Sunday night I watched Scott Pelley interview director Christopher Nolan on 60 Minutes about The Odyssey that opens on July 17. At one point Pelley considers the grandiose epic movies and complex storylines Nolan’s known for, and the sheer number of people involved to bring them into reality. The following exchange really stood out to me.
Scott Pelley: I have the sense that you don’t think of yourself as the most important person on the set.
Christopher Nolan: I think of myself as the representative of the audience on set. That’s– my north star. That’s how I have to be looking at the film. So, in a sense, I am the most important person on the set, because I’m the audience.
The man has earned eighteen Academy Awards between his thirteen films. He shot two million feet of IMAX footage for The Odyssey alone. And still, he considers his audience first.
I keep coming back to that, because it shows up time and again for me in manuscripts I edit. Writers need to keep this in mind as well.
Camera versus Character
I run into a similar pattern regularly in manuscripts I edit, and in my own early drafts. The writer knows their characters inside and out. They have a solid feel for their backstory, their personality, and often their whole internal life. But on the page, the reader only gets what a camera would see. Someone walks into a room and says something. Someone else responds. There’s a reaction, but too often the reader is told what it is, instead of experiencing it from the character’s point of view (POV).
Some time back I read a manuscript for a client with a journalism background. He was excellent at plotting and at building colorful characters you cared about. He’d seen a lot of life, and it showed in his storytelling. Unfortunately, some of the most important conversations in the book read like a transcript — people were talking with no interiority in between. I could guess how the POV character felt about what was being said, and what they inferred from the information — as a reader, I can fill in the gap myself. The reader wants to do that, to a certain degree. But it’s the writer’s job to curate the reader’s experience.
Nolan gets the audience into his films with tools built for visually representing an audience’s experience. A novelist has something a film doesn’t: direct access to the inside of a character’s head. You’re not just placing the reader in the room. You need to tuck them inside the character’s heart and mind.
That’s the whole advantage to a well-crafted story.
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Setting is more than decoration
The same gap shows up in setting. A scene can describe a clearing in the woods with a fire burned down to glowing embers… and then stop there. Or, that same scene can filter that setting through the POV character (whose head the reader is in) with the smell of stale ash. The way the cold presses in against their neck once the fire’s gone. Whether that quiet feels like relief or like they’re being watched from the trees.
It’s the same clearing, but you can see how different character experiences are conveyed depending on who’s noticing a sense of fear, and how.
Setting described from outside a character is scenery. Setting described from inside a character is atmosphere, and atmosphere is where a reader starts to step inside a story instead of just following along.
Representing the reader
I’ve mentioned knowing your ideal reader before — who she is, what she wants, and what’ll make her put the book down. There’s another dimension to this, which is keeping your reader’s experience in mind while you make story decisions as you write.
Instead of asking “would my ideal reader enjoy this book?” as a gut check, be more proactive. In any particular scene, ask whether you’re giving the reader what she needs in order to feel the way you want her to feel in that moment. Or, are you writing what you already know (or see), and trusting her to fill in the rest?
Connecting the dots is fun for a reader — it’s part of the joy of reading an engaging story. She shouldn’t have to fill in everything, though. That’s the writer’s job.
Where in your current draft is the reader guessing at something only you actually know?
Photo by Matt Whitacre on Unsplash.
Hi, I’m Rebecca Davis, developmental editor and book coach, mystery lover, and former research administrator. I traded grant proposals for plot twists and now I get to help writers find their way through the maze of story and structure. I live on the South Carolina coast, and believe every story needs both a map and a little mystery. Explore Coaching Services →