Why we love Worldbuilding, Show don't Tell, and Romance

There’s a secret ingredient to all the best books that we rarely talk about: reader engagement. A skilled writer doesn’t just reveal characters and plot and setting; they do so in a way that turns the reader from a passive “receiver” to an active “thinker.”

I suspect some writing advice would resist this idea of asking the reader to think, instead encouraging you to make them experience or feel, like floating down a lazy river on an inner tube. But feeling is often a passive role to take, and I truly believe a huge amount of narrative drive comes from outside the story—from the reader themselves—when they are asked to follow along in a way that requires something from them.

What fascinates me are the many ways we can move readers from passive to active. And just as importantly, the realization that these tricks have changed over time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that each era of literature was largely defined by which “active engagement strategy” it used.

Go back fifty or a hundred years and you’ll encounter lots of books with big words and convoluted sentence structures. We tend to avoid those things now, but I would argue that they served a very important purpose. They forced the reader to think. They encouraged active participation by asking readers to parse complex sentences and learn new words. Sometimes they could even function as a mental puzzle, giving readers something extra to chew on as they consumed the story, a sort of side-gig for the mind.

Our methods may have changed, but the goal of active reader engagement has not changed. We just have new tricks for accomplishing it.

Let me prove it to you.

Speculative fiction such as sci-fi and fantasy is more popular now than ever. And the thing that prevents outsiders from enjoying the genre is often what the fans are there for. We want detailed secondary worlds that contain new cultures, new governments, new forms of dress and etiquette, new magic systems, new technologies. A good fantasy novel drip-feeds the reader information as they go along, adding “crunchiness” to the narrative beyond just the normal character-versus-conflict.

Crucially, this friction may not be experienced by the characters themselves. Yes, if they’re in an alien country they’ll have to spend some time learning its ways. Many fantasy novels feature a process in which the hero learns how to wield a sword or magic. But all of this serves to give the reader new information to absorb. Fantasy, as a modern genre, says more about reader experience than it does about hero experience. We readers want to find our way through an unfamiliar world.

Why? Because doing so evokes curiosity, which means we’re asking questions. And when we’re doing that, the story doesn’t have to work as hard to pull us forward. Asking questions means seeking answers, which can only be found by continuing to read.

The adage of “Show, don’t Tell” is nauseatingly familiar to writers, but it ultimately serves this same purpose. It asks authors to give clues as to the mental and emotional state of their characters rather than stating those things outright. For readers, encountering a “Shown” passage is the pen-and-paper equivalent of reading body language. Done well, it invites interpretation and empathy.

Unfortunately, good Showing is hard to find. Most books settle for the simplest form possible, using action cues to repeat what’s already been made obvious. For example:

“I don’t care what he says,” she shouted angrily, pounding her fist on the table. “I just want him gone!”

This is lazy. To be honest, it’s lazy and bad. Why? Because the writer of this line has failed to understand that Showing has one very specific strength: it asks the reader to do more work. Work that, counterintuitively, they want to do.

But for that to happen, the action needs to be ambiguous. It needs to have multiple possible interpretations. It has to create a desire for fuller understanding.

A slightly better example would be this:

“I don’t care what he says,” she replied, placing her hand gingerly on the table. She paused, then nodded to herself. “I just want him gone.”

Is she completely fed up with him? Is she a little bit sad to see him leave? Maybe both? Given more context, this would probably become clear. But that’s the point: it takes just a bit more thinking to parse this scene out. And for that reason, it’s also more enticing.

Romance has been the best-selling genre for as long as we’ve been tracking such things. Mystery is usually a top-three contender. What do these two genres have in common?

Reader engagement. Romance invites the reader to feel, to discern the quality of someone’s character, to make judgments and constantly revise them. Mystery invites the reader to think, to track clues, to draw up theories and constantly revise them. These genres trade on longing and wondering, which are both covetous emotions. They are forms of wanting, which—like curiosity—require us to keep reading.

Readers feel cheated when the detective didn’t give them enough clues to figure it out on their own. Why would that be, unless active engagement was one criteria for a good mystery?

Countless romance novels feature plain-Jane protagonists who are familiar enough that readers feel they could almost see themselves in the story. This is a form of imaginary play-acting, as if they’re trying the story on for themselves, a dress they might want to wear. The inherent question is “Would I or wouldn’t I?”

Far from passive, the experience of reading these books is often one of immersion and invitation.

I postulated earlier that the major movements in literature could be described by their forms of reader engagement. Just like our use of worldbuilding, showing, and romance today, previous eras have found ways to get the reader thinking. A few examples come to mind:

The Once and Future King (1940). This features a deep philosophical question: how can power be used for good? King Arthur is constantly asking this question and attempting to answer it in different ways, from a round table to a divine quest for a holy object. This feels distinct from most modern fantasy which rarely concerns itself with real-world ethical questions in such an overt way.

The dialogues of Socrates (400 B.C.) are written as dialogues so that readers are invited to see themselves within the conversation, as if they are sitting at the master’s feet and learning from him, or even disagreeing with him.

Morality plays (popular in the 1400s-1600s). While these were often used to “dumb down” the audience and tell them what to think, there was still a symbolic layer that required decoding. And viewers would have been left with the chance to ponder what they saw and decide whether deep down they agreed with it or not.

Writing gurus might urge you to go easy on the reader, to provide them with nothing but pure entertainment candy. I think this is dead wrong. Readers want to think. They want to be invited into an active role, using their faculties to pick sides when someone is forced to choose, to weigh moral questions, to judge characters, to ask questions, to digest a new world.

Although reading appears, from the outside, to be a passive activity, the best books are able to break through this illusion and invite readers into something more like a conversation or a dance. Our methods for doing this have changed over time, but the goal remains the same: don’t just bring someone along for the ride. Let them, once in a while, take hold of the reins.