Context VS Subtext: The Reader as Detective

Editing tips to 'unf*ck your writing'

Your writing is a crime scene. Your reader is a detective. Let them do their job…

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In this edition of Unfuck Your Writing, we’re looking at the fine art of pattern recognition, adding just the right amount of context and subtext to help your reader to fully imagine the story you’ve laid out for them.

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When I’m editing a writer’s work, there’s always something I keep in the back of my mind, no matter whether it’s an early draft in need of broad developmental feedback, or a late-stage draft in need of nitty-gritty copyediting:

The audience as detective

My overarching approach focuses on how all the pieces of a story fit together — structure, pacing, characterisation, narrative voice, stylisation, thematics — regardless of how polished the prose is or how ‘finished’ the writer believes their draft to be.

(Not trying to be snarky here, but it’s kinda my job to tell you if it’s not finished, sorry.)

Part of that work is acting as a story detective: investigating the premise, following the clues, building a bigger picture, and ensuring all of the evidence connects together.

Which is exactly what any reader does.

From the first page of a book or the first line of a short story, we’re subconsciously seeking out breadcrumbs to follow:

• Who is this character, where did they come from, what do they want, and what are they up to?

• What can I glean about how this scenario came to be?

• What are the important details I should be paying attention to?

• Is there a deeper meaning hidden in the subtext?

• Is this particular clue going to be relevant later?

As story detectives, we’re constantly collecting data, filing it away, linking one thing to another, and reading between the lines.

As writers (especially during the editing process), it’s our job to make sure we’ve sown the right seeds in the right places, and provided just enough information for the reader to make the correct assumptions and view the storyworld the way it’s intended.

Not enough context and the reader is left desperately trying to connect dots a mile apart, finding themselves adrift without the necessary information.

Too many details and the reader struggles to juggle all the different bits of info, tangents and story threads, unsure which path to follow.

It’s like a jigsaw with too few or too many pieces. Either way, the detective doesn’t see the whole picture and the reader gets frustrated, bored, or just plain confused. And it’s rarely because the writing is ‘bad’ — it’s because there’s a glitch in the pattern.

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The fine art of pattern recognition

We are all intuitively familiar with the pattern of stories. We expect to be led on a journey with a clear(ish) path, trusting it will eventually bring us to a logical end point — even if it sends us down unmapped trails, or takes a sudden short cut, or makes us start at the end and work backwards.

We can still recognise a story if it’s upside down or out of order or subverting stylistic conventions. Structural experimentation is not the problem here. The issue is the amount and clarity of waymarkers along the way.

Most manuscripts I edit will need some kind of tweaking on one of those points above: either not enough context or too many details. And the story detective part of my brain is trained to flag up every time it needs more evidence or encounters a red herring.

The trick is finding the right balance for each story.

Here’s what that might look like — and how to fix it: