The Ambiguity Problem

Someone posted an interesting question on social media yesterday. They said they are an ARC reader, so they frequently receive advance copies of novels to provide reviews, and have noticed something, specifically from debuts: a lot is being over-explained. There is little room for mystery and nuance in the debuts she's reading. Her question, which she posed to authors, readers, and the like, is--why? Is this a skill issue, or is this a symptom of a larger problem. Have we, as readers, become too uncomfortable with ambiguity?

Many of the responses to the question, especially from writers, spoke of feeling pressured from editors, imprints, beta readers, etc to spell everything out. Some readers and authors said it was probably a skill issue, and some others said it was a combination of the two.

I fall in the third camp, I think. As a new writer, I'm still learning, and one of the things I've learned about myself is that I'm too coy and withholding in my writing. My skill issue, which I'm constantly working on in revisions, is that I don't spell things out enough, I ask too much of the reader. And if that's the case for me, then naturally I assume the opposite is true--that there are new authors who write with too much handholding, and their craft needs honing there.

However, I do think there are questions and demands readers are making that I'm not sure they would make twenty years ago. Here's an example: I wrote a short story a few weeks ago wherein a music-obsessed guy living in West Texas is saved from death by a mysterious noise. He can't place the noise, only to say that it sounds like a horn. The noise is meant to be mysterious. I do not even know what the noise is. But a note from two out of five of the readers was essentially: well, what was the noise?

I do like to respond to almost every note, even if I don't agree with it, because usually there's something I can do to address it without addressing it. So for this specific story I added a little bit more pointed ambiguity about the noise. He asks other people about it, they don't know, etc. This is to let the reader know it's meant to be a mystery. I'm holding their hand in a different way. But I did find it interesting that this was a note at all. When I think back to all the books I've read, the ones that really stuck with me, there's a good bit of negative space there, unanswered questions, mystery, ambiguity. And I wonder if we're losing some of that as readers. Maybe not all at once, but incrementally.

As writers, we may have to find creative ways to hold a reader's hand.