Red Herring
Dec. 12th, 2004 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Red Herring
A red herring is something in a story that draws attention to itself but then turns out to have nothing to do with the story. When writers make a particular point of describing a deformed turtle, a locked closet, or a lurking girl, readers expect they are necessary to understand the piece. If they seem forgotten by the time the story is over, they are red herrings.
Red herrings often occur when writers have changed their minds about a story, or are fossils of ideas once part of earlier versions. To avoid this, revise carefully. As a story evolves, images that are no longer relevant tot the end need to be trapped and extracted from the beginning.
Other varieties of red herrings include character red herrings, who seem important and then vanish from the story; plot red herrings, which start and get forgotten; and cheap-trick red herrings, wherein the writer deliberately misleads the reader into worrying merely to set up a bit of suspense.
See "Don't Do This", Plot, Revision.
Red Herring
A red herring is something in a story that draws attention to itself but then turns out to have nothing to do with the story. When writers make a particular point of describing a deformed turtle, a locked closet, or a lurking girl, readers expect they are necessary to understand the piece. If they seem forgotten by the time the story is over, they are red herrings.
Red herrings often occur when writers have changed their minds about a story, or are fossils of ideas once part of earlier versions. To avoid this, revise carefully. As a story evolves, images that are no longer relevant tot the end need to be trapped and extracted from the beginning.
Other varieties of red herrings include character red herrings, who seem important and then vanish from the story; plot red herrings, which start and get forgotten; and cheap-trick red herrings, wherein the writer deliberately misleads the reader into worrying merely to set up a bit of suspense.
See "Don't Do This", Plot, Revision.