Klok Blogs: I love smart readers!

I had a discussion on Discord a few weeks ago. The topic involved a bunch of plot points in The Last Precursor, and how a few readers were trying to guess events that might happen in the future.

That discussion inspired today's post. I have written before about Reader Levels, which I included in the Ancient Era Breakdown post. Today's post will be on a similar note, but not quite the same thing.

So, to start, I'll repeat what I wrote previously about Reader Levels.

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Level 0: This reader is a dullard. He/she might not be particularly smart, and this might even be their first experience with a book. They are either easily amazed, or never care. These are the people who watch anime just to look at cutely rendered girls, and pay barely any attention to the plot. These are the readers who just want to see sexy succubus-on-angel action and they like reading about things going boom.

Level 1: These people have definitely read a book or two, or maybe watched a few series of the genre they are currently interested in. They may have some small capability to remember character names, and you might even be able to inspire a spark of mental aptitude in them with a particularly dramatic plot twist. (Hint: They were MINDBLOWN by 'Luke, I am your father.")

Level 2: These people are fairly smart. They've read several books. They remember most major character names, can clearly follow plot threads, and will probably have some fun trying to predict where the story is going. These are the people who will ask questions about worldbuilding, usually, and will use their perception of character motivations to guess at where the plot will go. Their predictions are correct sometimes, wrong on others. These readers will get a special thrill out of finding out their predictions were correct.

Level 3: This reader is a genre buff. They have read so many time travel and etc stories that they can predict major plot points or figure out how the world works by noticing even the smallest hints dropped. These are the people who are so well-versed in genre-specific tropes that they can predict things that will happen long before they happen, often with uncanny accuracy.

However, this is not the final level for a reader base.

Level 4: This level can sprout from level 2 or 3, and is tailored to specific authors and writers. This person may or may not be genre-savvy, but they are author-savvy. This is the person who has read so much Asimov that they can figure out what's going to happen in an Asimov novel before it actually happens. This is someone who pays so much attention to little details in a Cryoverse story that they can spot the Red Herrings and Chekhov's Guns and tell them apart. Nothing surprises this reader, but above all others, they get the most thrill from "being right" about their predictions. These people are also the most mindblown if their predictions are not correct, but only if the manner in which they are proven wrong makes sense and isn't... bullshitty.

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The reason I linked the reader levels above is because I want to make a point. But first, a small tangent.

The last few years of mainstream entertainment have not been very good for people like me, people who enjoy consistently written, well-thought-out storytelling with interesting and realistic characters. In particular, I want to bring up Star Wars.

Star Wars The Last Jedi was a travesty. A lot of people didn't like it, and at the time, I already disliked The Force Awakens because it, too, was a pretty bad movie with a lot of dumb stuff happening. The problems with the entire Disney Trilogy of SW movies, no matter which one, are well-documented already and not worth repeating.

What is worth mentioning, though, was the way the two chosen directors, JJ Abrams, and Rian Johnson, approached their storytelling with respect to the SW fanbase. Rian Johnson made it a point that he was going to 'subvert expectations' and he followed through by cleverly subverting my expectations that he would direct a good movie. 

Specifically, he would write a scene in such a way that the characters would do something totally off the wall; something that, if you thought about it for more than six seconds, didn't make a lick of goddamn sense when placed against the events of Force Awakens, let alone the preceding six movies.

The first scene that annoyed me was when Luke Skywalker threw the lightsaber away behind him. A clever director would have made this an important moment, something with weight. Luke would have done it dramatically, as if the weapon disgusted him. Instead, Rian's vision had this scene play out like a comedic moment, making viewers scratch their heads in confusion.

Even so, a moment like this could be redeemed and even made legendary with clever character development, which we didn't get. Instead, what followed was the whole rest of the movie, with Snoke getting killed without much fanfare or impact, Luke dying because he was tired, and other dumb stuff.

After the movie came out, Rian Johnson posted this infamous image on Twitter.

The condescension was real, and it was thicker than blood. Rian proceeded to trash the entire community, insulting anyone who thought he had made a bad movie with all sorts of quips. 

But this isn't really about Rian, specifically. After all, JJ did plenty of other 'subversive' (idiotic) things in Rise of Skywalker. JJ is well-known from his work on LOST, Star Trek, and other series for just having dumb bullshit occur on screen to make the plot move along. He is, in general, a terrible and overrated director.

What both of these two failed to understand is that consistent writing is not a bad thing. Consistent writing separates the wheat from the chaff. If absolutely nobody can predict where your story will go, not even the broad beats, then you are not a level 100 top-tier genius; you are a bad writer with inconsistent characters, flimsy motivations, and a complete lack of foresight.

For those of you not in the know; back during the days of LOST, JJ Abrams admitted that he and Damon Lindelof would browse fan theory forums, read people's theories, and then change their scripts so that the fan theories would never happen. They did this, I imagine, because they assumed that if a few giga-brained geniuses could guess where their story was headed, then absolutely NOBODY would be surprised, and thus, the story would lose its shock value.

This is the real problem plaguing certain writers. I won't say that it's all writers, or even 'many' writers, but it does plague certain big name writers badly, and that saddens me.

Take for example the final season of Game of Thrones. Truthfully, the show heads, Benioff and Weiss, ran out of GRR Martin's book material in season 6. Therefore, they had to write the rest of the series themselves, and so, I almost can't blame them for how badly seasons 7 and 8 went... but I still will.

To be clear, B&W were fantastic show producers; they adapted GRR Martin's work perfectly  and really brought his books to life. There were a few stinker episodes that bored me, but for the most part, they were excellent when it came to adaptation. It is only when they had to write the material themselves that their shortfalls became obvious.

Much like JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, B&W read lots of fan theories and started trying to surprise people with 'twists.' After all, GRR Martin added tons of great twists into the show, and so, that meant B&W had to do so, too, right?

But that's the thing. There is a big difference between 'a show with twists' and a fictitious work that surprises the reader by making characters act in surprising ways while remaining consistent with their characterization, motives, and previously established actions.

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I love smart readers. I love when I set up a reveal early on in a story and someone notices it, comments about it, and then waits eagerly to see if they were right. It is great fun for me, as an author who strives to execute to the best of my ability on stories, that readers care enough to see the breadcrumbs I've placed down, and then they follow them to what might be a logical conclusion.

The problem as I see it is that many big-name authors have yet to figure this truth out. For every giga-brain badass who figures out your story's secrets, there will always be 5 or ten or perhaps even many more who don't guess the secret!

Some new and aspiring authors might then follow up with a logical question:

"Klok, how can I avoid that pitfall?"

The answer is, write narratives with multiple logical possibilities for key reveals!

Instead of having your whole story hinge on one character's death, where if people manage to guess the killer's identity ahead of time it will ruin the impact of the moment, you should instead write in such a way that there are multiple possible killers, all of them with logical motives to murder the victim. It is only when we reach that key reveal that we get the final puzzle piece, the one that makes the audience yell, "Ohh, I should have seen that coming! Amazing!"

This is the key component that JJ Abrams and his ilk always overlook. They are so fixated on writing surprising reveals that they will often whiplash their story when even a few people guess their reveals ahead of time.

When I said earlier that I enjoyed when people guessed my plot points ahead of time, what I actually meant was "I like it when readers guess some of my plot points ahead of time," because that is the second component of any good writer's toolset: You should not have only one big reveal in your story! You should have multiple, and the more of them you plan out and execute ahead of time, the more likely you will surprise your readers at least once, leaving a memorable impact on their soft and squishy brains!

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I have been deliberately vague up to this point, opting not to reveal anything in my own writing, lest I spoil readers for one story or another. I have lots of readers who only read Cryopod to Hell, and others who only read The Last Precursor. As such, any such reveal I point out in my stories will spoil readers one way or another.

Instead, I'll take a little bit of time to mention that, in the vein of this post, I have just completed a 3,000 word outline for The Last Precursor, the first of its kind! I have fully outlined the entire story from Part 49 to the final part, hopefully completing all of TLP's events in under 100 parts!

This monumental event ended up taking a huge weight off my shoulders. I've had vague and tangible ideas of how I wanted the story to go for a long time, but now that I've outlined the major story beats, I can confidently say that there will be around seven or eight huge reveals, a dozen or so fun twists, and lots of character-related moments of intrigue!

None of that would have been possible if I had a mentality of 'needing to surprise every single reader at all costs.'

That mentality is toxic. I wish it would die off, along with the careers of those who perpetuate it. Poorly written stories are nothing more than massive money and timewasters, their only positive note being to remind us what can go wrong when amateurs are given big budgets.

But hey, that's just a theory. A Klok theory!

Thanks for reading.