Don't Be a Show-off

 

It bothers me when authors feel the need to show off their superior knowledge. Even good ones can fall into this trap, though.

One of my holiday reads was A Christmas Party by Georgette Heyer. I enjoy her light murder mysteries when I am in the mood for something that doesn’t require much thought. So I was disappointed when I read this:

When a leaden sky heralded the advent of snow, he began to talk about old-fashioned Christmases, and to liken Lexham Manor to Dingley Dell.

In point of fact, there was no more resemblance between the two houses than between Mr. Wardle and Nathaniel Herriard.

Georgette Heyer used that as a lead-in to describe Lexham Manor, which was the setting for her story. I understood the allusion only because I had recently listened to Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers as an audio book. Since I have only read about half of Dickens’ works, I could easily have missed the reference. I image that many of Heyer’s readers would have had no idea that Dingley Dell was a country manor owned by Mr. Wardle in The Pickwick Papers. Fortunately, Heyer’s use of literary allusions was minimal and easy to overlook.

I’m not saying that a writer should never refer to something a less-well-read reader doesn’t know about. I often have my characters reading the books they would have read during their period of history, but I do it to show the characters as readers and use only the titles since the content of the book is irrelevant. Or, if it is relevant, I give the reader enough information to understand my use without having to research it.

Hidden or double meanings can even be fun at time, but allusions that some readers will miss work if—and only if—they don’t interrupt the flow and the surface story is interesting without them. Disney handles this issue well. Its animated films are filled with adult humor that children won’t get, but that doesn’t matter because the story is also told at a child’s level. If my enjoyment would depend on specialized knowledge or Mensa-level thinking, however, it isn’t the book for me.

If you want to infuse your manuscripts with allusions that show how smart you are, make sure they work on an everyday level as well.

Because it isn’t very smart to write a story nobody wants to read.

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The illustration at the top of this page is “Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle’s” by Hablot Knight Browne (known as Phiz) drawn for The Pickwick Papers in 1836. It is in the public domain because of its age.