It's Invisibility Week!

Have you ever gotten so absorbed in a book you forgot that reality even existed? You transmute your entire soul into the story and lose awareness that you were even reading. You barely even knew time was passing. This is one of fiction’s highest goals, and you can only achieve it by becoming invisible to your readers. The story must exist in the reader’s mind. The writer must not. This week, we’re going to learn how to become invisible. You’ll be familiar with some of the strategies we’ll cover:

• Telling instead of showing removes your invisibility cloak.

• Writing pretentiously removes your invisibility cloak.

• Formulating an opinion on your characters or story removes your invisibility cloak.

• Breaking out of the voice you’ve chosen removes your invisibility cloak.

• Using more than one protagonist can remove your invisibility cloak.

• Using a perfect and reliable protagonist removes your invisibility cloak.

Perhaps the easiest way to remove your invisibility cloak is to write as though you’re an omniscient, omnipotent being who knows what everyone in your story is doing at any given time. This style of writing is typical of romance novels, Stephen King books, and, often, magical realism. The point of view constantly moves with a godly narrator who can magically tell you what will happen in the future and what has happened in the past. There are worse things than this. Sometimes the writer is the narrator—a habit that can be catastrophic.

This is a relatively contentious topic. There are many great novels that use the author as the protagonist and many with omnipresent narrators. As with most of the themes we cover in the workshop, this is not about what is correct. It’s about having the knowledge to formulate your own conclusion and break the rules WELL.

I’ll warn you upfront that I think all invisibility cloaks are stellar, as you probably know. Many of the cloaks we use in the literature space are broadly accepted as desirable. “Show don’t tell” is a good example. Most writers embrace the rule, and yet one of the most masterful books of all times, One Hundred Years of Solitude, does little more than tell.

It takes mastery to break the rules and break them well, and you can’t gain mastery until you learn how to use the rule. If you’re a beginner to fiction, you should be keeping all the rules because you don’t have the mastery to break them YET. In other words, this week you will be wearing invisibility cloaks.

Let’s start the week with some flash fiction of no more than 300 words with a twist. Show. Don’t. Tell.