Surprise me (please)

Books on Writing.

The Sense of an Ending?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
In reading crime novels, I frequently find that I guess what's going to happen with characters long before it does.

For instance, I'm currently enjoying one of the excellent Hap & Leonard novels by Joe R. Lansdale. Honky Tonk Samurai has a plot involving a missing girl, who may have been working for a high-class prostitution operation, which makes most of its money from blackmailing clients. Her granny hires Hap & Leonard to track her down, and asking around they pay a shady character $1,000 for information. This career criminal tells them of a dreaded assassin who works for the extortionists, called the Canceler who garrotes his victims with a wire, before slicing off their testicles to keep as souvenirs. The snitch says he needs the pay-off to flee town. When I read that, I thought "He'll stick around, be killed and end up in the trunk of his car—without his balls." Sure enough, 20 chapters later, that's exactly what happened.

I wasn't that disappointed, for I'm familiar with plotting my own crime stories, and I must have read a couple of thousand crime novels in the last 50 years. I even had a glimmer of satisfaction at having guessed what would happen—something that fans of any genre enjoy—it pays to state the expected sometimes.

What's more rewarding, is when a complete surprise happens...a believable one, I mean, not something so wildly improbable that the reader gets annoyed. As thriller writer John Buchan advised, "A good story should have incidents, which defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible."

I've been trying to think of novels I've read recently, where something totally unexpected happened. Dennis Lehane's Since We Fell begins with a surprise, as the protagonist is killed by his wife: 'On a Tuesday in May, in her thirty-fifth year, Rachel shot her husband dead. He stumbled backward with an odd look of confirmation on his face, as if some part of him had always known she'd do it.'

The plot is convoluted, a tangle of conspiracies, which throws out a few shocks, although the opening with the apparent murder of the husband is explained away with one of the most far-fetched tricks I've come across in fiction.

I should say, that Dennis Lehane fabricated one of the best twists in modern psychological suspense writing, with the ending of Shutter Island revealing that the protagonist is really a mentally unbalanced murderer who's fantasised the story.

A few weeks ago, I read Adam Hamdy's thriller Pendulum, which uses the writing technique of having most chapters end with the hero being thrown into jeopardy. It was skilfully done, but preposterous at times, as he's involved in so many violent fights that he makes James Bond look like a wimp. The author gleefully kills off some engaging characters, which wrong-footed me a bit.

When it comes to best-selling novels, praised for their edge-of-the-chair tension and unpredictable plots, I found that my jaw didn't drop over Gone Girl, The Girl On The Train, Fight Club or Cara Hunter's Close To Home. Part of the problem for me was, that far from being books I couldn't put down, I was so repelled by the unlikable characters, that I didn't much care what happened to any of them! As Mark Twain said: “The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”

Maybe I've become unshockable from being a writer. I wrote about this drawback in an old thread:

https://colony.litopia.com/index.ph...-writer-spoil-your-enjoyment-of-reading.2945/

Well, I'll be damned, I've been surprised in a slightly spooky way, for I just finished reading Honky Tonk Samurai to find it has an ending identical to my recently completed novel The Dead Need Nobody—the hero gets stabbed in the last chapter and is at death's door on the final page. I'm glad I finished my story before reading it, as it might have forced me into altering my work. :confused:

It all makes me wonder if the surprises I've put in my Cornish Detective novels will work on my readers. I try to throw at least one you-didn't-see-that-coming incident into each story. For example, in An Elegant Murder, my detective is working on his garden, thinking about investigations, when a mountain lion leaps over the fence and stalks towards him. There'd been rumours of exotic big cats on the loose, and various savaged livestock corpses have been found, but suddenly he has dramatic proof of their existence. I took myself by surprise writing that confrontation, which I hadn't planned, so maybe the spontaneity will catch the reader out.

What books surprised you?

Do you try to hoodwink your readers with twists and turns?

Are there any supposed surprises in great literature that you saw coming or that you just couldn't believe?

images


 
I did use a surprise time twist in my first book that I try to give clues to for the reader to figure out. But somehow I don't think it's as sophisticated as I'd like to believe it is or not at least as the adult crime novels that you read, I imagine.

Nevertheless, I found if I can amuse just one person, including myself, I've succeeded as far as I'm concerned. And that amusement can involve surprising myself.

In my second book, I've decided to incorporate another tool that I enjoy exploring. That is the concept of fractals in both the physical world and the abstract parallels of human behaviour through history. I don't know how it's going to come together but I've got the faith that it will. My name happens to be Faith in Arabic - somehow that's relevant to this post. Somehow.
 
I wish I were better at surprise endings ... I like to read them, but whenever I write them, I think, 'well, that's stupid.' One of my unpublished books has a surprise ending that my daughter thought was diabolical: boy gets girl, as expected, but then discovers they can't touch (a magical incompatibility--she's deadly to him). Naturally, their relationship is doomed. It goes to hell in book 2.
 
I did use a surprise time twist in my first book that I try to give clues to for the reader to figure out. But somehow I don't think it's as sophisticated as I'd like to believe it is or not at least as the adult crime novels that you read, I imagine.

Nevertheless, I found if I can amuse just one person, including myself, I've succeeded as far as I'm concerned. And that amusement can involve surprising myself.

In my second book, I've decided to incorporate another tool that I enjoy exploring. That is the concept of fractals in both the physical world and the abstract parallels of human behaviour through history. I don't know how it's going to come together but I've got the faith that it will. My name happens to be Faith in Arabic - somehow that's relevant to this post. Somehow.
How interesting. My WIP involves human behaviour echoing and recapitulating over centuries, with Fibonacci primes as a subtheme.
 
I totally agree with you about Girl on the train and Gone Girl, really unlikeable characters, much like everybody in 'The Slap' which I found tedious beyond belief . . . But hey, what do I know? The books sold in their bucketloads, so perhaps characters don't have to be likeable.

I tend not to try and surprise people in the events which happen in a story, but more in how a particular genre is approached - I try to step away from the familiar tropes and do something a bit different. For example, my most recent novel was ostensibly about murders in a supermarket and so followed the general line of a thriller, but was in fact more about the nature of heroism, shifting the perception of who the MP/hero was throughout the book, with the real hero only surfacing towards the end (she'd been a minor character up to a particular point).

But as no-one wanted to publish it, I refer to my previous remark - what do I know? Although perhaps William Goldman's right - "Nobody knows anything," so at least I'm in good company there!
 
How interesting. My WIP involves human behaviour echoing and recapitulating over centuries, with Fibonacci primes as a subtheme.

Excellent!

I've been pondering over the individual who becomes aware of patterns in human behaviour (e.g groupthink, follow a trend, follow leaders with no question). The phenomenon of awareness itself may be enough of a key to take one out of that pattern. The non-conformists, the outliers.

And what happens to such people?..do they go mad for seeing the world differently as they are inevitably treated different (ostracised, weirdos) or do they use that power to steer the masses for good or *insert cackle* evil.

Afterthought note: Advertisers could be said as using such patterns in the unawares to benefit from financially.
 
I try to incorporate at least one big twist or unexpected surprise (good or bad) in all my books, usually right at the end, almost on the last page if possible. I love it.
If I can subtly drop in the odd clue, here and there in the book so that the reader, when they reach the twist, say to themselves "Ah-hah! So that's why, blah, blah, etc!" then I've done what I wanted.
But it's got to be "real". It's got to be possible and feasible and not highly coincidental or "unbelievably lucky." That would not be being fair to the reader, in my book. You can't have the psyco, axe-wielding, maniac whose just about to deliver the final death blow to your trapped protagonist, suddenly clutch his chest and die of a heart attack. The reader would rightly feel cheated. Even if you had previously mentioned that he suffered from a heart condition.
 
I'm on the other side. I am tired of writers trying to do sleight-of-hand with their readers and throw me plot twists, especially in the last 20-50 pages. To me it reeks of "look at what a brilliantly tricky writer I am, you didn't see THAT coming didja?" and takes me out of the narrative. As often as not, it involves people behaving in a way inconsistent with their characters and plot resolutions that defy our intuitions about human behavior in general. I admit that I'm not one of those people who read "whodunnits" with the goal of figuring the answers before the reveal; I read to be entertained and just let myself get immersed in the scenes and drawn along with the characters and I have no interest in a battle of wits against the author.
 
Not sure if the book is that surprising but I am currently half-way through 'American Tabloid' by James Ellroy and every chapter proves to be more spell binding and stomach churning than the last. I was convinced that nothing could out cynic me but I am a mere novice compared to how his characters act. Perhaps the best, and most disturbing, book I have read in a long long time. I know it has been around for a while now (first published in 1995) but it has left me breathless with characters who you think are meant to be the good guys but who then do something so awful that you have to reassess everything you felt about them. Utter genius.
 
Not sure if the book is that surprising but I am currently half-way through 'American Tabloid' by James Ellroy and every chapter proves to be more spell binding and stomach churning than the last. I was convinced that nothing could out cynic me but I am a mere novice compared to how his characters act. Perhaps the best, and most disturbing, book I have read in a long long time. I know it has been around for a while now (first published in 1995) but it has left me breathless with characters who you think are meant to be the good guys but who then do something so awful that you have to reassess everything you felt about them. Utter genius.

James Ellroy is one of my crime writing heroes. There have been various plans to film American Tabloid, none of which have materialised; I doubt that any movie version would be true to the cynicism of the book.

James Ellroy’s American Tabloid: will it ever make it to the big screen?

Q&A: James Ellroy, author
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Books on Writing.

The Sense of an Ending?

Back
Top