Order of Information, by Elizabeth Kay
The order in which you present information in a book is very important. If you delay including something we need to know we’re going to spend too much time trying to work out what’s going on, which is when we lose touch with the story as we’re no longer concentrating. Most of us have read books where we’ve suddenly been surprised by something – the gender of the narrator, their appearance, their age perhaps. This can mean completely re-evaluating what we’ve read before, and we may end up no longer trusting the author to tell us what’s necessary which may be when we stop reading. When we know the gender of the author we tend to assume their narrator is the same gender too, unless we’re given a pointer. I have written as a man several times, and it’s often important to establish this fact right at the start, otherwise the plot won’t make sense. This is the beginning of my short story Cassie , which was one of the winners of the Canongate prize when I needed to flag up the gen...