In the Dark

The challenge of fiction writing boils down to this: what information to supply to readers, and when to supply it, by what means. How much does the reader need to know, versus how much he or she should be kept in the dark? Give the reader too much information, or give it too soon, and you kill any sense of suspense. Give too little, and you'll generate not suspense, but confusion. And though inexperienced authors routinely conflate the two, they aren't the same thing.

To describe what writers do, Frank Conroy—who, before his death in 2005 directed the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop for over 30 years—used the metaphor of a mountain. In writing fiction, we equip readers for a journey up a mountain. When they get to the top—assuming that they get there—they'll be rewarded with an expanded view of life (and even, if the book is really good, of the universe). But in order to get there they'll need certain things. The trick, Conroy explained, is to give readers everything they need to make the journey—compass, map, hardtack, water—but nothing unnecessary (yo-yo, kazoo, kaleidoscope), and nothing sooner than it's needed (telescope, champagne).

This opening generates a lot of what I call false suspense—the kind of suspense that has readers asking not what's going to happen next? but what the heck am I reading, and why? From the profusion of blood-drenched visions that the heroine suffers to the mystifying "U'Gen"—a term without meaning in my world and without explanation in the author's—it offers almost nothing but confusion.

Who is Rachael? Where is she? What is she doing there? When did those intruding thoughts of hers—the ones she is "grateful to be away from" in the first paragraph—intrude? During the long bus trip? And if indeed she has gotten away from them, then why, two paragraphs later, is she seized with a vision? Is this the same vision she's on her way to report? Do these visions pop "into the forefront of her thoughts with little prodding" or against her will? What, if any, is the relation between Rachael's visions and her mind's autonomous habit of drifting into other "open minds"? Those other minds—are they where Rachael's visions come from? We don't know. Nor can we be sure if Randall is the dying soldier in the vision, and if the "coveted item" he embraced with his dead arms is the family photograph mentioned later. As to the nature of the relation between Randall and Rachael, regarding that, too, we are left clueless.

What we do know is that for reasons unclear Rachael is able to see into the future, and that that future is apocalyptic, with blood "leeching from . . . dead bodies" and "streets littered with glass and rubble." Then again, the story itself would seem to be set in a none-too-charming future in which U'gen cadets and "Visionary students" (author's capitalization) rehearse military strategy as they gear up for the coming apocalypse.

What partly does in this opening is a lack of contrast. Were they cast against a less dismal present Rachael's "horrifying" visions might indeed horrify; instead, they spill blood and darkness into a vision that is already dark, or at any rate murky. Just as, in her vision, "light filter[s] through the haze of dusk," in this opening as a whole very little light seeps through. All is hazy, dim, and obscure. Between Rachael's vision-addled mind and the author's own lack of clarity and precision (Is the school in Paragraph #1 a "looming remnant of an ancient society" or active and in session?), we are left completely in the dark.