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ostarellaFrom "Write Through It," the monthly newsletter by Manuscript Rx.
Weaving the element of surprise into your writing
You may not like surprises in real life.
Take surprise parties, for instance: some of us hate the shock of dozens of people (some already inebriated) springing out at you with party hats and blowers and whoops and hollers the minute you get home from a draining day that left you bedraggled and looking your worst, when all you wanted to do was lower yourself into a hot bath and then crawl into bed.
But, whether or not you have an aversion to surprise in your daily life, you want and expect surprises when you read.
People read to escape the ordinary, to vicariously participate in the things they wouldn't encounter in their daily lives. So while you might call a week successful if it involved no surprises and just hummed along in the safety of predictable, planned routine, you'd toss a book aside for the same reason.
But how do we surprise our readers? Especially now, when the stakes are higher than ever? With so much television and movies and Internet and the astounding rate at which information is spread, is it even possible to really administer a good dose of surprise? If the phrase "There's nothing new under the sun" held true when it was first uttered decades ago, it must be even truer now, in our age of instant news, downloadable anywhere, anytime.
So if there is really nothing new, how do we incorporate surprise in our work so that readers will feel that particular brand of delight and satisfaction and read on, wanting more?
In his book On Writing, Stephen King says that a writer's job isn't to create a story idea from scratch, but instead to unearth the skeleton of one, to rediscover one of the many (but finite) stories already floating in our collective consciousness. And then put the one you choose on paper.
(Cue for you to breathe a big sigh of relief: nobody's expecting you to come up with a new color or suddenly start orbiting a new solar system.)
Actually, if you were able to conceive of something that's never been conceived of before, your readers might not feel grounded enough to make a meaningful connection with your ideas and characters. Although readers (and moviegoers and TV watchers) demand to be surprised (which goes hand-in-hand with being entertained), they also want to relate to what transpires. It needs to feel plausible. Yes, even if it's fantasy -- it must then feel logical within the fantasy world that you create...occurrences can't randomly violate the rules of that world just to throw a curveball at the reader.
Readers need to identify and understand the logic of what they read. Plus they want to be surprised.
Gosh, those readers sure are demanding.
Let's look at some effective ways to incorporate the element of surprise into your work.
(Note: Creating surprise by using experimental, off-the-beaten-path structure and form is risky and best left to published veterans, simply because most editors or agents won't even consider something "groundbreaking" or "trendsetting," structure-wise, from a relative novice. (Did you ever notice how the author's name is often much bigger than the title on a bestseller? This is because it's the author himself/herself who's actually selling the book, not the book itself. Therefore, editors are willing to allow the writers who represent scads of guaranteed sales much more latitude with their work -- including room for experimentation -- than they would for anyone else.) Therefore, we'll be talking about content here.)
Surprise is a way of bending the rules: delivering something unexpected. It's not breaking the rules of what could happen, but bending them in a refreshing, intelligent way.
Here are some tips for elevating the element of surprise in your writing:
1) Determine your book's particular reality, and start there.
As mentioned above, even stories that have little in common with reality as we know it (take The Lord of the Rings, for example), have to adhere to some type of rules -- rules within the work and the invented world itself -- so that the reader can make sense of things as s/he reads. Tolkien's reality, as it exists within the covers of his beloved series, becomes the reality while the reader is in it, and Tolkien doesn't scrap the rules of his world mid-way through because he wants to trick the reader into being surprised. (Readers hate being tricked, by the way. Surprised, yes. Tricked, no.)
On the planet Winter, in Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness, there is no such thing as gender as we know it; instead, individuals morph from female to male (and back again), depending on the cycle they're in. That most definitely breaks with our reality, but within the novel's, it marks a core truth. True, that scenario is surprising in and of itself, but the real sustained surprises in the book happen on a more intimate level, and involve an earthling's interaction with some natives of Winter.
So establish the parameters of your story's reality, and remain true to it, even as you reveal unexpected things throughout your journey.
2) Lead UP to surprise.
Tap your readers on the shoulder with surprise instead of bludgeoning them over the head first thing. If you open your book with a heavy dose surprise, it won't feel like surprise -- it will feel like assault.
If you start with the most majorly surprising thing, you have nowhere to go but down. Let your reader assimilate to the world you've created before you veer off into the unexpected. Roller coasters are fun (well, maybe for you...not for me) because they drop you after you've tamely coasted along for a bit.
Some writers employ a really big surprising event closer to the beginning of the book (not typically on the first page, though) and then spend the rest of the time unraveling smaller, unexpected things that explain or shore up the initial surprising incident. Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes is a good example of this.
And other writers lure the reader on with relatively small gifts of surprise throughout, and save the giant, breathtaking one for the very end. Two excellent examples of this are Meg Rosoff's What I Was and Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. Both novels use the "hidden in plain sight" surprise: the surprise that's revealed at the very end was there all along, was accessible to the reader if only s/he had thought along those lines. Those are particularly satisfying surprises, since they make you rush back to the beginning to look for those clues you may have missed.
Interrogate yourself when you look back on your first draft. Ask the hard questions like: Could this really happen? Does it make sense? Will the reader buy it? Don't let your desire to surprise -- which is different from raw shock -- let you lose sight of the need to hold the story together through the common ground of the piece's reality. Let the surprising events be things your reader could have come up with if s/he tried hard enough. Remember: the best endings are surprising and inevitable. Readers want to be surprised, but also want to feel in control, to a degree.
3) Make a list and check it twice (at least).
Think of all the given things that might happen to your characters. List them, mull them over, and then choose the least expected or the most ironic--the thing that doesn't immediately come to mind as you trace the organic line of events. But be sure that thing could happen, that it doesn't topple everything that came before and make it all useless or irrelevant.
The very act of making a list can encourage new ideas. And some of those may surprise even you.
4) Record your own surprise.
You can only surprise yourself once (once per idea, that is), so be cognizant of those times that you feel surprise as you weave your plot. Make note of your reactions when you think of something. If it's Wow!, hold onto that because that initial reaction will fade as you wade into the muck of revision. Call your initial surprise up again when you're wondering about whether or not the plot twist you've read 2,456 times by now might be surprising to someone who encounters it for the first time.
Keep a writing journal for each book you write, for each project you seriously immerse yourself in. Record your frustrations and triumphs and dead-ends and patches of smooth sailing as you progress. These journals are always fun to look back on, but they can also help you while you revise, can help when you start your next book, and can be invaluable when you try to identify bad writing habits you'd like to break, or good ones that you'd like to encourage. This journal is the perfect place to keep track of those "Ah-ha!" moments you stumble upon in your own writing. And that way, even if it's something you have to cut in revision, you have the idea safely stowed away for use in a subsequent work.
5) Hand it off to someone else.
Check in with trusted readers. Ask them to read with an open mind, and after they read (don't influence their reading), ask them about whether or not they registered surprise. If they did, ask them if they felt alienated or stymied by disbelief. It's important to qualify their reaction so you can get a real sense of whether or not your approach succeeded on the page.
You can never be truly objective about your own work (even if you are one of the lucky ones who writes in a veritable trance). This is why outside feedback is crucial.
6) Sleep on it.
Start a dream journal, since some of the most surprising (and outlandish) things happen in dreams. However, the outlandish that might not work in your story can be tweaked and prodded and slimmed down until it fits into the normalcy suit that your book requires. So don't dismiss the workings of your overnight self too quickly.
If you don't record dreams right away, chances are you'll lose them by lunchtime. So keep the journal right by your bed and capture the dream on paper before your feet hit the floor.
Furthermore, if you've been thinking about your plot, really gnawing on a particular problem within it, your unconscious mind will work on it while you dream. Your nighttime brain, when you're attuned to it, is often a rich source for surprise.
7) Seek out surprise in action.
Read, read, read. Watch good TV (it's rare, but it's out there...and no matter how good, don't watch too much or you'll run out of time to write), see movies, surprise yourself with art or culture or sports or the news. Listen to that chatty co-worker rehash her mother-in-law's latest antics with fresh interest. But look at all of these things with a different eye, with the goal of identifying deftly-used surprise.
Keep track of the things that surprise you. You don't have to necessarily use them as-is in your work (for instance, a severed horse head in bed might ring the wrong bell for readers), but the essence of them will help shape your own artistic sensibilities as you vow to surprise your audience more often. And news stories can be great in formulating those first ideas, because you can sometimes use them nearly as they are, with just minor changes.
The more you expose yourself to thought-provoking pieces of creativity that employ surprise, the more likely you'll be able to deftly weave surprise into your own work.
8) Put a new spin (yours) on an old subject.
There have got to be thousands of books that deal with the very simple, yet complex subject of family. Yet Alice McDermott's novels, both respected and commercially successful, are about exactly that. Her subject doesn't surprise us, but her own nuanced spin on family, complete with inevitable-feeling surprises, provides us with fresh, new works about a much-written on topic. You can do the same with any subject, no matter how many titles have preceded yours.
Similarly, there have been loads of books and films on the Vietnam War. Yet Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, has enough surprising elements in it against a familiar backdrop of war that readers feel like they're encountering something new at the same time.
And let's not forget Gregory Maguire's brilliant "retelling" of certain fairytales (especially in his novel Wicked). The surprise here is that we learn all sorts of things about a character (the Wicked Witch of the West) we thought we knew all there was to know about.
9) Avoid Gods in the Machine.
When you're nearing the end of your manuscript and you're exhausted and you've had it up to here with the whole thing (and your family's ready to put you on the curb if you don't just finish it already), it's tempting to end the whole thing with a convenient -- though inauthentic and improbable -- device. In the throes of desperation and fatigue, you might grasp at something -- anything -- that evokes surprise and saves the day. Yes, ladies and gents, a deus ex machina.
This device of an external rescue (bearing no relation to the rest of the book's plot) swooping in to make things right may have worked on the ancient Greek stage, but it doesn't work in today's market.
Think organic, never artificial.
Your ending should be rich with surprise, but it needs to be an earned ending, one that makes sense considering all that preceded it. It should spring from the characters themselves, not from an artificial intervention that was irrelevant to the characters as they toiled along. Your plot twists and turns should follow an organic, this-could-really-happen path...even if your world is one where people painlessly change gender more often than they change their motor oil.
From "Write Through It," the monthly newsletter by Manuscript Rx.
www.ManuscriptRx.com
You may not like surprises in real life.
Take surprise parties, for instance: some of us hate the shock of dozens of people (some already inebriated) springing out at you with party hats and blowers and whoops and hollers the minute you get home from a draining day that left you bedraggled and looking your worst, when all you wanted to do was lower yourself into a hot bath and then crawl into bed.
But, whether or not you have an aversion to surprise in your daily life, you want and expect surprises when you read.
People read to escape the ordinary, to vicariously participate in the things they wouldn't encounter in their daily lives. So while you might call a week successful if it involved no surprises and just hummed along in the safety of predictable, planned routine, you'd toss a book aside for the same reason.
But how do we surprise our readers? Especially now, when the stakes are higher than ever? With so much television and movies and Internet and the astounding rate at which information is spread, is it even possible to really administer a good dose of surprise? If the phrase "There's nothing new under the sun" held true when it was first uttered decades ago, it must be even truer now, in our age of instant news, downloadable anywhere, anytime.
So if there is really nothing new, how do we incorporate surprise in our work so that readers will feel that particular brand of delight and satisfaction and read on, wanting more?
In his book On Writing, Stephen King says that a writer's job isn't to create a story idea from scratch, but instead to unearth the skeleton of one, to rediscover one of the many (but finite) stories already floating in our collective consciousness. And then put the one you choose on paper.
(Cue for you to breathe a big sigh of relief: nobody's expecting you to come up with a new color or suddenly start orbiting a new solar system.)
Actually, if you were able to conceive of something that's never been conceived of before, your readers might not feel grounded enough to make a meaningful connection with your ideas and characters. Although readers (and moviegoers and TV watchers) demand to be surprised (which goes hand-in-hand with being entertained), they also want to relate to what transpires. It needs to feel plausible. Yes, even if it's fantasy -- it must then feel logical within the fantasy world that you create...occurrences can't randomly violate the rules of that world just to throw a curveball at the reader.
Readers need to identify and understand the logic of what they read. Plus they want to be surprised.
Gosh, those readers sure are demanding.
Let's look at some effective ways to incorporate the element of surprise into your work.
(Note: Creating surprise by using experimental, off-the-beaten-path structure and form is risky and best left to published veterans, simply because most editors or agents won't even consider something "groundbreaking" or "trendsetting," structure-wise, from a relative novice. (Did you ever notice how the author's name is often much bigger than the title on a bestseller? This is because it's the author himself/herself who's actually selling the book, not the book itself. Therefore, editors are willing to allow the writers who represent scads of guaranteed sales much more latitude with their work -- including room for experimentation -- than they would for anyone else.) Therefore, we'll be talking about content here.)
Surprise is a way of bending the rules: delivering something unexpected. It's not breaking the rules of what could happen, but bending them in a refreshing, intelligent way.
Here are some tips for elevating the element of surprise in your writing:
1) Determine your book's particular reality, and start there.
As mentioned above, even stories that have little in common with reality as we know it (take The Lord of the Rings, for example), have to adhere to some type of rules -- rules within the work and the invented world itself -- so that the reader can make sense of things as s/he reads. Tolkien's reality, as it exists within the covers of his beloved series, becomes the reality while the reader is in it, and Tolkien doesn't scrap the rules of his world mid-way through because he wants to trick the reader into being surprised. (Readers hate being tricked, by the way. Surprised, yes. Tricked, no.)
On the planet Winter, in Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness, there is no such thing as gender as we know it; instead, individuals morph from female to male (and back again), depending on the cycle they're in. That most definitely breaks with our reality, but within the novel's, it marks a core truth. True, that scenario is surprising in and of itself, but the real sustained surprises in the book happen on a more intimate level, and involve an earthling's interaction with some natives of Winter.
So establish the parameters of your story's reality, and remain true to it, even as you reveal unexpected things throughout your journey.
2) Lead UP to surprise.
Tap your readers on the shoulder with surprise instead of bludgeoning them over the head first thing. If you open your book with a heavy dose surprise, it won't feel like surprise -- it will feel like assault.
If you start with the most majorly surprising thing, you have nowhere to go but down. Let your reader assimilate to the world you've created before you veer off into the unexpected. Roller coasters are fun (well, maybe for you...not for me) because they drop you after you've tamely coasted along for a bit.
Some writers employ a really big surprising event closer to the beginning of the book (not typically on the first page, though) and then spend the rest of the time unraveling smaller, unexpected things that explain or shore up the initial surprising incident. Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes is a good example of this.
And other writers lure the reader on with relatively small gifts of surprise throughout, and save the giant, breathtaking one for the very end. Two excellent examples of this are Meg Rosoff's What I Was and Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. Both novels use the "hidden in plain sight" surprise: the surprise that's revealed at the very end was there all along, was accessible to the reader if only s/he had thought along those lines. Those are particularly satisfying surprises, since they make you rush back to the beginning to look for those clues you may have missed.
Interrogate yourself when you look back on your first draft. Ask the hard questions like: Could this really happen? Does it make sense? Will the reader buy it? Don't let your desire to surprise -- which is different from raw shock -- let you lose sight of the need to hold the story together through the common ground of the piece's reality. Let the surprising events be things your reader could have come up with if s/he tried hard enough. Remember: the best endings are surprising and inevitable. Readers want to be surprised, but also want to feel in control, to a degree.
3) Make a list and check it twice (at least).
Think of all the given things that might happen to your characters. List them, mull them over, and then choose the least expected or the most ironic--the thing that doesn't immediately come to mind as you trace the organic line of events. But be sure that thing could happen, that it doesn't topple everything that came before and make it all useless or irrelevant.
The very act of making a list can encourage new ideas. And some of those may surprise even you.
4) Record your own surprise.
You can only surprise yourself once (once per idea, that is), so be cognizant of those times that you feel surprise as you weave your plot. Make note of your reactions when you think of something. If it's Wow!, hold onto that because that initial reaction will fade as you wade into the muck of revision. Call your initial surprise up again when you're wondering about whether or not the plot twist you've read 2,456 times by now might be surprising to someone who encounters it for the first time.
Keep a writing journal for each book you write, for each project you seriously immerse yourself in. Record your frustrations and triumphs and dead-ends and patches of smooth sailing as you progress. These journals are always fun to look back on, but they can also help you while you revise, can help when you start your next book, and can be invaluable when you try to identify bad writing habits you'd like to break, or good ones that you'd like to encourage. This journal is the perfect place to keep track of those "Ah-ha!" moments you stumble upon in your own writing. And that way, even if it's something you have to cut in revision, you have the idea safely stowed away for use in a subsequent work.
5) Hand it off to someone else.
Check in with trusted readers. Ask them to read with an open mind, and after they read (don't influence their reading), ask them about whether or not they registered surprise. If they did, ask them if they felt alienated or stymied by disbelief. It's important to qualify their reaction so you can get a real sense of whether or not your approach succeeded on the page.
You can never be truly objective about your own work (even if you are one of the lucky ones who writes in a veritable trance). This is why outside feedback is crucial.
6) Sleep on it.
Start a dream journal, since some of the most surprising (and outlandish) things happen in dreams. However, the outlandish that might not work in your story can be tweaked and prodded and slimmed down until it fits into the normalcy suit that your book requires. So don't dismiss the workings of your overnight self too quickly.
If you don't record dreams right away, chances are you'll lose them by lunchtime. So keep the journal right by your bed and capture the dream on paper before your feet hit the floor.
Furthermore, if you've been thinking about your plot, really gnawing on a particular problem within it, your unconscious mind will work on it while you dream. Your nighttime brain, when you're attuned to it, is often a rich source for surprise.
7) Seek out surprise in action.
Read, read, read. Watch good TV (it's rare, but it's out there...and no matter how good, don't watch too much or you'll run out of time to write), see movies, surprise yourself with art or culture or sports or the news. Listen to that chatty co-worker rehash her mother-in-law's latest antics with fresh interest. But look at all of these things with a different eye, with the goal of identifying deftly-used surprise.
Keep track of the things that surprise you. You don't have to necessarily use them as-is in your work (for instance, a severed horse head in bed might ring the wrong bell for readers), but the essence of them will help shape your own artistic sensibilities as you vow to surprise your audience more often. And news stories can be great in formulating those first ideas, because you can sometimes use them nearly as they are, with just minor changes.
The more you expose yourself to thought-provoking pieces of creativity that employ surprise, the more likely you'll be able to deftly weave surprise into your own work.
8) Put a new spin (yours) on an old subject.
There have got to be thousands of books that deal with the very simple, yet complex subject of family. Yet Alice McDermott's novels, both respected and commercially successful, are about exactly that. Her subject doesn't surprise us, but her own nuanced spin on family, complete with inevitable-feeling surprises, provides us with fresh, new works about a much-written on topic. You can do the same with any subject, no matter how many titles have preceded yours.
Similarly, there have been loads of books and films on the Vietnam War. Yet Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, has enough surprising elements in it against a familiar backdrop of war that readers feel like they're encountering something new at the same time.
And let's not forget Gregory Maguire's brilliant "retelling" of certain fairytales (especially in his novel Wicked). The surprise here is that we learn all sorts of things about a character (the Wicked Witch of the West) we thought we knew all there was to know about.
9) Avoid Gods in the Machine.
When you're nearing the end of your manuscript and you're exhausted and you've had it up to here with the whole thing (and your family's ready to put you on the curb if you don't just finish it already), it's tempting to end the whole thing with a convenient -- though inauthentic and improbable -- device. In the throes of desperation and fatigue, you might grasp at something -- anything -- that evokes surprise and saves the day. Yes, ladies and gents, a deus ex machina.
This device of an external rescue (bearing no relation to the rest of the book's plot) swooping in to make things right may have worked on the ancient Greek stage, but it doesn't work in today's market.
Think organic, never artificial.
Your ending should be rich with surprise, but it needs to be an earned ending, one that makes sense considering all that preceded it. It should spring from the characters themselves, not from an artificial intervention that was irrelevant to the characters as they toiled along. Your plot twists and turns should follow an organic, this-could-really-happen path...even if your world is one where people painlessly change gender more often than they change their motor oil.
From "Write Through It," the monthly newsletter by Manuscript Rx.
www.ManuscriptRx.com
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 05:37 pm (UTC)