The Element of Surprise, Revelation, and Epiphany

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The other night at my critique group, I was thinking about what we writers are trying to accomplish when we withhold information. 

On more than one occasion, when our group has discussed the opening section of a story or an early chapter, there’ll be a general consensus that it isn’t working. Either there seems to be a piece of critical information that is alluded to but never revealed or, less specifically, it’s just not engaging. In the later example, usually the characters are motivated, but we don’t know why or the conditions of their motivations seem trivial.

When these problems come up in discussion, the answer from the writer is almost always along the lines of, “Oh, there’s this shatteringly brilliant piece of information that will be revealed in the NEXT section or chapter or whatever.” So, you know, just hang on because it’s going to be AMAZING! The problem is, no matter how cool the world of your story is or how fascinating your characters, people won’t keep reading on the good faith that something great is going to happen somewhere down the line. 

Now, for a certain kind of story the withholding and revelation of a crucial bit of information is what it is all about. Let’s call it a “twist story.” For me, twist stories are more closely related to jokes and riddles. These can be fantastic stories and they have a long history in the genre. The Twilight Zone made a cottage industry of producing them. But, writer beware, their success in the past, make them tricky to pull off today. TheTurkey City Lexicon even has a bullet point on the topic, titled “The Jar of Tang,” referencing a Twilight Zone episode. Check it out to see the Lexicon’s explanation of the difference between a story conceit and an idea. 

More often with the stories I’ve read and critiqued, it’s clear that the writer is not attempting to write a twist story. If you're not writing a twist story, then it’s worth your time to think about how to use the facts of your story to best effect. *

Suspense and revelation 

Many good stories often (more often than you might think, once you go looking) tell you right at the beginning what’s going to happen. Turns out revealing information is often just the thing we need to get them emotionally hooked into the story.

I’ll let Hitchcock, the master of suspense, lay it out for you:

"There is a distinct difference between suspense and surprise, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, Boom! There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. "Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode! "In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed."

What Hitchcock is talking about here is dramatic irony. This is when the audience or the reader is privy to information that the characters don’t have. Writers from the ancient Greek playwrights to Stephen King have used this tool, because it is such a great way to generate tension and emotion. 

It’s true that readers read on because they want to know more. This can be a trap when a writer thinks that they can build suspense by withholding crucial facts relating to the plot and characters. When I’m reading stories (that are not “twist” stories), it’s not the WHAT that holds my attention, but the HOW and the WHY.

Revelation and Epiphany

To take things a step further, there is also the idea of revelation and what James Joyce called epiphany. Joyce recorded surprising moments that, 

"[S]eemed to have heightened significance and to be surrounded with a kind of magical aura."

To me, epiphany in writing is a kind of alchemy where an unexpected moment or image creates an emotional response. These are the stories that take the idea of revelation beyond the surface facts of the plot to engineer a shift in perception for the reader. These rare gems make me see the world a little differently after I’ve read them.

"He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured." 

– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artistas a Young Man

A Plague of Cliches, and How to Avoid Them - or Not

Gil J Wolman

Last week I talked about originality and authenticity, but just because writers don't have to worry about coming up with an original idea, doesn't mean that we are immune to cliche.

TV TROPES
Of course, you can go to TV Tropes and see just how popular a particular idea or trope is by how many entries are listed. While this will give you some idea, it's not always a good indicator of what ideas are tired and which ones are vastly popular because they are tapping today's  zeitgeist. 

READ
As Stephen King (and many others) said, to be a good writer you have to be a reader. Reading around the genre you're writing in will really help you know what's trending and what's beginning to feel played. Of course, everything that you'll find in the bookstore and the library has been published, so on some level it's passed minimum requirement for originality (yes, even zombies and vampires - see zeitgeist). If you want to take your reading to the next level:

READ SLUSH
Reach out to the editors of your favorite independent genre zines. (you are reading them already, right?) They always need slush readers. There is no better way to become familiar with what's being done, and what's being done to death. If you don't have the time for that kind of unpaid extracurricular activity, there are a couple excellent resources out there. 

STRANGE HORIZONS
Things We've Seen Too Often

Here are just the first four items on Strange Horizons' excellent list:

1. Person is (metaphorically) at point A, wants to be at point B. Looks at point B, says "I want to be at point B." Walks to point B, encountering no meaningful obstacles or difficulties. The end. (A.k.a. the linear plot.)
2. Creative person is having trouble creating.
   1. Writer has writer's block.
   2. Painter can't seem to paint anything good.
   3. Sculptor can't seem to sculpt anything good.
   4. Creative person's work is reviled by critics who don't understand how brilliant it is.
   5. Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.
3. Visitor to alien planet ignores information about local rules, inadvertently violates them, is punished.
   1. New diplomat arrives on alien planet, ignores anthropologist's attempts to explain local rules, is punished.
4. Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real.
   1. In the end, it turns out it was all a dream.
   2. In the end, it turns out it was all in virtual reality.
   3. In the end, it turns out the protagonist is insane.

There are 51 items on this list. Read them all. It's a class in itself. In the end, this list isn't so much about overused thematic tropes as it is about the multitude of pitfalls that a newbie writer can fall into. 

THE TURKEY CITY LEXICON 
The Lexicon grew out of the Turkey City Workshop to give attendees a common language for critique.  Learning how to talk about writing techniques is an important developmental step. The items on this list illustrate the kinds of missteps that, when embedded in your prose, will give your story a hackneyed feel no matter how brilliant the other elements might be. Entries include:

Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses.

Dischism: The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome.

As far as thematic cliches, sometimes they can feel like a gauntlet thrown down, and I'm all for bucking the system. If you're going to try to spin gold out of a leaden trope, you'll have a better chance if you'r familiar with what you're up against. And, if you bring your most original, un-cliched writing to bear on your story, you might be able to write something that is the exception to the rule. 

Joshua Kemble via Threadless. Get this, or his League of Cliche Super-Villains as a tee-shirt for a wearable reminder!

No Such Thing as an Original Idea

The Six Neighborhoods of Tropes *

Science Fiction is a genre that puts a premium the Original Idea, but I think its worth clarifying what exactly that is, especially for writers.

Often, after I get a kernel of an idea, I go over to TV Tropes to see how it's been handled in other places. If you don't know, TV Tropes is a massive wiki that catalogs storytelling conventions and devices across all sorts of creative and popular media. But be careful! It's dangerous territory. Every article links to several others, creating a maze more labyrinthine than anything Daedalus could have imagined. Seriously, that picture on the top is a map of TV Tropes links. According to Uther Dean,
TV Tropes will Ruin Your Life. So, consider yourself warned.

I don't shy away from this kind of thematic research, because, as Solomon said:  

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 NKJV

And I find this comforting.

When I'm working up a new idea I find it useful to see the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of approaches to an idea (trope) that I'm working with. I'm not there to steal, though there is nothing wrong with stealing if you do it right. Austin Kleon has written a whole book about how to Steal Like an Artist.

by Austin Kleon

And filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch explains it much better than I can:

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”"

No matter what you're creating, it's not about coming up with an Original Idea, because it's not really about the idea at all. It's about the idea + you.

Take any old idea that's been expressed a million times over and dig deep inside yourself, find and reveal your own personal, human experience of it, and people will call it "original."

Jean-Luc Godard

* In the information is beautiful, but the subject tangential to this post category: check out this multi-part study about the nature of information on the Internet, using TV Tropes as its model. Here's the opening quote:

"HP Lovecraft popularized a certain type of malevolent force, something so massive and powerful and unconcerned and out-of-scale with humanity that we could not even understand the whole of it.  Instead, his characters would–before inevitably going mad–only experience a small portion of these beings, typically some kind of horrid extrusion into our reality.  There is much that these Eldritch Abominations have in common with the kind of massively peer-produced content that floats like icebergs in the Internet."