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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12350
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12350
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In addition to Dale's excellent answer, try ending a chapter or a scene break on a phrase or sentence which can be slightly misinterpreted.

The example I'm thinking of is from Anne McCaffrey's _Moreta_. Briefly, people ride dragons, who have the ability to teleport in both time and space. When teleporting, the dragon is said to "go _between_," which is a place of blackness and cold, for three to five seconds. Too long, however, and the dragon is "lost _between_" — they never arrive at the destination.

**SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK'S END**

Near the end of _Moreta,_ one of the characters has been doing multiple time-hops (on the order of 15-minute increments) on an old dragon who isn't her bonded dragon. She's exhausted, the dragon is exhausted, and she gives the dragon the order to teleport without really clearly giving the dragon spatial and temporal coordinates.

> > Moreta looked at the sun and wondered with a terrible lethargy what time it was.
> > 
> > "Let's go, Orth."
> > 
> > They went _between._

And scene break.

I realized there was something... _off_ about that the first time I read it. I flipped forward several pages (cheating) to see if I was right, because something didn't sit right about that. And yes, it turns out that they go _between_ and don't come out again.

The phrase "They went _between_" is used all over the place in the Dragonriders series, but not on an ominous, scene-ending note like that. That's how the reader is surprised.

So take something innocuous like "They went through the door" or "over the hill" or whatever and set it up so that the reader doesn't realize until a moment later that it's much more than simply going through a door.

Original score: 1