Dancing is a romantic couples’ activity because it’s a metaphor for romance, or at least for sex. Usually, the man “leads”, and the woman “follows”. But it’s more complicated than that sounds. The degree to which the man “leads” can vary from Victorian dances or a circle-sweeping Viennese waltz, where everyone knows when to step where and the man’s leading is a mutually-agreeable deception; to salsa or swing, where the woman may find herself spun in a circle or turned upside down with less than a second’s notice. But whatever the dance, the man doesn’t drag the woman around the floor. He senses where they both are already going, and adds a flourish or twist. His movements should be congruent enough with what they're both doing to be anticipated, but not so predictable as to be expected, much as your girlfriend anticipates a present on Valentine's Day, but doesn't want to tell you what to get her.¹ By leading well, a man proves he's capable of being sensitive to a woman's desires. Leading is thus also a kind of following.

(In contemporary club dancing, by contrast, there is no leading, no following, no synchrony of movement, no interaction of any kind other than eye contact sometimes followed by grinding bodies together. Make of that what you will.²)

Let’s see how well this metaphor applies to writing.

The reader chooses a book or movie because its genre, cover/poster, and first page/trailer lead her to expect a story with a certain form and feel to it. Different genres and styles, like different dances, promise different degrees of energy (salsa vs. waltz, pulp vs. memoir), unexpectedness (swing vs. square dancing, independent vs. Hollywood), and intimacy (tango vs. rhumba, first person vs. third omniscient). The author leads the reader through a story respecting those expectations, providing details and turns that are anticipated but not expected.

The dance is about the woman; an observer’s eyes go to her, not to him. He is the frame and she is the picture. Similarly, the story is for the reader more than for the writer. Writing that draws attention to itself, rather than to the story, is like a salsa shine, where the man pushes the woman away and struts up and down the floor. Some people like it, but I find it contrary to the spirit of dance.

When learning a dance (learning a genre / writing a story), the man (writer) first learns the steps (tropes / plot). Only after that can he figure out how to lead the steps correctly. When I rewrite, I try to make sure all the important story points have arrows somewhere pointing at them. That’s what I mean by leading. I can’t do it in the first draft.

Leading in writing isn’t just foreshadowing. It’s leading the reader through the mutual creation of a story. If your character’s throwing a pot away symbolizes a rejection of love, you’ve got to draw the reader’s attention to it. Just tossing it out there is like trying to spin a woman without lifting your arm beforehand. But having a character look at the broken pot and think it was “broken, like my heart”, is like yanking the woman’s arm to make sure she makes the turn. It gets you both through it, but it's more work and it isn't much fun for either person. Following has to be challenging, or it isn't really dancing. A proper dance, like a proper story, is the work of two, not one.

To learn how to lead well, you must learn how to follow. Dancing the woman’s part teaches you which parts of the man’s movements are the leads, just how obvious they need to be, and how irritating they are when overdone. It’s easy to know when you’ve missed a dance lead, because you stumble and run into people. But you can't tell when you’ve missed an author’s lead; you just think the author is being stupid. So you need to pre-read for other authors and ask them to tell you what you missed.

Dancing the woman’s part also teaches you that the key to leading is not doing anything that feels like leading when you’re not trying to lead. That’s the TL;DR of this post. When I fail to follow some clue the author planted, it’s not usually because the author planted that clue poorly. It’s because the author wrote many other beautiful things that looked like clues, like a dancer who keeps tugging at the woman’s arms even in the middle of a step.

Things look like clues if they’re vivid, unexpected, or repeated; if they stand out stylistically; if they get a lot of words. When William Gibson wrote, “The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel,” it wasn’t just because the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. Writing “The sky was grey” in such a long and unexpected way was like highlighting it in yellow and writing “Symbolism!” in the margin.

Have you ever bought a used book from the college bookstore and found it had every sentence on some pages highlighted? Don’t do that. Seriously. It makes photocopies and scans hard to read. Also, don’t highlight everything in your story with a vivid or startling description. If you have a loving description of how the tramp handles his cigar, but it’s just a cigar, you may want to dial it back a bit if you don’t want to foreshadow a certain narrative turn. After the reader’s wasted enough time puzzling over red herrings, she’ll assume everything that stands out is just another meaningless yank on her arms.

All this is doubly true in fan-fiction, where the reader assumes—justifiably!—that anything that sticks out in your story is probably just a mistake. When I had Celestia go ballistic on Trixie in “Trust”, readers didn’t say, “Oh, that’s very strange; this issue must be especially emotional to her right now for some reason” as often as they said, “That’s too out-of-character.” When I had Holmes suggest physically assaulting Trixie in “Detective & Magician”, that was supposed to be a key indicator that there was something wrong with this incarnation of Holmes, but could easily be read as bad characterization. Many times I’ve missed clues planted by other fan-fiction writers because they were fan-fiction writers and I assumed they just screwed up. Aquillo’s stories are loaded with subtle clues, but if you read them in fan-fiction mode, you might not find them unless you already know his stories are loaded with subtle clues, which you won’t know unless you… you see the catch-22. Just being on fimfiction rather than in a Norton anthology makes leading the reader more difficult.

It doesn’t help that rather than relaxing in the tub with a single paperback, I’m reading on a screen that has a large icon at the top telling me I have 324 stories queued up to read after this one. Fast reading, like fast dancing, makes subtle leading harder. I'm afraid faster and faster reading is in store for us, as the supply of free fiction keeps increasing. Getting on EqD, or getting followers, doesn't just bring you more readers; it brings you readers who will cut you more slack and take more time to look for your leads. The more reputation you have, the more you can get away with, and the more people will like your stories. (This is just one of the reasons that if you're a new writer and you want to be as popular as me, you have to be better than me.³)

A final aspect of leading in dance, whose metaphoric equivalent may or may not be true, is that the better you get at dancing, the fewer people you can dance your best with.⁴ You can't dance just as well with any partner. The most exciting dance moves require a great lead and a great follower expert at that particular dance. There are writers, like James Joyce or e. e. cummings, who seem to me to have been very good, and then to have become unreadable. Whether that's because they were corrupted by too much praise, or because they went beyond my ability to dance with them in their own specialized style, is probably unknowable, if it is even the sort of question that has an answer.

1. It's not my fault that we have a "sex" tag, but no "sexist" tag.

2. I count it as a victory for the men.

3. Except for GhostOfHeraclitus. That was obviously just luck.

4. I speak from observation, not from experience.