What's a good way to put an Audience Surrogate in a Story?

[Wanara009]

I think its a good question for people who set their story in their original world-building project. You have to explain the world to your audience and the fastest way to do it is audience surrogate character.

However, what's a good way to do this aside from the usual 'foreigner walking into a strange land' or 'fish out of spatial and temporal water' approach? I want to avoid as much exposition as possible, since I find it rather clunky.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Child narrators can easily start as ignorant, although it can be a problem to educate them. On the other side of things, well-educated upper-class folk may have idealistic, "enlightened" views that sound reasonable to your readers, but that exposure to ordinary folks' daily life in your world will forcibly disabuse them of.

I think the larger question is why you need an audience surrogate at all. If you want to build readers' interest in a society, why not just write about a likable and interesting person in that society? Let readers find out gradually about your world by watching someone move through it.

 

[Steerpike]

I disagree with the assumption that you have to explain the world to your audience. You certainly can explain it, if you wish, but you don't have to do as much of this as most people assume. Look, for example, at Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Steven Erikson's Malazan series, and you can see how little explanation an author has to provide to have an effective book. Part of the fun of that book and those that follow is that the reader is left to piece things about the world together without the author explaining them.

So, in short, if you want to explain, I think that's fine. But don't do it simply because you feel you must. If you think the explanations are clunky, see how things look without them.

A problem with audience surrogates is they are often extremely obvious. In my view, you are better simply using exposition to get the information directly to the reader than to set up a contrived dialogue between characters that is clearly there only to tell the reader something the characters already know.

 

[Ankari]

I agree 100% with Steerpike.

 

[BWFoster78]

I agree completely with Steerpike on this one.

Focus on what the needs of the story instead of what you want to tell your reader.

I think that, sometimes, people who love world building get too caught up in the excitement of wanting to share this incredibly neat place they've created. If they're not careful, they can hurt the story with irrelevant details.

EDIT: I read back over my post. I hate it when people reply to a question and, instead of answering it, propose something else. I realize that I did the same thing. Would that I had a good answer for you, but I haven't tried to do such a thing. Sorry.

 

[Sheriff Woody]

A problem with audience surrogates is they are often extremely obvious. In my view, you are better simply using exposition to get the information directly to the reader than to set up a contrived dialogue between characters that is clearly there only to tell the reader something the characters already know.

One way around this is to have a character that doesn't know about the world.

The first Matrix film (and the only one, for my money) handled this beautifully. Neo doesn't know anything about The Matrix. Therefore, he must learn. If there were no scenes of him acting as the audience surrogate, and instead he just went off to whoop ass and be awesome, it wouldn't make sense. The audience would be sitting there thinking 'how/when did he figure out how to do that?'. In this instance, the exposition becomes more than audience information. It becomes important plot and story information that aids in the development and growth of Neo's character.

Granted, this is only a situational fix and I am by no means suggesting every fantasy story should behave in this manner, but having a character that knows little about what's going on is generally a good vehicle for getting information to the audience without the exposition feeling out of place or forced.

 

[Kit]

Anyone who is in training (as a warrior, mage, etc) is going to be constantly thinking, practicing and being told things that the audience needs to know even if that character already knows quite a bit about the world.

 

[Chilari]

A character who has had so far only one persepctive of the world they live in coming into contact with alternative perspectives and new experiences. This could be someone who has been a monk or nun all their lives going out into the rest of the world, or someone who has had a sheltered upbringing thanks to the wealth of their parents (the Buddha is a great real-world example for this), or someone who has only ever seen the underside of society newly experiencing the way the "other half" live.

A way of doing it without an audience surrogate would be to just describe things in as natural a manner as possible.

 

[Jess A]

I suppose the reader 'views' the world through the characters' contexts, as described above by others. Using a medieval world as an example:

- Coming to a medieval world with a modern world context/history.

- A peasant in a medieval world.

- A king or wizard in a medieval world.

All will have different reactions to things, different perspectives. As Feo said, let the reader discover the world through the character(s). Info dump is tempting when you've spent years building a super fantastic world, but some readers may lose interest.

If you want to go ahead with the surrogate, however, you could have someone telling a story. Start off with a character aged and writing the book about his or her past, or a character writing a book about another extraordinary person. The 'writer'/narrator might describe the world in more detail.