One of the things I've noticed in your drafts since we started the class was a tendency, particularly in the beginning of a piece, to withhold information from the reader about the four w's (who, what, where, and when), choosing instead to keep these things vague, presumably for the reader to find out--or figure out--later. I wonder if this approach is something we glean from watching film or television, or reading mystery and suspense novels. It is a common technique in dramatic narrative to leave the resolution--who done it and why--for a reveal at the end. Or I wonder if vagueness is meant as ambiguity. We withhold information because we want to exploit the drama of a reader figuring out the mystery of time, place, characters on his or her own. What do you think?
I often feel that withholding information, particularly in nonfiction, doesn't work very well. Either it feels overtly manipulative (the writer knows the end of the story after all), or, well, vague and therefore less interesting. I think I look for time, place, and character footholds to orient myself in a narrative. I want to know exactly where I'm standing with the narrator, sometimes quite literally. The particulars of a certain time and place don't make the narrative less universal for me, they make it more so. The clarity gives me enough to more readily see how a narrator's situation fits into contexts that I my recognize in my own life or others' lives.
I think, for me at least, it stems from the fear of 'telling vs showing' that has been drilled into me. This is probably also because I do read mostly fiction, and the idea of building suspense seems to often translate into not sharing all the information. It seems too obvious to simply state these things at the beginning, like you are not trusting your reader's ability to figure it out for themselves. That being said, I do feel like stories are too often too vague, and I have been struggling to find a happy medium in my own writing.
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