I am trying to work out stylistically how to achieve focus within a story. I don't want to overtly draw the reader's attention to something, or spell it out, but I need a small act to resonate. It does strongly in my mind, but not enough on the page. In a film it would be one of those swift cut aways, or the object in the background behind the key player, at eye level, so it fed into the viewer's unconscious, as it were. Or a crowd scene yet somehow one's eye is drawn to the character who ends up being significant. In music hall the stage hand put extra limelight (hence the phrase) on the girl he was courting so she showed up better than the other chorus girls. That's the sort of trick I want to pull.
Hmmm. Sorry, this is terribly nebulous.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? How do you guide the reader to register something as more important than what's going on around it?

Not sure how much descriptive detail you put in your writing, but the bit you had in your other thread about sparseness and "cutting" being the way to go sounds about right. If you only have three props in a scene, the reader is more likely to remember the important one than if you bombard them with distractions in the form of irrelevant but beautiful descriptive prose. Once you have an empty room, it should be enough just to mention that something is there to give it a massively heightened significance.

Hm. Tricky. If it's a character-narrator they can just notice it a bit extra - slightly more detail, or have it resonate with a memory or remind them of something... oh dear, they all sound crass in the abstract, but you know what I mean

Or there's the single line paragraph option.

That can really pull something out, but can be too much.

I'm not here, I'm arm-wrestling PhD footnotes...

Emma

Dick Francis may not be top of the booker prize list, but he certainly does this kind of thing a lot and from what I remember, it was pretty much a case of...

"blah blah blah and on the top of the cabinet, there was a revolver. I blah blah blahed and blah blahed and put my drink down beside the revolver which I could now see was made by Blumenthaller arms. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah away from the revolver and went home."

Tricky, without knowing the story. I guess there are several possible ways:
1) Draw the attention of the reader without the characters noticing - a bit of an 'omniscient' thing, but - 'she didn't see the way Arthur smiled as he replaced the receiver, and if she had would have made little of it'. But a bit clunky.
2) Throw the detail casually into what's 'normal', so that it seems odd: 'Arthur replaced the receiver. A ghost of a smile flickered across his face, quickly replaced by his usual frown.'
3) Use the info in a question: 'Was that a ghost of a smile flickering across Arthur's face? Arthur, who was usually so sombre and frowning?'
4) Include it as the last and (potentially) most important part of a list: 'Afterwards, she was never quite sure why, but certain details were etched in her memory: the way the sunlight haloed Francis's head, Carly's thin fingers picking at her sandwich, and the ghost of a smile on Arthur's lips as he replaced the telephone receiver.'
Er, don't know if that's any help at all.
Susiex

I find this terribly difficult as 2 books ago i dropped lots of hints to the reader about something that was going on, without the MC knowing, and an agent said it made my MC seem 'almost mentally retarded'. But then that was a whole plot line (she was pregnant but didn't realize it).

In my wip i have a scene where the MC is being followed but doesn't realize it. I have her hear two sneezes but nothing more is said. Then a few chapters on she is told about being tracked and i'm not sure whether to have her think back, a sort of 'ah yes, those sneezes' or whether in real life she would remember. (This all sounds very farcial but is more subtle in the book)

No help whatsover to you, i'm afraid, Cherys, just to say i symptathize. It's a difficult one.

a bit extra - slightly more detail,

I would echo Emma's comments here. There are clues in the Harry Potter books, where JKR has done just that - the small tick on a person's face which is echoed in another character linking the two; the little extra detail about a cupboard harbouring a secret drawer...etc.
Jasper Fforde who has a character comment about a loud check jacket worn at a dinner table where the character jots something down on a napkin, which in another book is left on a boat with the secret formula in the pocket.

I think it is a matter of simply trusting the reader to get it, and under-doing it rather than over doing it (you can't expect every reader to get it.).

If you over do it you risk raising questions in the readers mind about it which they will expect the mc, or another character, to be asking as well, and then get annoyed that they seem to be ignoring the obvious.

Funnily enough I had a present of a pair of georgian silver candlesticks in one chapter, which the CW tutor leapt on and was reading all sorts of meanings into, which hadn't even occurred to me at the time - I could just as easily have picked a pair of scented candles. So I think sometimes we under-estimate the reader's imagination and are tempted to over-egg the pudding out of fear they will miss our little clues and nudges.


- NaomiM

Then again, you could just over-egg it but for completely the wrong reason...

"Hansel was furious when he saw the handle sticking out of the bushes like that. How could Eric, his son, be so reckless with such a valuable axe? It was Hansel's prize possession, a Klausweiler Doppelkonvex 138mm, and he had been so careful to tell Eric to put it back afterwards. But that was teenagers, he thought, no respect for anyone else's property. He hadn't even had the decency to wipe the copious amounts of blood and offal from the handle. One thing for sure, Hansel told himself, Eric would be in really big trouble when he got home. And where the hell was the idiot boy anyway? He should have been back hours ago."

<Added>

(ps: not the axe, but the blood and offal, thank-you)

One thing about childrens fiction is everything mentioned in detail usually has a dual purpose, in that the author intends to revisit it later in the novel. So from an early age readers are taught to pick up clues from the text.

"He had been there for seventeen hours, just him, a chair, a table and a discarded mechanical dog, a child's toy with a broken hind leg and no eyes that seemed, nonetheless, to anticipate his every move and to bark whenever he thought that the guard outside might finally be asleep. This was one case that he wished he had never gotten involved with and he thought ruefully about his client, an electronic surveillance equipment manufacturer. There had been something quite unusual about their first interview, it was almost as if he didn't actually want Konstantin to solve the case."