If you haven't subscribed to Randy Ingermanson's free Advanced Fiction Writing Ezine, you're missing out (the link to subscribe is at the bottom). When I read Ingermanson's article on presuppositions, it was so well-explained that I knew there might be others looking for a way to explain details without "telling". Read on for a great article.
Creating Presuppositions by Randy Ingermanson
One of the biggest problems I see in fiction manuscripts is a big glop of backstory in the first two or three chapters of the novel.
Every novelist who has ever committed this sin justifies himself by claiming that the backstory is necessary because otherwise the reader won't know what's going on.
This isn't true. Readers don't read your novel for your marvelous backstory. They read it to get immersed in your main story. Once you get them hooked on the story, they'll begin to get interested in the backstory and you can start feeding it to them in small doses.
You may be thinking, "That's great advice for everybody else, but I'm different. My story is different. My readers HAVE to know my backstory."
The answer is yes, but.
Yes, you're different. Yes, your story is different.
But your reader really doesn't care that 35 years ago your main character Luke got beat up every day in kindergarten.
Your reader cares that RIGHT NOW Luke is peering through the sights of a sniper rifle. Which happens to be trained on the head of the state governor. Who happens to be 40 years old. Who happens to be a bully. Who happens to have gone to kindergarten with Luke.
NOW your reader cares just a wee bit about what happened way back when. But your reader still cares a whole lot more about Luke's trigger finger than about his horrible childhood.
It's true that your reader is going to need to know a little about your backstory. How do you provide that without losing momentum in your frontstory?
One way to do that is by inserting "presuppositions" into your sentences.
And just what exactly is a "presupposition?"
Loosely speaking, a presupposition is a statement that is implied by a sentence. If the cop asks, "Have you quit beating your wife?" there's a presupposition that in the past you beat your wife.
A classic example of how presuppositions work in language is the following sentence, which Bertrand Russell analyzed many years ago:
"The present King of France is bald."
Is the above sentence true or false?
Since France is a republic, there is no present King of France, so the sentence can hardly be true.
But is it false? If it were false, would it be true that the present King of France has a full head of hair?
Obviously not. Russell pointed out that this sentence carries along with it some unspoken presuppositions:
* France has at least one king
* France has no more than one king
When you say that the King of France is bald, you are also implicitly asserting these presuppositions, and the combination of the three statements is false because they aren't all true.
Some people would say that it's simply meaningless to say "The present King of France is bald."
But if you were watching a movie set in 1753 France, and if one of the actors said, "The King of France is bald," everybody would know exactly what he meant.
Context matters. Presuppositions imply context. And another word for "context" is "backstory."
Now here's the point for fiction writers. Many of the sentences you write in your novel carry along with them certain presuppositions. When your reader reads your work, she unconsciously analyzes those presuppositions and makes conclusions about your Storyworld and the backstories of your characters.
When Han Solo brags about his ship in the original STAR WARS movie, for example, he says, "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."
Here are some presuppositions which are implicit in this line:
* The Millennium Falcon is famous
* The Kessel Run is long or treacherous or both
* A parsec is a unit of time
* Twelve parsecs is an excellent time for the Kessel Run
Notice that these presuppositions may be false (parsecs are units of distance) but they still tell us something about Han Solo and the world he lives in. Solo is not only egotistical, but he's also sloppy in his use of language.
Writers constantly try to explain too much. This is true for the greenest novices and the most advanced experts, and it provides unending employment for editors, who earn their keep by scrawling "Resist the Urge to Explain" in the margins.
How do you fix things when you're explaining too much?
The first step is to cut out the backstory. (Don't throw it away. Save it to another document so you'll have a record of it. Then delete it from your main story. Yes, all of it.)
The second step is to look for those places in your story that are now confusing to your reader because she lacks some essential context -- some piece of backstory. Insert ONLY the fragment of backstory that your reader needs in order to make sense of the story.
One way to do that is to imply a chunk of backstory by rewriting a frontstory sentence so that it now contains a few well-chosen presuppositions.
Your reader is smart. When she reads a sentence that carries presuppositions, she immediately assumes these presuppositions are true and are part of your backstory. If she knows or learns that these presuppositions aren't actually true, then she concludes that your character is unreliable.
We've already seen how George Lucas used a few presuppositions to characterize Han Solo. Let's look at a couple of examples of how other writers have done it.
Here's the beginning paragraph of a scene in ENDER'S GAME by Orson Scott Card, in which we meet Ender Wiggin:
The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, "Andrew, I suppose by now you're just absolutely sick of that horrid monitor. Well I have good news for you. That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit."
This only makes sense if the following presuppositions are true:
* Ender is a fairly young boy
* He's had a monitor installed for quite a long time
* The monitor is unpleasant to wear
* Ender has had some painful medical procedures before
* Monitors are managed by a bureaucracy
We can also deduce from all of these that the story is set in the future.
Card could have told us all those things and a whole lot more about the history of monitors and why they're necessary and thereby slowed down the story. Instead, he let us figure out only what we need to know right now. With presuppositions.
Here's an example from the opening two paragraphs of THE KEY TO REBECCA, by Ken Follett:
The last camel collapsed at noon.
It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.
The first paragraph carries with it this presupposition:
* More than one camel has died already
The second paragraph has these presuppositions:
* The owner of the camel is a lone man
* He is no longer in Gialo
* He is familiar with camels
We can also deduce that the owner of the camel is making a long and dangerous journey across the desert. This isn't a presupposition, but it follows pretty readily from the presuppositions and from the first sentence.
Presuppositions are useful because they let you say more with fewer words. That is a worthy goal for any novelist.
If you'd like to see some more examples of how presuppositions work, check out the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
One of the biggest problems I see in fiction manuscripts is a big glop of backstory in the first two or three chapters of the novel.
Every novelist who has ever committed this sin justifies himself by claiming that the backstory is necessary because otherwise the reader won't know what's going on.
This isn't true. Readers don't read your novel for your marvelous backstory. They read it to get immersed in your main story. Once you get them hooked on the story, they'll begin to get interested in the backstory and you can start feeding it to them in small doses.
You may be thinking, "That's great advice for everybody else, but I'm different. My story is different. My readers HAVE to know my backstory."
The answer is yes, but.
Yes, you're different. Yes, your story is different.
But your reader really doesn't care that 35 years ago your main character Luke got beat up every day in kindergarten.
Your reader cares that RIGHT NOW Luke is peering through the sights of a sniper rifle. Which happens to be trained on the head of the state governor. Who happens to be 40 years old. Who happens to be a bully. Who happens to have gone to kindergarten with Luke.
NOW your reader cares just a wee bit about what happened way back when. But your reader still cares a whole lot more about Luke's trigger finger than about his horrible childhood.
It's true that your reader is going to need to know a little about your backstory. How do you provide that without losing momentum in your frontstory?
One way to do that is by inserting "presuppositions" into your sentences.
And just what exactly is a "presupposition?"
Loosely speaking, a presupposition is a statement that is implied by a sentence. If the cop asks, "Have you quit beating your wife?" there's a presupposition that in the past you beat your wife.
A classic example of how presuppositions work in language is the following sentence, which Bertrand Russell analyzed many years ago:
"The present King of France is bald."
Is the above sentence true or false?
Since France is a republic, there is no present King of France, so the sentence can hardly be true.
But is it false? If it were false, would it be true that the present King of France has a full head of hair?
Obviously not. Russell pointed out that this sentence carries along with it some unspoken presuppositions:
* France has at least one king
* France has no more than one king
When you say that the King of France is bald, you are also implicitly asserting these presuppositions, and the combination of the three statements is false because they aren't all true.
Some people would say that it's simply meaningless to say "The present King of France is bald."
But if you were watching a movie set in 1753 France, and if one of the actors said, "The King of France is bald," everybody would know exactly what he meant.
Context matters. Presuppositions imply context. And another word for "context" is "backstory."
Now here's the point for fiction writers. Many of the sentences you write in your novel carry along with them certain presuppositions. When your reader reads your work, she unconsciously analyzes those presuppositions and makes conclusions about your Storyworld and the backstories of your characters.
When Han Solo brags about his ship in the original STAR WARS movie, for example, he says, "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."
Here are some presuppositions which are implicit in this line:
* The Millennium Falcon is famous
* The Kessel Run is long or treacherous or both
* A parsec is a unit of time
* Twelve parsecs is an excellent time for the Kessel Run
Notice that these presuppositions may be false (parsecs are units of distance) but they still tell us something about Han Solo and the world he lives in. Solo is not only egotistical, but he's also sloppy in his use of language.
Writers constantly try to explain too much. This is true for the greenest novices and the most advanced experts, and it provides unending employment for editors, who earn their keep by scrawling "Resist the Urge to Explain" in the margins.
How do you fix things when you're explaining too much?
The first step is to cut out the backstory. (Don't throw it away. Save it to another document so you'll have a record of it. Then delete it from your main story. Yes, all of it.)
The second step is to look for those places in your story that are now confusing to your reader because she lacks some essential context -- some piece of backstory. Insert ONLY the fragment of backstory that your reader needs in order to make sense of the story.
One way to do that is to imply a chunk of backstory by rewriting a frontstory sentence so that it now contains a few well-chosen presuppositions.
Your reader is smart. When she reads a sentence that carries presuppositions, she immediately assumes these presuppositions are true and are part of your backstory. If she knows or learns that these presuppositions aren't actually true, then she concludes that your character is unreliable.
We've already seen how George Lucas used a few presuppositions to characterize Han Solo. Let's look at a couple of examples of how other writers have done it.
Here's the beginning paragraph of a scene in ENDER'S GAME by Orson Scott Card, in which we meet Ender Wiggin:
The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, "Andrew, I suppose by now you're just absolutely sick of that horrid monitor. Well I have good news for you. That monitor is going to come out today. We're going to take it right out, and it won't hurt a bit."
This only makes sense if the following presuppositions are true:
* Ender is a fairly young boy
* He's had a monitor installed for quite a long time
* The monitor is unpleasant to wear
* Ender has had some painful medical procedures before
* Monitors are managed by a bureaucracy
We can also deduce from all of these that the story is set in the future.
Card could have told us all those things and a whole lot more about the history of monitors and why they're necessary and thereby slowed down the story. Instead, he let us figure out only what we need to know right now. With presuppositions.
Here's an example from the opening two paragraphs of THE KEY TO REBECCA, by Ken Follett:
The last camel collapsed at noon.
It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.
The first paragraph carries with it this presupposition:
* More than one camel has died already
The second paragraph has these presuppositions:
* The owner of the camel is a lone man
* He is no longer in Gialo
* He is familiar with camels
We can also deduce that the owner of the camel is making a long and dangerous journey across the desert. This isn't a presupposition, but it follows pretty readily from the presuppositions and from the first sentence.
Presuppositions are useful because they let you say more with fewer words. That is a worthy goal for any novelist.
If you'd like to see some more examples of how presuppositions work, check out the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 24,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit
http://www.
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http://www.
Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.
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For more on Randy Ingermanson, check out my review of his Writing Fiction for Dummies, one of my favorite writing books.
Oooh! That was brilliantly helpful. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI know, I hadn't really thought about how helpful presuppositions could be. I'll definitely look for spots to use them.
ReplyDelete~Debbie