitter account or Facebook page or even website for the listener who has brought them to us.

So hopefully that'll be a great impetus for you to share your pithy favorite quotes or pieces of advice. So if you do have a favorite quote or a piece of writing advice, I hope you'll share it. You can go to the talk to us link on the website.

So it's time for our weekly challenge, and this week's weekly challenge is going to be to go over the first few pages of whatever it is you're working on now and ask yourself, how am I asking my readers to fictionalize themselves? You're doing it. You're either doing it well or you're poorly doing it poorly, but you are asking your readers to fictionalize themselves.

So identify how it is that you're doing it. Then using the three techniques we've discussed, frame stories, limited description, and unexplained terminology, and you know that terminology can be political systems or magic systems or even terminology from a time period, but try out a few intentional strategies to draw your readers in as characters in your story. Give them a role to play besides just sitting on the couch and reading.

Okay, next week we're going to be talking about something that I'm excited about. It's called How to Keep Your Characters Alive. Now this is not going to be about plot. This is not about whether your protagonist lives or dies at the end. It's actually about verisimilitude, the appearance of being true or real.

So I hope you'll get in touch with us here at the show's website and tell us what things kick you out of a story. What things break the spell of reality for you when you are reading? Leave us a voice message. You can connect to that for free through the website. Or send us an email at feedback at the show's website and let us know what things kick you out of stories as you're reading and you just might hear yourself on next week's podcast. We'd also love to hear your questions, your suggestions for topics, or respond to today's show again by going to the show's website and clicking that talk to us link.

So remember, the best way to improve your writing craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. I hope you're off to do the same.

So let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.