The Man behind the Curtain

How often, dear reader, do you pay attention to the "man behind the curtain," when reading a story? A story, like the Wizard of Oz, requires a man or woman behind a curtain to create the illusion. Often, but not always, the author behind the curtain wants to remain hidden behind the curtain, keeping the reader's attention on the story they are weaving. The best succeed in getting readers' hearts beating fast with excitement, skin crawling with creepy things, and shedding tears at the death of fictional characters. In short, making things real in the moment with words alone. If that isn't wizardry, I don't know what wizardry is. 

Of course the success of  this depends on how skillfully the author is and how engaged the reader is in the story's premise, but it is still a rather amazing accomplishment, when done. But the magic doesn't work on every reader, not completely, anyway.

I must admit I've never shed a tear while reading a book, or never got so wrapped up in a story that my heart raced or ever took a "scary" scene seriously. (Though I'm not a horror story reader, so that I don't tempt fate in this regard.) This is not to say that I don't get emotionally involved in a good story - though it takes a good story - but at some level, I think I'm always aware that I'm reading a story, not living it. I'm always aware of the author working behind the curtain, perhaps because I am one myself, and have been one most of my life. I don't think this distracts from my enjoyment of a well written story, it may even enhance it, but I am never entirely immersed in the premise of the story. So how does this being a writer reading a writer work?

On a basic level I would imagine most readers recognize certain story patterns as being artifacts of the style or fashion in fiction when it was written, but forget about them when reading the story. Take for example the opening scene in a lot of contemporary SF & fantasy books. These stories often immediately open with - without context - an action scene with lots of drama and violence. Sometimes its a prologue, and sometimes it's a scene out of story order which has to be walked back once the story really starts. But you see it all the time in contemporary fiction because it is thought to "hook" the reader - in the case of traditional published book, this reader is the prospective agent or editor - into reading the rest of the story. I, however, see starting a story by jumping immediately into some sort tense action as an artifact contemporary commercial storytelling. I see the writer behind the curtain writing it that way because they have been told that is what they need to do to hook an agent, an editor, or a reader. The same can be said, at least for me, for stories that jump around between multiple points of view - another popular motif these days. While many readers find this technique interesting, I can't help but see it as an artificial construction of the author to tell a story in a contemporary way. The popularity of these techniques gives them a level of invisibility to readers. But as someone who has, over the last decade, read various "how to" write advice pieces, (which I read far too late ever to take to heart) I've often encounter these prescribed patterns. Thus when I see them, they immediately bring the author out from behind the curtain for me. It's an "Ah-ha!" moment; they're doing this because it's what so-called experts, agents, or editors have advised them to do. I see the man behind the curtain pulling levers. This awareness of techniques - of authors manipulating the levers - often takes me at least a bit out of the story.

I'll use an actual example of this from the book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Many readers of this book often cite it as one of their favorite books of all time. In it, one of the main characters dies. If you've seen the TV mini-series you know who. Many readers say that they are so sad that they shed tears over this incident, even if they had seen the series of TV. In my case, however, it just made me angry. Angry enough for me to stop reading the story at that point. So why did I react this way? Because it felt like a cheap trick by McMurtry designed to manipulate my emotions. I saw him as deliberately pulling levers to create an emotional response, which, I will readily admit is something authors regularly do, and readers expect. It may well be justified, and obviously works within this book for most readers. But you see, I'd made the mistake of reading the prequel novels,  Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon prior to reading Lonesome Dove, so that I did not see this death, and all the others in this story in isolation. I was painfully aware that in the prequel books (written after Lonesome Dove) McMurtry introduces a great many named characters, has them do stupid things, and then kills them off. It seems like nine out of ten named characters never make it out of one of these books alive. So I was well aware of his technique of introducing characters only to kill them off when I was reading Lonesome Dove. I could seem him at it once again in this story, killing off many minor characters along the way, just as he had in the prequels. And so it goes... But when he pulled this stunt on my favorite character in the books, it was a bridge too far. He had finally flogged that mule to death. It was clearly McMurtry who had killed him, not the native Americans in the story who did the deed within the story. McMurtry was no longer behind the curtain, and, like Dorothy and her friends, I was no longer impressed. The magic of storytelling was gone.

While this is the most dramatic example an author visible behind the curtain, I can cite other examples. Charles Finch in his The Last Passenger, inserted random explanations of this and that into his Victorian era mystery story, perhaps to recreate the timeframe, but which struck me as merely trying to impress the reader with his Wikipedia-sourced tidbits of Victorian life. In the fantasy book The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, it seemed that the author was using Ready Player One's formula of inserting all sorts of trivia from the culture of the time period into the story, I suppose to world-build, but struck me as just that; random trivia. Every time I encounter a handsome 6'3" square jawed hero I cringe. And all too often when sampling SF stories I see Star Trek or Firefly, or Star Wars lurking behind the story from which the author drew their inspirations from. In short, I am often struck by the things the authors do in writing their stories - especially in modern stories - that take me out of the story, or at least keeps me a arm's length of it.

And yet, seeing the author at work is not always bad. There are stories I read just to watch that little man behind the curtain do his or her stuff. Indeed many of my favorite authors and stories fall into this category. These are the books that I enjoy how they are written - how they pull the levers. I enjoy observing just how these authors put words together to tell their story as much or more than the story they are telling. These are writers I can read over and over again for their wordsmanship rather than the story, i.e. authors like my often mentioned favorites; P G Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Patrick O'Brian, and Jasper Fforde to name a few. When reading these stories, I can both admire the authors' skillful manipulation of these "levers" and still enjoy the stories they produce without any disconnect. Though even at this level, it is not always the case of me enjoying their magic. Gene Wolfe springs to mind. He is often held up to be one of the great American literary writers, whose style and depth of writing is admired, though less widely known because he wrote in genre fiction - SF & fantasy. In the one book of his I tried to read, I found his obvious manipulation of the levers of writing too self-pretentious, deliberately obscure, and too literary for my simple tastes.

So, to sum things up, it seems that I can't help but look on stories with the eyes of either a writer, or a critic. To some degree or another, I peek look behind the curtain. The question I have is the one I posed at the beginning of this piece; how do you read stories? Are you also aware of the author behind the curtain as you read the story? Or can you completely lose yourself in the story? Can the story be everything in the moment for you? Drop a line in the comments below to enlighten me. I am very curious about this.