Where is your audience? A lot of your job is to manipulate your audience, putting them in a situation where they are actively involved in the world you are laying out in front of them. You need to know (or aim to know) where they are at any point in your story.
Is your audience in front of you, with you or behind you?
I think it is really important to make sure that your audience is with you. That seems to me the general, bog-standard relative position. With you, means that they’re being lead by you, they are feeling the warm, shivering in the cold, following the points you’re making and happy and content with the events unfolding. It is a great place to be. It is the aim of writing, not to over-state, over-write, over-explain; the plot is tootling along and they’re happy being where they are.
Entrance Your Audience
Being with you is entrancing them, making them lean forward, being interested in what you’re doing on stage, making them worry for your protagonist, the situation they’re in, the dilemma they’re wrestling with, the approach they are taking to that…
Surprise Your Audience
Your job is to surprise them, to make them sit up and take notice of plot points and personality that moves the story along. These are events like “I didn’t know that this character had that issue in the past,” or, “Oh, that’s a bit odd,” or “I wouldn’t have done that!”
This surprise means that you are ahead of your audience, that they didn’t expect something. Having the audience behind you is generally a good thing. If they are working to keep up with the plot or the situation and they’re actively struggling with that, that is a good thing. Them being behind you is a thing to encourage. But not too much.
Keep Your Audience With You
If you are too far ahead of your audience, they tend to lose interest. You can confuse perhaps even alienate them. They stop caring because that empathy you’re encouraging is lost. Large steps in front of them mean you’re presuming too much. That you have a belief that needs questioning… Of course, everyone understands the morality of hedge funding in Nauru…
This doesn’t mean you need to condescend to your audience. It means you need to make sure there is a balance in getting them to the position you want them.
Being in front of you is dangerous. If you encourage them to get ahead of you, it means you are mis-reading their capabilities. You want them in front of you at times. Think about the murder mysteries, you always need a good red herring, you wave that in front of the audience, they jump to a conclusion and you undercut that by saying… A red herring is a positive force; you make your audience second guess events and reactions. And then surprise them that their expectation was wrong.
Don’t be Predictable
But if you are writing material that makes them switch off, that’s a danger. If they are too far in front of your writing they do the “Been there, done that” and watch the lighting rig, go inside their head or sleep. They are not surprised about the twists and turns of your plot, they have worked out what is going to happen and the script plods along and proves that to be the case. These are, of course, extremes, but making sure that your audience is not in front of you UNLESS you want them to be, is a positive.
These parameters are all relative. Knowing who your audience is, what their interests and expectations are is important. These change constantly and develop over time. Think of the drawing-room comedies of half a century ago… there is often nothing wrong with the core issue of the play, just the manipulation of the audience.