Breaking the Reader Trance

When you write fiction, you're trying to induce a kind of hypnotic trance in your readers. A reader is sitting in her living room in a recliner in suburban Arkadelphia in the twenty-first century, but if your story works, she believes she's in a gravity chair in a space ship somewhere near Arcturus in the twenty-seventh century. You break the trance, and lose your reader, when anything in your words reminds her she's actually in Arkadelphia. If that's where she's going to be, she doesn't need your book.

What Breaks the Trance?

There are many ways to induce the reader trance, but even more ways to break it. Typos or grammatical errors may take your reader right back to Arkansas, especially if there's more than one per page. Or, if you force your reader to navigate long, boring descriptions or back-story, she may decide that even Arkadelphia is less boring.

Breaking point-of-view can also break the trance, especially with egregious breaks like, "Reader, you might think that Joachim is going to marry Sylvia, but watch out!" Or, you can accomplish the same sort of break by having a character do something sufficiently uncharacteristic. It may be shocking and interesting, but not without some justification.

Gross inaccuracies are sure trance-crackers. Yesterday, I was reading a mystery that put me in the California mountains in the 1940s, around Christmas. I was enjoying the well-constructed trance until the protagonist trudges through deep snow towards a mountain cabin and is startled by a brown bear emerging from the cabin's open door. I was startled, too—right out of my trance. I live in the mountains, and though I'm no bear expert, I do know that bears hibernate in the winter, even in California.

I Would Never Make Such an Ignorant Mistake

Completely out of the story's trance, I decided to return to my own story, the sequel to my novel, The Aremac Project. As it happened, I was editing a scene whose trance was also in the mountains (New Mexico, not California) around Christmas. I noticed that my character's car had just gone into a ditch trying to avoid a porcupine crossing the road. I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn't chosen a bear—but my relief was only momentary. Do porcupine's hibernate? I hadn't thought of that, and maybe I was about to make the same stupid blunder that had just broken my own reader trance.

I know about bears because I often see them in the spring, stumbling out of hibernation. There's no mistaking the behavior of a bear who's not eaten for five or six months and staggers into a town full of large cans redolent of decaying garbage

But all my porcupine encounters have been in the summer, like the time Rose emerged from a bush with a nose full of quills. I could have worked around my ignorance by changing the porcupine to, say, a wolf. I know from direct experience that wolves roam around in the snow in the winter. But I had my own reasons why it had to be a porcupine. (You'll have to buy the book when it's published to find out why).

Is the Internet Reliable?

So, I required a source authoritative porcupine information. Naturally, turned to the internet and googled "porcupine" and "hibernate." On the first page, there were seven references that seemed to speak directly to the issue. Unfortunately, some said porcupines do not hibernate, but others said they do. So much for the internet as an authoritative source!

I had to dig deeper and find someone who had direct experience with porcupines. Fortunately, our local forest rangers were glad to oblige. Porcupines spend a lot of time huddled in winterized nests, but they don't hibernate—not in the sense that bears do. Sometimes they emerge from their nests and go wandering around on porcupine business, even when there's snow on the ground.

Surely, Direct Experience is Reliable

So, my scene's trance was safe. Or was it? Later in the scene, Marna, my heroine, stuck in the ditch, has to relieve the pressure in her bladder. Shyly, she creeps into the cold, dark woods, out of sight of any possible passersby. When the three women in my critique group (The Plotbusters) read this incident, they laughed. One said, "If it's dark, and snowing, and freezing, I don't go creeping into the woods to pee. One step outside of the pickup is all it takes."

I was puzzled. "But the scene is based on an actual experience. It's what actually happened when Dani and I, plus Keats and Chantal, were stuck in the ditch at midnight."

"Oh," said the Plotbusters, "but that's not the same. Marna is alone. You had two guys with the two women. Of course the women went into the woods."
Of course.

So, even direct experience can trap you, and break your reader's trance.

How About Science Fiction or Fantasy?

But surely you can get away with inaccuracies if you're writing science fiction or fantasy, can't you? After all, you're inventing the reality. If you want to have bears that don't hibernate and porcupines that do, you can make your world work that way. Just be sure you tip off the reader before the critical scene. As a writer, you don't have to think of these new realities in advance, but once you decide to put them in a scene, you'd better return to some earlier scene and add something to foreshadow the change. Perhaps one character says to another, "Oh, they may look like Earth bears, but they're different in a lot of ways. They lay eggs, don't nurse their young, and don't hibernate in our winter."

Inconsistencies

One other thing. If your bears lay eggs in one scene, they'd better not give birth to live young in another—unless you've foreshadowed that these alien bears do both. Inconsistencies take your reader right out of your fantasy world and back to their armchair reading a not-very-good book. That's what happened to me the other day when I read a far-future novel in which the mother spaceship is built to last for millions of years, self-repairing and able to build new bodies for human beings as well as new parts for itself plus millions of high-tech devices of all kinds. It carries a single planet-landing craft, which breaks a landing strut when the solitary pilot takes it down to the surface of a dangerous alien planet. He has no means of repairing the broken strut, so is stranded on the planet. And why is it the mother ship cannot build another landing craft?

Bah! The author hasn't done his job. Let's read something else.

Arbitrariness

It's fun to invent alien bears that lay eggs and don't hibernate. It's easy, too. In another recently trance-breaking novel, the alien creature had six heads, but its two mouths are in its buttocks, attached directly to its stomachs. Gee, I thought, I can do that. Let's see. My alien creature has seven heads, three mouths, one in its buttocks and two on its wings. Oh, did I mention that it had wings?

Yes, an author can make up all sorts of configurations, that sound "creative," but without a word or two of why this arrangement versus other arrangements, the whole story seems to me to have been generated by a computer using random numbers to select nouns and adjectives. Since no reason was given for six heads or mouths in the buttocks, I closed the book and went back to writing my own, determined to be a better hypnotist.

How about you, dear Reader? Do you have any trance-breakers to share?