Surprise!

Since my last post was about the importance of maintaining suspense throughout a story, I decided that this time I would go the opposite direction and talk about surprise. Yes, writing about surprises is much easier than the slow burn of a building dilemma, but that does not mean it's simple. More importantly, there can be wrong ways of introducing surprise that actually cheat the reader of a potentially enjoyable shock. 

Anyone who has watched a horror movie knows the fun of a good scare. The frightened main character  hears something out on the porch. The person approaches, opens the front door and sees nobody on the porch, breathes a sign of relief, then closes the only to reveal the menacing villain, Hawthorne, right behind it. Then there's the jump-scare - the same scene, but when the door closes it suddenly reveals... another character who we did not expect but not our villain Hawthorne. The jump-scare is the cheap scare that serves no purpose in driving the story but primes the audience for future surprises. We learn these tricks in writing for the same reason - one is to jump the story's action forward, the other keeps the reader on edge. However, there are good ways to do this, then there are cheap ways to do this.

Let's say we are now writing a story about the character with the front-door situation. We can engage the reader by focusing the descriptions of the door, the shadows, the rustling wind outside - all the senses of the character tuned in on that one element of the noise on the porch. We narrow the reader's attention so their focus is tunneled to that one event - what is on the porch? Then we offer the sudden opening of the door and the reveal that nothing is there. We let the reader experience one beat of relief with the main character, decompress the scene with them shutting the door, then have them turn around and see the cold eyes of Hawthorne as our bad guy takes over the scene. Fairly simple, straight-forward, and effective, but with the potential to be cheapened by the wrong words.

As writers get into their story, there is always the temptation to install a false sense of urgency or surprise with things like, "Suddenly," or "Without warning," to start a surprising scene. Effective writing creates the sudden change without actually using the word "sudden" because the writing shifts gears in a way that is jarring to the reader without telling the reader the scene is, in fact, jarring. Consider our scene above, that could be presented two ways:

"Dale breathed a sigh of relief, releasing his stress as he shut the door. Suddenly, from behind the door, Hawthorne stepped forward..."

"Dale breathed a sigh of relief, releasing his stress as he shut the door. Ready to go back to bed, he turned to meet the eyes of Hawthorne..."

The second example does not warn the reader of what is approaching with "suddenly" but instead makes the bad guy appear in exactly that manner. The sudden change is assumed, written in, and the reader gets a good start. Throwing any word to preempt that action basically warns the reader that something is coming, and takes the energy away from the event itself. It cheapens the scene and actually takes away some of the characterization of Hawthorne because he no longer created the surprise - "suddenly" did.

Surprise is an effective tool in writing if it's managed well. The best way to tell if you are creating a surprise moment is when you don't need to tell the reader they are going to surprise them - you just go off and do it.