Miscellanies: Subverting Expectations
Keep readers off balance. Think also about the story behind a story.
Over the next few posts, we’re going to wrap up our farrago of miscellanies and return to more concrete blocks of tips on writing. In the meantime, we want to talk to you today about subverting a reader’s expectations. In a recent post, we talked about “managing the informational drip” and how that is fundamentally about restraint in how you transmit information to a reader. If that lesson is to slowly drip information, this tip is about keeping an ace up your sleeve, keeping a reader off balance, and more than anything keeping a reader’s attention.
Subversion
Subversion is defined in the dictionary as “undermining a system of power or authority.” In this case, if that definition is to be applicable, the “system of power or authority” is a reader’s expectations. There are a great many ways to do this, but the overall point we want to make here is to give readers both what they bargained for and more than they bargained for. Exceed their expectations with something they didn’t expect and maybe haven’t experienced. In math, you’re taught that you can’t create a proof by example; proofs are to be built using logical mathematical argument. We’re kicking that rule out here—this ain’t math!—and using examples, because examples are a great way to make the abstract feel practical, concrete, apprehensible. At the outset: SPOILER ALERTS.
A Gentleman’s Murder
Coming into Christopher Huang’s debut novel, you expect a whodunnit like And Then There Were None. But what you get is something much darker, a character study in racial ostracization and war trauma. As mentioned above, the trick here was to give readers what they wanted and expected (a great golden age mystery) but also to give them something that they didn’t even know they wanted (a story about other in British society). Not every story can do this, and not every story needs to do this. But if you can find a way to do this, you have done something special. This is something we often talk about as “the story behind the story.” Think of your story as two paintings, one behind the other. You can fully appreciate the painting in front. But over time we are poking holes and slashes in it, revealing a second painting beneath the first. That’s the “story behind the story,” the story they didn’t expect, but the one that they can fall in love with. We’ll talk more about the “story behind the story” in future posts.
Kill Creek
Scott Thomas’s debut novel has been a roaring success. Why? Partially because it’s a meta love letter to the genre. Partially because it gives you the wish fulfillment of going to a haunted house with a great horror writer like Stephen King. Partially because it’s terrifying. Partially because the character work is so excellent. And partially because Scott’s just a really gifted prose writer. But also partially because it subverts the classical expectation of how plot progresses in horror novels. It broke a basic structure by having the protagonists leave the haunted house at the halfway mark. There is a really basic lesson here in not being afraid to break with classical structure. Once upon a time someone was the first to start in media res. Once upon a time someone was the first person to move from five acts to three acts. Don’t break things that work for no reason, but do think creatively about structure in order to subvert expectations. Even at a small level.
The Loving Wrath of Eldon Quint
Chase Pletts’s debut novel won not one but two SPUR awards. It’s an incredible story about identical twin bothers, one a farmer and the other an outlaw, on the Dakota frontier. This is a story about war trauma, about grief, and about a generation of settlers that were as much cannon fodder as manifest destiny. But what Chase does so brilliantly is lead you into the belief that one of these brothers is good and that the other is bad. Over the second and third acts of the book, however, Chase really subverts your understanding of who these men were and are. Where you find yourself heading into the third act is almost incomprehensible from where you were at the end of the first act. There’s an important lesson about the information drip here, too: if you knew everything about Eldon Quint and Jack Foss at the outset of the novel, Chase could never subvert your expectations the way he does.
If A Gentleman’s Murder subverts expectations using theme, and Kill Creek subverts expectations using plot, Eldon Quint really subverts expectations using character. These are not the only ways to do it, and virtually ever aspect of story can be used to subvert expectations. Ask yourself: what’s the element that will help you subvert expectations most effectively?
Cheers,
The Inkshares Team