21.25: Follow the Bouncing Ball
In this episode, our hosts explore how writers control their readers’ attention with the metaphor of a bouncing ball. We break down techniques for guiding focus on the page, including POV choice, selective description, rhythm, and where details appear within sentences and paragraphs. The discussion highlights how structure often matters more than individual word choice, with emphasis on primacy/recency effects, white space, and pattern recognition like the rule of threes. Each host shares their thoughts on how to sharpen reader focus or intentionally diffuse it to help you with your current work in progress!
Homework:
Write a mundane scene three times: once straightforwardly, once where you deliberately hide a major event by shifting focus away from it, and once ending with “and that was the day everything changed.” Then compare how attention and emphasis shift between the three versions.
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, Erin Roberts, and DongWon Song. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: Focus: How do you get readers to pay attention to the parts you want? Unreliable narrators. POV, what the character notices. Breath, how long does it take, more words. White space edges. Recency and primacy. Specificity. Depersonalized actions. Emotional states. Why focus? Stakes, tension. Information.
[Season 21, Episode 25]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
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[Season 21, Episode 25]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Follow the bouncing ball.
[Erin] Tools, not rules.
[Howard] For writers, by writers.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m Dongwon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] And today we are going to talk about focus. How you actually get readers to pay attention to the part of the page that you want them to pay attention to. How do you get them to follow the bouncing ball in the right place, like you would in a really, I guess, old school karaoke joint. Um, but I have a bunch…
[DongWon] Just a Korean one?
[Erin] Oh, really? Do they sing with the bouncing ball?
[DongWon] They still use the bouncing ball.
[Erin] Oh, I want that. Okay. We are going to follow the bouncing ball back to the topic.
[laughter]
[Erin] And what I… I think about this a lot because of how much I love unreliable narrators and narratives, which is a lot about misdirecting your reader into paying attention to a thing that they think they should be paying attention to, but in fact you’re doing something else on the side. And over time you reveal that the thing on the side was the thing they should have been paying attention to all along. And so I use a lot of small tools to do this, but before I get into the ones I use, I’m curious, how do you make sure that your reader is following what you want them to follow on the page and not getting lost in the weeds or lost in the sauce?
[Mary Robinette] I do it in a couple of different ways. For me, focus, because of my puppetry background, is always about… Is about directing the reader’s attention using things like what the character notices, that I tend to lean into POV for it. So what is the character noticing because then the reader is going to notice it, which also means that I can misdirect the reader by having the character notice the wrong thing or apply the wrong emotional significance to something. Then I also, again, because of the puppetry, I use breath, which is how long I linger on something or the rhythm of it. So I will often, if I want the reader to notice something, literally use more words. Like I will describe something with… more than instead of just saying his hands, I might say his large hands, just even just a single word can sometimes draw their attention to it more. Sometimes it’s giving two or three sentences, like unpacking stuff. So I’m very conscious about where I put my embellishments, whether it’s a… just a single word or a clause or just larger descriptive stuff. So those are the two major things that I use. I have some others, but those are the two ones that I reach for first.
[Howard] I lean into white space. The first word after a line feed, the last word before a line feed, they naturally stand out because they’re hanging there. I mean, I can’t always put something important there because the sentence sometimes grammatically I just can’t begin it that way. But being aware of that tool is very useful.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, we call that… I do the same thing but I think of it as recency primacy effect.
[Erin] Yeah, I was going to say, like, recency and primacy, like, people always pay attention to the first thing and the last thing, which is great if you want to hide a detail from the reader and not have them focus on it, put it in the middle. And so a lot of times what I’ll do is put something in the middle of a larger paragraph but with richer language. So it brings slight attention to it, but by the time… then they keep going past it and look at the end or the beginning of the paragraph.
[Howard] You can add weight to it while making it less urgent, less important. And boy, that’s a fun practical joke.
[DongWon] You can also really use pattern and rhythm to keep stuff in. So rule of threes is really useful for this, right? People pay most attention… It sort of dovetails with recency primacy but people expect a three. And so if you slip a third in there or put it in the middle, then people think you’re just filling out a pattern but really what you’ve done is sneak them a really important detail. And then when that bites them in the ass later, I’m thinking of this from a GM perspective, that is a thing that feels inevitable in a certain way and they kind of missed it in the moment. It’s a very common thing in games where you’ll just. like. accidentally over describe an NPC and suddenly now they’re the main character of your campaign. It’s a thing where sometimes attention and focus will draw your audience’s eye to a place you didn’t intend them to. One thing I do want to flag though is sometimes it can be really useful as a signal to yourself of oh, am I interested in a thing that I didn’t realize that I was in, right? So, and this is from the perspective of doing improvisational storytelling, but one that’s still for an audience of when something grows in interest and you realize that there’s something here, you can follow that ball, too, right? Like you can follow your own ball and sort of see where it lands and then…
[laughter]
[DongWon] What? We didn’t like that?
[laughter]
[garbled children’s…]
[DongWon] You can chase that ball and see where it goes, you know what I mean? And like, if you wander way off the track, you may end up having to undo some stuff and, like, go back in the edit, but sometimes exploring that avenue will lead to more exciting places than what you had planned.
[Mary Robinette] What you remind me of is a conversation we just had with one of our attendees on the Writing Excuses Cruise. Rick is an architect and he was talking about intentional design in architecture and it was so much… We started talking about how it applied to fiction. That in architecture that if you go to a restaurant and you have to ask where the bathroom is, that’s a failure of design. Because the way you do that is you control where the viewer’s eye goes. There’s, literally you hang a lantern on something, you put more interesting pictures there. You have a sign sometimes that says restroom this way. But you direct people that way versus where you don’t want them to go, where you remove decoration, you make it a little darker, it’s a little bit less inviting. And then we started talking about, I think it’s Tokyo Disneyland. So, most of Disney, when you start to move out of the public spaces, things become less decorated, less interesting, less detailed and then the colors become muted, and you can tell that you’re heading the wrong way, and then they have a color service something, but something… it’s a color that says you’re in a service, you’re heading into a service area. Tokyo Disneyland was like, we are going all in, all the decorations, all the embellishments. So, you don’t get any of those cues as you are heading out of the main areas. You don’t think, oh, it’s more interesting back that way. this is getting less and less interesting. And so, you’ll just open the doors.
[Howard] Just walk into the sewer.
[Mary Robinette] Mhm, yeah.
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And so, like, when you see someone who’s writing purple prose, this is often what’s happening to them. They’re putting decoration on everything. When you have a scene where you’re just like I’ve lost the plot completely. Everything is getting the same amount of attention.
[DongWon] There’s a thing that I like to say about fiction or writing or communication, anything word oriented. And it’s a little bit deliberately provocative, but I say words don’t matter. And what I mean by that is sometimes when you as a writer are telling people this is the thing that matters, right? When you’re like, here’s the gem of Rohisla. This is the most important thing and getting this back to the temple of blah te blah will solve the crisis that is looming. But you’re spending all your time talking about how the prince is going through this career crisis and really doesn’t want to be a prince anymore, wants to go into occupational therapy, then suddenly you’re not writing a novel about getting the gem back to the temple. You’re writing a novel about someone’s journey of self-discovery, right? And so, I think kind of what I was saying earlier about I’m going to make everyone laugh again, but chasing your own ball, is this aspect of pay less attention to the words that you’re saying and pay more attention to the structural elements you put in place, right? And this is sort of wayfinding that you’re talking about like in architectural spaces, you can put a sign that says restroom and no one will see it. Not a single person will read the sign. They will walk down the hallway that feels like it should go to the bathroom, even if you’re… you had a big glowing sign over there that said, “Restrooms this way.” Nobody sees it. They’re like, “Oh, this is the hallway by the kitchen. that’s usually where bathrooms are. There’s two doors down there.” And then you get there and you’re like, “These are two supply closets.” And you’re like, “What happened here?” Right? Structure and expectation matter more than you telling me something matters. [Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. And I think a lot of times some of that is in the way you… Also, the way you tell it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, I think the kind of thing that you end up doing, for example, in a TTRPG campaign is that you will describe a character and you’ll give them a really interesting specific detail.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Humans love specificity. If you want to draw somebody’s focus, tell them something specific. It could be like… the… I don’t know. They have embedded gems on their face. It could be, which sounds painful. It could be that they always walk diagonally.
[Mary Robinette] Well, the gems of Rohisla is actually a great example of this because you used a specific name for that. That’s part of why we keep going back to it.
[Erin] And I also said the eight or however many it was. Which I was going to say the other thing I really love is giving a number to something. Like if you say like, the fifth… They said the fifth war would be the last war. Like, okay, that’s interesting because there’s a number in it. You got to think, why are there five wars? It allows the mind to do a lot more…
[DongWon] Totally.
[Erin] If you put things behind it. So, like, that’s one of the techniques is to use specificity, whether you’re trying to draw someone’s focus on purpose or whether you’re trying to distract them from something else.
[Howard] But you need to… you need to not use it. You need to not use it when it would be wrong to use it. Now, in 1924, Max Fleischer invented the follow-the-bouncing-ball technique. Max Fleischer, also the same guy who invented the rotoscope used for animation. Does that have anything to do with this episode? No. No. But, that information was interesting, and now I’ve derailed us just in time for our break.
[Erin] You have.
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[Erin] Now that we’re back from 1924, a fun detour that we took for the break. I want to talk about a couple more, like, things that I think are very cool techniques that you can use to shift focus. And one is… one of my favorite, actually one of my least favorite grammatical techniques used by the news. This often happens when violence has occurred. People often depersonalize violent acts. Like they will say, “A violence occurred to this person.” As opposed to this other person did the violence.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] This person was shot by…
[Erin] Yeah, this person was shot by versus person X shot you.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And so, what happens is it actually, when you use those kind of was X’d by, it actually makes it feel like the whole thing is less important.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It already happened. It’s in the past. It takes the focus off of the action. So, if you’re looking to create focus, one way is to think about where are you using, like, sort of direct verbs. Verbs are great. We like them. They’re active. They often draw focus. Where are you using detailed words, rich, lush words? Don’t overdo it like the purple prose, but there are times in which you do want to say, “This is the archway to go through.” And so, it’s a beautiful balloon archway, and it’s going to draw your eye, and that’s the one you’re going to want.
[Howard] The very simple difference between mistakes were made and I got it wrong.
[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and I think this really ties into tension, to go back to an earlier time, right? When you move from one section to the next section, from chap- across chapters, across parts of a book, or in a TTRPG when you arrive at a new setting, a thing that I see a lot of the time is nobody knows where to go. Nobody knows what’s happening. What are we following up on, and where is this all going? That’s when you lose audience, right? That’s when people fall off, stop reading, don’t watch the next episode, whatever it is, because you’re not creating tension as you roll into the next section, right? So, follow the bouncing ball is a way to think, or one way to make people follow the bouncing ball, is to manipulate their emotional state, right? You need to get them feeling unsettled, uncomfortable, or excited, or interested in something, right? They need to be feeling a thing as you roll into the next section, so that they’re like, “Ooh, I don’t know, this other love interest is coming into this stage. They just broke up, and so now I’m interested and invested in this other thing.” Without that other thing in play, then you’re entering into a section where nothing’s happening, and all you have is de-escalation, no parallel escalation in the background to keep that thing moving forward.
[Erin] Yeah, and I think one way to do that also is, like, to get people excited and to get people feeling a certain way is to use pattern recognition of words on a larger sense. For example, we use the word see a lot when we’re talking about one person looking at another. So, it’s kind of like the said, if you don’t want anyone to pay attention to what way somebody said something, you just say he said, she said. But, if all of a sudden instead of I saw this person, it’s I glanced at them. All of a sudden there’s something different there. It’s not a word we use as commonly, and so you’re actually using, like, overarching kind of cultural pattern recognition and saying, “I’ve decided to use a different term here. This isn’t the same thing that’s always happening. Therefore, this look is different than every other look that’s happening in this scene because why is this one shorter? A glance is usually shorter and more surreptitious. That means maybe there’s some tension, maybe there’s some interest here.”
[Howard] Big difference between I saw them check out of the hotel and I watched them check out of the hotel. That second one, wow, there’s some Why were you watching? Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Well, and it’s also… it goes into that, the repetition and the pattern recognition again, that if you have one character who you always use the word studied, he studied it. That you’re going to start making decisions about that character because of the deliberate, if it’s on purpose, sometimes it can be… it is unintentional. And when it’s unintentional, you’re drawing attention to something that you didn’t want the reader to pay attention to. But, that repetition can say, “Look at this. Look at this.” One of my favorite lines of Ray Bradbury is this thing from the fruit at the bottom of the bowl, which I know I’ve talked about on the podcast before, but he looked at his hands and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. And that… It’s just like this beat, beat, beat. And each thing gets more important as he goes because he gives a little bit more weight to each of the things. But that beat…
[DongWon] Well, and this plays into microcosm macrocosm, too, right? You can set up a set of things in an opening line and then fulfill that later in the story because you’ve established the pattern for us as we go. Another trick I really think about a lot when it comes to reader attention and focus is POV.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Being playful with POV in ways can highlight aspects of the story, right? I think about there’s a moment in Stephen King’s It where a character like… just a random person in the scene shows up for 1 second and then he describes the rest of that person’s life in a couple of sentences. I don’t remember the details of it, but it is sort of this thing like, “In 10 days he would be dead” or something like that, right? And it’s this complete break in the flow of the story. Nothing at this point has been from that perspective, but in giving us that, he has drawn our attention back from the quiet domestic thing that was happening on this street to there’s a big threat looming, right? There’s something happening here that is bigger than this and we have a perspective that is broader than you thought. So, he’s like pulling your attention in a way to create stakes that is wildly artificial and breaks with the realism of the narrative up until that point, but is an incredibly useful and exciting thing suddenly to encounter in that moment of like, “Ooh, what’s happening?”.
[Erin] I think you’re getting to something great before we wrap up this episode, which is why we want to move attention. Why do we want the reader to focus here instead of there? And one reason, like you’re saying, is to to move our understanding of the stakes and the tension within a scene. Are there other reasons that you would like want people to focus one place and not another?
[Howard] It’s the probably unattainable goal. I want you to read the book that I wrote.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.
[Howard] That is… that I wrote. No, I don’t want you to read the story that you told yourself while you were reading the book that I wrote. I want you to read the book that I… And that is a high bar to clear.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] There are not very many books that clear that bar for me.
[Mary Robinette] It’s so interesting because I don’t have that goal. I want you to read a book that we create between us.
[DongWon] It’s… There’s a thing that I talk about. People ask me all the time what I’m looking for, right? Like it’s you talk to a literary agent as a writer, you’re like, “What are you looking for? What makes something stand out to you?” My answer is always when I can feel the perspective of the person who wrote it. I want to know why this book can only be written by you, right? And I think kind of you’re both are getting at that a little bit in terms of I want to know that you drew my attention to something that matters to you on purpose, right? I think this that being able to move the reader focus from point A to point B smoothly and fluidly and expertly communicates to me that you have something to say here.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] You were trying to show me something that you see and let me experience it. And in that experience, we create something new between us. There is that connection between author and reader that I think is also really important. And we can get into like death of the author and Barthes and all that crap. But like there is utility there in understanding where your perspective ends and the reader’s begin, but you need to start with I had something to say when I wrote this book.
[Howard] Yeah. And I… the… I 100% believe in the collaboration. I just want to make sure that my contribution to the collaboration is the part that I meant, is intentional.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] Yeah. And that’s the follow the bouncing ball for me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and for me, I think going back to the question that Erin asked in the way that you asked it was, what are the other reasons besides tension that we might want to do it? Information. Because information is how we build the stories. I’m giving you a set of tools to be involved in creating the story with me. So, I have to make sure that I’m giving them to you at the time that you need them and in the order and and that I’m not asking you to pick up something that is unnecessary and carry it with you through to the end of the story.
[Howard] Good print journalism will do this. They give you the information that you need when you need it as the story unfolds. They’re not trying to spin an exciting narrative. They are providing… they are… you are supposed to follow that bouncing ball.
[DongWon] Yeah. I hate the term info dump, you know what I mean? And it’s a thing that gets… a lot of fiction gets accused of. And for me, it feels like a misnomer because it’s… the problem isn’t that you’re giving me a lot of information, it’s that you’re giving me that information at a time where it is not relevant. If it is relevant to the scene and the tension and the character, you can tell me anything. I have read like pages of theories about time travel or physics or whatever it is because it was relevant to what the character was going through or trying to figure out or trying to solve. And so, if you are… if you have mismanipulated where the bouncing ball is, where my attention is, and you give me a bunch of stuff that doesn’t feel relevant to the situation, then I am not in a place where I’m ready to receive that information. [Erin] Yeah, it’s like to talk back about focus, it’s like I don’t know why I should be focusing on this information right now. So, now it just feels like you’re assaulting me with information because you want it to be given to me, not because I want it. It’s where you don’t want to go the other way where it feels like the hand of the writer is so strong that you don’t care what I’m reading. You’re going to tell me this whether I like it or not.
[Mary Robinette] Well, and it’s confusing. It’s going into the building looking for the restroom and you… and someone jumping out at you and saying, “Hi, can I tell you about our new specials?” And you’re like, “No, no, I just need…” “But we have these all of these specials. Let me tell you about them. Tonight we have this amazing Panama steak. What’s a Panama steak? I’m glad you asked.” And you’re like, “No, I don’t, I don’t want any of that.”
[DongWon] One of my…
[Howard] What do you want to know about a Panama steak?
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I have no idea.
[DongWon] One of my…
[Mary Robinette] I’m a vegetarian. I don’t know.
[DongWon] Favorite books of all time…
[Howard] It’s got a notch through it.
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] You just put beef tallow down the middle of it. And then sometimes…
[DongWon] Incredible.
[Mary Robinette] it’s you get it stuck sideways. That’s called the evergreen Panama steak.
[laughter]
[DongWon] I would eat that. But one of my favorite books of all time is this book called H is for Hawk. And it is a memoir that is mostly about a woman’s relationship with a particular type of bird. It is also a memoir about grief. And it is also a literary analysis of a book by T. H. White. And the way she transitions us from the very thrilling personal story of her relationship with this violent bird that she is trying to work with to this literary analysis of a fairly obscure book by an author who’s only really known for writing The Once and Future King is she makes the content of her analysis deeply relevant to the story that she is trying to tell. And by the time we get to the section where she’s going to talk to me about this book that I’ve never even heard of for 30 pages, I’m so invested in her relationship with this bird and the parallels to this man’s relationship to the same type of bird. It ends up being this beautiful resonance between these things. She gets away with doing this because she has done the work to make it relevant to me. So, when I say info dumping isn’t really a thing, it’s a problem of focus and attention, that’s what I mean, right? If you set it up, you can get me to sit through anything.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And with that, you are done sitting through this episode…
[laughter]
[Erin[ And it is time for your homework. So, what I’d like you to do is to write a quick… you go to the grocery store or something else that is something mundane that you might do in your life if you don’t go to the grocery store and just write it straight. Like, I went here, I went there. Then, rewrite it as if something amazing or horrible or just very, very important happened during the period of that, but you don’t want to talk about it. So, write it so that you are focusing away. You are attempting to avoid, like, the white space that’s in the middle. Write it a third time then as if it ends with the sentence, “And that was the day everything changed.” Nothing’s happened yet, but something is about to happen that makes that the last mundane thing you ever do and see how the way you write the story shifts the focus based on what you as the writer know about what the reader is about to experience.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now, go write.