Fiction Mondays: "Water for Elephants" and More

I just finished another book in two days.

Sometimes I feel guilty about doing this, like I should spend more time absorbing what's on the page, what the author put into it, but with Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, I just could not stop reading. There's a circus, love, betrayal, and murder. What more can you possibly want?

The most impressive part of the whole book, by far, is the big twist at the end. The impressive part is that it isn't really a twist at all, but a revisitation of an earlier scene through the lens of the rest of the book. When you first encounter the scene, the author is just withholding certain information from you, and the second time around, she reveals everything, which changes your whole perspective. After I read it, I went back and read it again, just to see how she pulled it off.

Reading this book as a writer, I was thinking a lot about information. It's really a challenge to know how to dole out what you know to a reader. It's a constant pull between giving too much and keeping too much hidden. Seeing how incredibly well the flow of vital information went in Water for Elephants definitely gave me some insight into how I might handle the revelations in my own work. Hopefully my story is half as captivating as Sara Gruen's.

The revisions continue. I'm going to have to add a chapter, and I'm excited to write it now that I know (roughly) what happens. At first I was wary about adding a chapter, because I thought...I don't know what I thought, maybe just that it wouldn't fit in right, or it would feel to readers that this chapter was obviously added later. But I got over it. This week, I'll put it in, and it will fit.