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.

Resource fields, Sovereign Territory & Why oppression breeds Artistry (and other stories for children between 6 and 600)

Across all productive fields, humanity engages itself with two connected forces of nature: resource, and its worker. The worker works the resource and aligns it through various processes until it becomes a product which, should the process be successful, be of 'greater' value than the resource as it was.

[I say 'greater' with fingery quotations out of respect to mathematics. As 'maticians may inform you nothing ever changes its value by being a whole rather than the sum of its parts. 1,5 + 1,5 = 3, but 3 isn't greater for being a whole number. Nor does the invested process (+) somehow raise the value of 1,5 and 1,5. When I say it is of greater value, I mean it in the sense that it is organised more efficiently. More efficiently for what? For use as a resource in a secondary process.]

Career is in essence a declaration of resource. Doctors doctor flesh in order to reshape it into a more effective format. In a similar fashion engineers engineer wood and steel to shape machines. These are two examples of shapers of physical resource, the primary field of science.

But careers are not restricted to the sciences. Politics, while adhering to laws as science does, is not described as a species of shaping something humans see as a natural resource. Namely, it shapes humans. In particular, it shapes human resources by harmonising their emotive sentiments. The atypical, functional politician acts as a medium through which resources travel, redistributing them to the places they need be to have the most impact for production. The clearest example of shifting human resources is the Industrial Revolution, during which humans deterritorialised (converted their wealth from the resource of land to the resource of labour) and moved to monolithic cities where they had the best resources to work with. The other aspect of this industry is not in moving people to resources, but resources to people. In the same revolution, physical resources were moved from points of natural occurrence to centralised storage where complimentary components with no geographical synergy could at last react.

The trouble with this second kind of transportation (physical resource to human resource) is that if at any point during the transfer the resource stops moving, it falls into the hands of the politician. Another way to look at this is to picture government as an ocean. In its most high-functioning state, it exists solely as a medium for transport, declared international and outside of the control of any single ruler. Should anyone lay claim to any part of these international waters, they also assume ownership of any cargo ships moving through them, and all cargo aboard. Should they believe it necessary, they can seize said cargo as an asset of their rule and redirect it as they see fit. This could not happen if the state did not make a sovereign location out of what should have been a free territory. While larger organisations (political parties) often seek to dominate the movement of resources, smaller ones (corporations and businesses) operate as free merchants through the same ocean of government, organizing their operations by a different code of conduct (sadly often still restricted by sovereign law). In a lot of ways corporations are smaller, individualised governments, kept in power by the success with which they perform the task of managing production. This distinction is initially rejected on the terms that our government is viewed as our employee: we pay them a sum of money to provide us with a service, whereas being part of a corporation means consumers pay us a sum of money for providing them with a service. However if a corporation holds a monopoly over a market, it means that they will at some point have to sell that service to their own employees. If, for example, X became the sole producer of food, its employees would still pay X a certain amount every month to survive. This is no different from taxation. Income tax is an effective means of making citizens of a country its employees, because the country then benefits from whatever form of labour that citizen undertakes. As far as getting wages in return from the government, our corporate employers, I can only assume that it must cost an overwhelming amount to pay for the services I get from them, so much so that there is a deficit on my salary at the end of the month, and in everyone else's. Our only wages are cleverly disguised as untouched income, a part share in the product of labouring in the country’s interest.

In these purely economic terms, a politician could still be seen as a shaper of physical reality, because the corporate president still relies solely on the production of tangibles as proof of their competence. The other kind of politician - the dangerous one - is the one who sells human sentiment rather than actual organisation. The resource they try to shape is an intangible: faith in the ability to deliver on promises, the charisma to convince others of integrity without evidence of it, a suspension of reality in the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, rather than exactly equal to it and damaged by each negative integer.

In principle, the vote is a good idea. Modern democracy relies on the notion that every human being should have a say in who runs their corporation - they each hold an equal share of stock in the company. But beyond that, we still face the terrible limitation of existing within the jurisdiction of a corporate monopoly. All we really vote on is a merger that shuffles around the country’s management divisions. In a true democracy, we should be able to sell our shares and invest in whatever company/country we believe will pay us the most and provide us with the greatest benefit package. We should even be able to start our own companies, with our own constitution for interactions between its members.  Federations are one step towards this, in the same sense that one step south brings you closer to Antarctica. As far as that kind of democracy goes, should you choose to leave the country, you don't even get as much as a severance package. What's more with countries still existing as land-based territories – something we realised was ineffective since the Industrial Revolution – the prospect of founding a new enterprise is lost to the prospect of either violent revolution or squatting on a lonely sandbar.

In short, politics sucks.

The third kind of worker is the technician. The technician is a very basic kind of worker who isn't held in the same inventive sphere as other workers - they are the hands of nations. Many of them are very talented - they devote the whole of their understanding to a single resource, be it a form of software, a mechanical device or a tool such as a spade or a pickaxe. Sometimes the line between the technician and the inventor blurs, particularly when there is the way to improve the use of a resource that others haven't considered by being too far removed from the link in the chain of production. Other technicians are bad technicians, because they assume that a flaw in the resource denotes a flaw in reality - particularly regarding software. Through intimate contact with binary logic, they assume binary logic constitutes of all logic, and they see what is on their screen as true physical reality rather than a representation of a narrow set of variables in regard to a specific problem. The bad technician is the one who mails an invoice costing $10 in postage to demand an outstanding $2 from a client. The bad technician is the one who looks at two conflicting reports and insists one is true arbitrarily because it came from 'their' system, like when a banking notification says that a sum of money has come through from a client and that same client is blacklisted later for not paying money into that account. Pure AlphaVille.

Technicians are dangerous because they lose touch with the world outside of their particular resource, and ultimately struggle to interact with it. This is very possibly true of all workers operating in broader spheres. The scientist often cannot understand the differently-ordered mind of the artist, and the artist cannot accept the 'consensus makes true' attitude of the politician. Technicians are very plentiful in the world, and are narrowed the most through their restriction to singular resources. They are the most likely to be encountered, and the most likely to annoy people. Now you know why. Hope that helps.

So in terms of resources, we have now looked at Scientists for Physical resources, Politicians for Human (bonding) resources, and Technicians for Specialised resources. We might even add the Industrialist as the counterpoint to the technician, as they have an eye on whole areas of production in organising how one resource is transformed into another. Last we come to Artists; those who exemplify the use of Mental resources. While it is true that the mind is a tool used in working any kind of material, the artist is particularly concerned with shaping the mind, not using the mind to shape. They do this through a variety of media used to challenge norms of perception, which directly manipulate how the mind interprets data. While some see this simply as entertainment, it is impossible to ignore the effects games and TV serials have on perception. In the worst cases, these can be used to improve combat reflexes and desensitise soldiers to violence. In the best, games can improve strategic cognition, and books can make us aware of alternatives to social norms. I stress emphasis on the last bit.

Within the world of resources, there are only finite materials available to work. Politicians fight over voters just as scientists fight over hadron colliders. I believe that this more than anything else is what drives advanced species to specialised work, because after a certain level of efficiency portions of the population are left without a purpose. To regain one they must move into unclaimed territory, or compete for the resources which have already been claimed.

This is why it is likely technicians who specialised in hunting and gathering later moved on to science as agriculture. Once these resources were controlled, politicians would branch out into human resource in an attempt to maximise group efficiency. Then industrialists would develop to fill the void left by bad politicians by truly organising collected resources. Last of all would come the artist. With the physical world claimed, human relations networked into iron-tight castes, jobs taken by both the industrialist and the technician, the only unclaimed resource is that which existed in the primitive cyberspace between human minds. Artists attempt to occupy this space, pushing into its frontier as resources in other locations became increasingly restricted. We still do. This perhaps explains Charles Bukowski's claim that suffering is essential to art; the more oppressive the physical world, the fewer resources from which to eke out life. The more our human bonds give way to scorched earth, the more desperately we are driven into our minds (or out of them, into virgin psychoses) as the last provider of material which we might shape to regain a sense of purpose.

This too is probably true for all other forms of workers. Artists may even be viewed as oppressors for committing exhibitionism, an act of invading another's psyche through art. A love of science could be brought about by the infringement of art's chaos in a worker's life.

What this shows us is a trend reflected throughout human history running parallel to the matrix of our social development. Just as nations declared sovereign control of resources and forced out those who disagreed with that ownership (rebels, pirates and pariahs), only to have those same outcasts eventually contribute to independent states with codes of their own, so too do outcasts from ‘filled’ career groups move into others to ply their trade when resources are controlled. This is the danger of enforced monopoly. When it occurs, inhabitants of its region move out – like that same idea of a centralised city undergoing industrial revolution, but in reverse. The city empties, the monoliths are deconstructed. When that happens, fewer resource collisions occur and technologies fail to progress.

Doctors, masons, painters and prophets take heed: The story of Babel was misinterpreted. The only metropolis that will ever succeed is one where those of divergent tongue are not cast out and scattered. It was the unity of its language that made Babylon fall.