The Element of Surprise

Nothing really makes a story sparkle like a zap of the unexpected. It doesn’t really matter what genre it’s in – we love to be led by the nose to a delicious banquet, only to discover that we will be dining on our dance partners. Or some such thing.

Writing is really about telling people about what they know, as observers into another world. But half way through a book, once the setting has been adequately constructed so as to make the reader feel like they understand that world, you need to remind them of how much they don’t know: there’s still half a book to get through, and if you just keep throwing information like character names and feelings and opinions at them, they’re going to become obese sacks of knowledge who politely decline a bite of the next chapter. You have to smack them over the head with your words and make them know they understand Nothing. They’ve been passive observers, treating everything you tell them with mild, polite curiosity. Lie to them, immediately. Convince them that it’s about more than taking on the perspective of the protagonist: they need to decide for themselves what’s going on. They need to digest what they’ve read, and hold out their plate for the next reserve.

It can be hard to come up with ideas, though, especially because the most effective surprises come with lots of hints that aren’t recognized as hints until much later, at a time when they themselves become obvious. When engaging a surprise, a writer has to function both as an unaware reader and an omniscient narrator – and it’s not easy, sincerely pretending you don’t know what’s on the menu. Especially when the person you are attempting to fool is yourself.

As such, there are two ways to approach the difficultly of surprise effectively. In the first (Storytelling Mode) you write passively, as a deranged psychopath who doesn’t actually know what’s going to happen on the next line. Will you kill the main character? Maybe. Will there be some unexpected incest? Probably. You can safely set aside the blame by claiming that you are just a conduit for these things, and you don’t really have much say in the outcome of the story.

The second option is exactly the reverse: plan everything. Every little detail. There are so many little hidden connections waiting in the wings, things you can refer to offhand to make the reader put the pieces together, they may even derive a measure of satisfaction from seeing everything play out as expected. Until you insert a surprise technique.

Techniques are the little tricks writers steal, improve or innovate to give a story structure. For the Element of Surprise, they have to come from outside of the pattern you have already laid down in your work. It’s a sudden change – the moment when the bucket of ice you’ve been nudging towards the edge of the roof topples off it and drenches or brutally decapitates the person beneath it. Many exist. Some have existed for so long, they are no longer effective. Others count on the fact that techniques have been around long enough to be predictable and pretend to be them before becoming some other oddity entirely. Learn them. They will help.

The “Sudden Relation”

People love geneaology. It’s probably some kickback from a former age when blood meant the difference between peasantry and nobility. It’s certainly still a matter of scandal in our own age where incest or bastardry is frowned upon and the products thereof treated with great suspicion. There is a particular phrase which is still popular in mainstream culture, and that is ‘missing heir’. With it come the prospects that all troubles will vanish in an instant, which for some reason people find attractive in a story, even though it’s really just a lazy way for a writer to tie up loose ends.

But it is popular.

People have come to associate specialness with genealogy. Whether it’s an ancient magical bloodline that implies they are more powerful or important than others, or the belonging to a family that is identified for its protagonists, birth matters. Not really, and if you’re a particularly cutting edge writer you’ll go about trying to convince people of the exact opposite, but in the way we humans like to group things, you can’t go wrong with sudden relation.

Why was the phrase, “Luke, I am your father.” such a popular twist?

Because horror! By this point in the Star Wars franchise Luke Skywalker already had his group: an identified cadre of social misfits trying to bring down an identifiable evil. Luke already had a father: a Jedi of the Light Side, like himself, which he aspired to be like.

Then in a moment of trying to reconnect with his son, Darth Vader shattered that illusion. Luke was suddenly born of something evil, was physically connected to the Evil group he had devoted himself to fighting. His mentor Obi Wan had hid the truth from him, as had his other mentor, Yoda. Did that mean they suspected he was evil, too? Were they trying to condition him against his very nature?

You’ll already see here the immense power of the Element of Surprise: it makes the audience question everything they know up to that point. It’ll make them read further, demanding an explanation. Curiosity is a wonderful thing.

The “We forgot to mention this in our mission statement…”

This is a wonderful technique born from spy thrillers and war novels. What you do is, you throw the protagonist in with a group of people who you call the good guys. You make them likeable enough, go into their characters details as much as you need to make them likeable. Then you get the protagonist involved in whatever it is that group does: deliver some important letters, steal a priceless relic, play a prank on the identified ‘evil’ group. Things in the good group are going great! and it’s all thanks to the intervention of the protagonist! And then –

EVIL. Sometimes with Nazis.

The protagonist puts two and two together and realizes that they’ve been working for the wrong side all along. The carefree, fun-loving friends they made, so craftily structured as amoral characters winning easy victory, turn out to be the ones the protagonist initially set out to defeat. And there hangs the tale: will the protagonist be able to recover their moral center, atoning for all the things they did under the belief that it was ‘good’? Even if it’s really, really hard? Will there be enough chapters left to do it?

There are some really good examples of this out there, and my favourite ones happen underwater. It was particularly well done in the Disney movie Atlantis, where in one short sequence the characters the protagonist fought so hard to earn the trust of turn on him and appear almost monstrously transformed. It’s also an interesting case because ‘redemption’ includes swaying the majority of the amoral villains to turn coat, just as he has.

What works about this technique is that it makes the audience feel guilty. They may not have taken an active part in the treachery, but they realize they’ve been rooting on the bad guys this whole time. And because they aren’t active in the story, and they themselves can’t atone for that guilt, their only real choice is to stick with the protagonist, supporting it through its redemption, and feel absolved through the protagonist’s success.

The Wrong Nemesis

It’s an easy enough mistake to make. Some people are just so unctuous and swooping, they naturally appear to be the enemy. The protagonist develops an abiding hatred of them, projects all the evils of the world upon them – only to realize, at the final confrontation, that their anger blinded them to the real nemesis. It had nothing to do with the unctuous swoopy one at all.

This is a great technique to use in combination with a shoal of red herrings. You can gloss over all the moments that made the false antagonist suspect, and lightly flit over all the truths that point at the real one. It’s one of those things that teaches readers not to invest in the perspective of the protagonist, but to trust their own, unbiased judgement of events. It’s not only sneaky, it’s educational.

The example you’re probably all thinking of is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or if you are American, Harry Potter and the Voodoo Pebble. Quirrel and Snape shall go down in history for this one, especially Snape because he plays at being the nemesis both often and well.

If you can remember what it was like to read the chapter ‘The Man with Two Faces’ almost twenty years ago, well done. I think my own reaction was, “No. Wait. What? Is that a typo? No… wait… WHAT? No… HOW???”

It is the perfect way to get the pulse racing for a final encounter. The hero goes in prepared… and turns out to be decidedly unprepared. For a moment the reader loses all faith in the protagonist’s ability, and in their own ability to predict an outcome. They’re hooked.

And then there’s the chapter after in which you have to explain exactly ‘what’ and ‘how’.

The Resurrection Misdirection

This one is tired, and begs to be shot in the face so it never has to be used again. But somehow it keeps coming back.

Pretending to kill a character only to bring them back to life, or leaving the reader in suspense as to whether they are dead or only mortally injured, is something we very generally expect these days. We are tragically desensitized to the sudden murder of our heroes, knowing that it’s never ‘really’ permanent. If you are considering using this one, please stop. It has been worn out. There are now enough variations on this technique to account for the fact that we expect it, and it no longer holds The Element of Surprise.

It’ll still work and make you sell, but you won’t have earned it because you are pandering to the docile mainstream.

The “Oh, I’m about to die, so pay attention” Trick

This is a clever way of approaching conflict in a story. Instead of killing a character, the writer brutally murders the suspense. They make it known that one of the characters will die, often casually slipping this in at the end of a chapter. Instead of the nibbling anxiety over whether the character is dead or not, the audience ruminates over the time and manner of their death, and how well they are using the time they have left on earth. You can make that character get into all sorts of trouble, examining spinning blades or bathing in shark-infested bathtubs, and every time, the audience will clench its gut and wait for the oncoming evisceration. If you are kind you will let it happen, and not pull some phoney Resurrection Misdirection trick at the end of the charade. They deserve that much.

This was quite masterfully done in American Beauty, in which there was no question of the character in question’s fate, but caused twists and turns in the audience’s perception and interpretation right up until the big bang.

The trick clicks when you have managed to make your audience foster wrongful prejudice. This means that they look at one thing you’ve told them about the future (Which character will die/whatever) and the things that they know about the story up until a certain point (who hates who, who has a motive to precipitate the chain of events) and directly relate them to one another. You set up the conditions for their deductions.

Then, because this is all about The Element of Surprise, you make sure that the deduction is incorrect. Have something else happen to prove the prediction. Let them know in no uncertain terms that you, the writer, are indispensable in spooning out the story. They’ll hate that, and likely keep trying to predict things to get you back for tricking them. Which is great for when you put out the sequel.

The Actual Death

As The Resurrection Misdirection has become so popular in the world of fiction, it is oddly, disturbingly shocking when a character does actually die. Most of the time when this happens on television, it is because an actor has had ‘creative differences’ and needs to have their character conveniently disappear so they can seek out employment elsewhere.

It takes a certain cold cruelty to off a character. We spend a lot of time shaping them just right, and like a favoured toy, it is difficult to set one aside. Especially since if you want an Actual Death to be effective, it really does have to be a favourite character. One of the good guys – the one your readers will feel a bit ill to consider the prospect of outliving. And no takesies backsies. They can’t leave a letter saying ‘If you are reading this, then I am dead’ (because honestly who besides me actually does that?), or magically pop up from the grave for a cup of tea. You aren’t trying to gently ease the audience into the idea of that character being gone, you are setting up a condition where no-one pictured them dying, and they died anyway. It is a sudden death, a tragedy.

Yes, it’s cruel. And a waste of something brilliant. But by doing this, what the writer creates is a martyr, and everyone loves a martyr, and fights for their memory even while cursing their foolishness. The audience keeps reading for the same reason we cling to memories of the deceased: to make sense out of what happened to them. To make their life and death mean something.

A seasoned master at this is GRRrrrr Martin. He murders characters you’d think central to the plot with casual, brutal disregard. He locks them up, gives them every chance at escape, and still kills them. Be glad that he became a writer.

But perhaps what is so great about the way Martin kills is that he reverses the tired Resurrection Misdirection. He feeds the reader lists and lists of characters, tells you how they are related to everyone else, what their politics are and how they darn their socks – and then squishes them. There’s this odd sense of relief that comes when you realize that you can forget the name and devote yourself to contemplating the other players of the Game of Thrones. He engenders bloodlust, particularly for a few hated characters. That isn’t The Element of Surprise so much as it is anticipation – but what does surprise the audience is that they can feel this bloodlust, that they can derive some satisfaction from the finality of death. It’s a bitter, twisted kind of self-discovery, but a legitimate one, and a powerful technique.

The Genre Swap

This is a technique best used either directly after the introduction or as soon as the setting has been laid out. It is exactly what the name implies – the sudden interchange from one genre to another. A common one is a switch from romance to horror, or romance to suspense, which is a thrill and delight to the phobo-erotics out in the world. But this one is hard to pull off in cinema, where people – especially people with kids – like to know exactly what they’re in for. It works a bit better with novels, which have by and large avoided censorship and age restriction.

Grass is a very fine example of an effective genre swap. It starts off with a slightly dull, male protagonist setting off to a planet as a diplomat, bringing along his conservative, church-going family to stay with him. The overtones are heavily aristocratic, almost archaic, as though the science-fiction aspect were a minor consideration. It has all the even-tempered civility of an 18^th century penny novel.

But then, unexpectedly, the diplomat’s even-tempered wife comes to the foreground as the real protagonist, proving herself to be much more bold and adventurous than anyone imagined. The story ends as a colourful romp with bestial alien sex, heroic feminism, and rebellious action sequences.

In short, Genre Swap is about adjusting your perception to find a real story hidden behind the boring, ordinary one everyone expects. The clever thing about it is that it lures in a disheartened, apathetic audience who really isn’t expecting anything new, and then lights their skirt on fire. By pretending to be mainstream and then adamantly rejecting itself, it wakes the audience up and excites them. It makes them want to read, not passively, but in search of all those things they missed by being asleep.

Granted, this will also make the audience critical, so be aware that you can’t let your standards slip, once you’ve poked your reader with a stick.

The Hole in the World

Not unlike breaking the fourth wall, breaking a hole in the world exposes characters within the story to the principles surrounding it. This doesn’t necessarily mean they become aware of an observer – it is more like handing the characters an essay on the symbols and meanings of their own performance up until that point. Sometimes a godlike character appears and explains everything, like in The Matrix: Reloaded. Sometimes a character is literally left staring through a hole in the fabric of their world, and both they and the audience are left momentarily stunned, trying to reorganize all their assumptions about the world up until that point. The audience’s attention is held because they want an explanation, and they want to know what’s on the other side of the hole, bless them.

An example of this is in The Subtle Knife when Will finds the dimensional cut through Hollywood Boulevard. He approaches it with a kind of academic curiosity. It is doubly effective because he so desperately needs to escape from his world, and a chance to do so appears. It mixed two important elements: surprise, and salvation. By doing so, it suggests that taking a risk, opening up to the unexpected, is a valuable attitude for the audience as well.

Futile Speculation

Part of preparing for the use of The Element of Surprise is setting the stage for it. Mostly this means misdirection. At any point in the story, characters should be allowed to talk to one another about what is happening in their world. They should be able to look at the way the wind blows and prepare for the future, not just remain static in one activity, waiting for it to smack into them.

And they should always, always be wrong about it.

A good way to go about this is to avoid alluding to the possibility of any surprise. Make your characters suppose what would happen if everything went exactly as expected according to what they know, discounting what they don't. This should present it self in terms of cause and effect, or ‘if this happens, then this will happen. If the opposite happens, then that will happen’. Really just cast some opinions about to distract your audience from forming their own ideas outside of those lines. If they see the story coming together before you get there, you’ve lost the element of surprise.

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I really hope to find more of these as I keep reading, but these seem to be the basics that writers should know about. And hey – get creative. A Sudden Relation doesn’t need to be purely about genealogy. It can be about significant objects, or characters who have met other protagonists in the past. A Genre Swap doesn’t need to escalate the pace of a story, just to focus on something truer and braver than what is originally presented. Play, fiddle, explore. There was never a technique that wasn’t improved without stepping boldly out of its intended use.