Every so often you come across an article or piece of writing which just sums up very neatly a lot of fuzzy musings and ideas, and you think to yourself – “Exactly right!! why did I never pull my woolly thoughts together like this?!” A fellow writer sent me a link to another blog post, entitled ‘Artifice‘; the blog is for writers and the particular is about “the illusion of reality”. Every writer tries to do this, even if writing about something completely unreal, like unicorns, or wizards, or mermaids, writing but not to deceive the reader – well yes, actually it is to deceive the reader! It’s to bring us into a fabrication, to engage with it and believe in it while we are there. We have to care about the not real people and their not real dilemmas and problems and their not real relationships and feelings. If we’re not drawn in and aren’t carried away in the ‘reality’ of what we’re reading, we don’t engage, became bored, and leave whatever the story is – dis-illusioned.
In the post ‘Artifice‘, from the blog ‘The Novelry’ by Louise Dean, an award winning author, Louise uses a magic trick by Derren Brown which is an illusion tricking the audience into believing they have seen something, which in fact they haven’t. An item is hidden but the eye of the audience is drawn to something else which is quite innocent – which is what writers try and do; we try to conceal an important piece of information among other things – the information is there, but we hope the reader will not notice it. We hope they will focus on something else completely, probably a fish of the clupeidae family of a rosy hue, i.e. a red herring! It’s a tricky balance – we want the clues to be there, we don’t want to deceive, we want everything to make sense, but we want to keep the reader guessing.
Here is a link to Louise’s blog, the particular post is ‘Artifice’:
Here’s a link to my novels, if you haven’t read them I hope they will keep you guessing:
Lois Elsden 