When writing how subtle do you go with writing? I'm trying to work on stopping expositioning and showing instead of telling but I'm scared readers won't pick up on more subtle things. How much do you trust your readers and how would you show more subtle things instead of telling them?
A good novel uses both subtle and less subtle means. Er Gen, for example, foreshadows by doling little tidbits of info he leaves to the readers to connect. It's nice, but not subtle per se. Consider the Great Gatsby. If you read it literally, it's an okay story. It's a guy watching a rich person pine for another man's wife. If you read deeper, you start picking up on the imagery, scenes hinted at, and scenes left unmentioned. Read further into it and you notice even more of those. There may be inconsistencies, but not picking up on something does not break the story. tl;dr a good story should be comprehensible at all levels of depth
Practice on describing what you see. If there is anything that the reader needs to know, find a way to highlight it in the paragraph....something like: "Maria could see the whole of the city below her, the lights flicking as the stars twinkle, the brightest star being the blue death star in the sky...." That kinda thing.
When i write, i broke the fourth wall so often that I might as well give the readers my complete structure.
Depends on what you're writing about. I think it's probably a good practice that the further away something will be happening or explained in your novel, the more subtle you should be, and gradually get less and less subtle until finally, when it actually happens, you directly tell them. For example with this example, if it was something important later in the story, i would maybe just have "Maria could see the whole of the city below her, the lights flickering as the stars twinkle, and her eyes were drawn to a blue star that was particularly bright and beautiful...." while if it was close to the event it would be more something like "Maria could see the whole of the city below her, the lights flicking as the stars twinkle, and noticed that there was a star that was unusually, perhaps even unnaturally, large and bright, shining in a brilliant blue...." and finally when the event is about to happen, "Maria could see the whole of the city below her, the lights flicking as the stars twinkle... But something wasn't right. That star, there was definitely something strange about it. It was altogether too large, too bright, and... Was it moving?" I like to drop a few subtle hints here and there. You might be surprised at what your readers can piece together.
As far as I know it depends on the type of novel in question and how much the author is eloquent . It got nothing to do with the reader, but only the author's style, the readers role is just to read and/or comment/like/hate, the author is the one supposed to worry about how to make the info reach the reader and not if the reader should trust you to write better/differently, because people are different, majority of readers prefer a clear definite and descriptive way to understand the story or as you may say subtle, some don't care as long as they can follow the story, some however (the minority) literally likes a broken, easy way of expression with no idioms nor metaphors nor whatever as they can't follow up as such they like keeping the writing as simple as possible meaning you need to tell them/express the plot to them each chapter as best as you can . Therefore, you must specify what kind of novel it is to your readers so you don't end up attracting the wrong audience and that is up to you to decide and not your readers and that is usually done by the way you made your readers used to your novels/chapters(of course you can change it if you want but you might end up losing some readers)
When you write to a certain point, take a step back and read what you wrote. Then, identify your climax points, when engagement or interest with the novel is piqued. When readers are actually focusing on a scene, throw something in that actually takes some thought to process. That's when they'll actually take the time to stop and consider different things, and even if they don't figure it out at the time, it gets left in the back of the mind to think about subconsciously. At the end of the day, no matter how something's written, people only put as much thought into something as they're actually invested into it.
I assumed my readers to have the attention span of a teen so I have to describe many things in details. However, the foreshadowing and the twists are quite hidden because I don't care if the general audiences got them or not.
It is very important that you are responsive to them. Readers love when the author shares with them the details, first of all try to do a survey whether they will be interested in it, whether they are ready to accept a new material. I think they will appreciate it.