Saturday 11 October 2014

Ever Wondered How to Create Wonder?

As a writer, I’ve talked before about how casual familiarity, is the key to accessible fantasy. But sometimes we don’t want to just ease people in. We want to bowl them over with the most fantastic of images. We want them to go away spellbound by what they’ve read. You want to evoke a mood, and one of the best – is wonder. It’s that perfect moment when you give the reader something that absolutely latches them to the page. It’s the moment when, without outright saying it, you’re grabbing the reader by their neck and screaming: “Look at this! This is wondrous and spellbinding!”

But how is this done? How do you make this particular scene so interesting or this locale so mystifying? These are, in my humble opinion, the best tips.

-       Build it up. Whether it’s a place, a person, or an event. If you want the reader to sit up and be attentive, then you need to whet their appetite. The story needs to place some great importance upon the thing you’re attempting to ‘wonderise’ (shut up, I added it to my Microsoft Word dictionary so it’s definitely a real word). You need other characters to comment on just how vital and special this person / place / event is. But don’t go overboard. There needs to be a little something every now and then. Like most things, if there’s too much, then it draws attention to itself.
-      Make it mysterious and don’t answer all the questions. A great way to make sure an idea sticks in a reader’s mind, is to make it mysterious. Reveal as little as possible, until the vital moment. If there’s a bunch of mysteries about the person / place / event, then the reader will almost always be burning with questions. They go in, expecting answers. Now he’s the kicker. Leave things unanswered. If there’s some crucial plot elements involved, then get those seen to. But remember that if you leave a couple of things open-ended or unanswered, then the sense of mystery is sustained, even after we’ve moved on from the thing itself.
-     Tease the reader. This is closely related to the two above points, but should also be awarded its own space. Building up your person / place / event and laying it with mystery, is all well and good. But to better excite and intrigue your readers, give them a little taste of what’s to come. After building up the thing, give us a tiny glimpse of it. After loading us with a dozen questions, answer one of them.
-      Make it alien. This doesn’t mean that it has to be extra-terrestrial or in any way delve into science-fiction. I mean alien in the purest sense of the word. Your person / place / event, needs to be unlike anything else in your character’s world. It needs to defy everything your book has taught you. It has to baffle your narrator. It needs to be unexpected and bizarre.

For quick case study, invoking all of the above points, look no further than the aptly named Department of Mysteries, from Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix. It’s no secret that I love this book, and the Department of Mysteries is one of the main reasons. The place is built up from early on in the novel, when Harry finds himself continuously dreaming about the place, in the form of a mysterious, sealed door. Harry and by extension the reader, desperately wants to know what lies behind it. This gets two points in one, hammering in the mysterious aspect as well. The tease comes when, later in the book, Harry’s dream finally takes him a step further and he sees beyond the door, into what lies beyond. But then what he sees throws up yet more questions. Other teases / build ups, include characters mentioning in passing how well protected the Department of Mysteries is, as well as the penalties for trying to breach it. Then we come to the master-stroke, the reveal. When the characters finally enter the Department of Mysteries, not in a dream, but in real life, the place is fantastically bizarre. Without giving too much away, it’s the magical equivalent of Area 51, where wizards perform very practical magical research into such subjects as death, space, and time. The characters see a great number of strange sights and almost all of it is left unexplained. More than once, the scenes within the Department of Mysteries had me coming back to reread them again and again.

In closing, dear readers (I’m allowed to say that because blog stats tell me more than one person has peeked at my ramblings!), the list above illustrates the ways in which I find it’s best to create a sense of wonder. By no means is it definitive, and in all good faith I welcome you to challenge it. I like to think that linking my points to such works as Harry Potter lends some strength. But as Shakespeare once said:

‘The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.’

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