Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

How do Red Herrings work?

+0
−0

The more distractions you have in your narrative, the fresher the plot/character twist. They were used in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and the Harry Potter series, to keep the audiences focussed on a different ‘conclusion’. How are they done, exactly?

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37765. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

0 comment threads

1 answer

+0
−0

Stories run on anticipation. A reader keeps reading because the anticipate that certain things are going to happen, and that we are making progress towards those things happening. By and large, the reader reads on because they anticipate the enjoyment of watching those thing happen, and thus enjoy the anticipation itself. When the reader finds a story boring it is because they don't anticipate anything happening that is likely to interest them.

Good writing, therefore, is about creating and maintaining that sense of anticipation and then following through and delivering what was anticipated.

A red herring creates a false anticipation. It suggests that A is going to happen, but B happens instead. There is no special technique for creating red herrings. You simply tell the story as if it were leading up to A happening. But then you twist the story and have B happen instead.

The perils of red herrings should be obvious. If the reader is anticipating A, and their pleasure in reading depends on the anticipation that A will happen, then the sudden discovery that A is not going to happen can come as a great disappointment and can lead them to stop reading and give the book a one star review on Amazon.

For the red herring (which is to say, the plot twist) to work, the reader who was expecting A has to be delighted to find that B happens instead. If you lead them to anticipate hamburger and then serve them steak, you will have some happy readers. If you lead them to anticipate steak and then serve them tofu, you will have some very unhappy readers.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

0 comment threads

Sign up to answer this question »