What factors in fiction arouse readers' expectations?
Feedback from my writer's group tells me that my recent stories leave promises unfulfilled and important questions unanswered. So I've become interested in how stories make promises and raise questions.
So I've identified a few factors that arouse readers' expectations.
Character desire. If I put a desire into a character's mind (or words, or actions), readers expect the story to resolve the desire.
Character speculation. If a character speculates about some future event or condition, readers expect the story to resolve the speculation. This is especially true if the character feels some emotion about the speculation. Fear. Worry. Anticipation. Hope.
Character motivation. Readers expect that characters have reasons for their actions. Sometimes readers can readily imagine the reasons, either from their own experience or from something earlier in the story. If readers can't readily understand the reasons, that opens a question, which they expect the story to answer.
Cause and effect. Readers expect that effects have causes. If readers cannot readily imagine the causes of some important effect, that raises questions that they expect the story to answer.
Textual weight. If I spend time on something in the text, readers expect it to matter. The more space I give it, the more readers expect it to matter to the story. This is especially true in short fiction, where the mere mention of a thing must justify its presence in the story.
Genre. Each genre brings its own set of expectations. In a mystery, the crime will be resolved in the end. In a romance, the lovers will get together in the end.
What have I missed? What other features arouse expectations in readers?
When you are reading, what raises questions in you?
My goal is to give myself a better chance to notice when I've made a promise or raised a question that I will need to resolve.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/8335. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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(The name for "Textual Weight" is Chekhov's Gun. Briefly, every element in the story must have a purpose, or don't put it in there. There are LOTS of examples and variants on TVTropes, with the standard TVTropes caveat.)
Other than your excellent list so far, I'd add plot complications or obstacles. The obstacle doesn't necessarily have to be defeated, but it does have to be dealt with.
An example: if the heroine punches out a guard and stuffs him into a closet, there are a number of things which could happen:
- The guard wakes up and goes after the heroine.
- The guard wakes up but the heroine has already gotten away.
- The guard wakes up, but the heroine locked the closet.
- The closet is locked, but the guard makes enough noise for someone to find him and let him out.
- The heroine tied and gagged the guard before locking him in the closet.
- The other guards find the tied and gagged guard in the locked closet and realize the heroine is in the building doing her heroic thing.
- The heroine hit the guard so hard she actually killed him.
Et cetera. Many potentials. But what you can't do is just have the guy in the unlocked closet with no restraints indefinitely and nothing else happens. The guard in the closet represents potential. You have to counter the potential or let the potential happen (which becomes the next obstacle for your protagonist).
A different way of dealing with expectations is (TVTropes warning again) the Brick Joke. This is when you set something up casually far in advance which pays off well after the audience may have forgotten about it.
An example: In Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles," tribbles are established to squeal in distress when they encounter Klingons. At the end of the episode, Kirk is carrying around a tribble which abruptly squeals when presented to a man who appears to be human. This unmasks him as a surgically altered Klingon.
Now, if you set something up in the beginning (a Chekhov's tribble, if you will) which then doesn't pay off (there's no traitor to unmask), your audience may wonder why the hell you bothered telling us that tribbles hate Klingons in the first place. If you're going to throw a Brick Joke into the air, remember that it has to land again somewhere.
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There is a difference between unresolved conflict and unaddressed conflict. Unresolved conflict pushes a story, unaddressed conflict drags the story. Both use energy (both the author's and the reader's). You want the level of total conflict to be high enough to fit the story without dragging the story down. In order to warn you away from the mistake of resolving all the conflicts, here is a suggested end to the story with the guard left in the closest.
Our heroine has made it to the top floor of the office building, where the madwoman who has ruined her life sits behind an oak desk. "Hello Mother," she said bringing the rifle to bear, "either you tell me who my father is or I shoot that yappy little dog of yours."
"Oh, Hi Lauren. You mean to tell me you didn't see him on the way in? He was guarding the lobby. You should pay attention to the things around you. It is not like you can expect every thing to go your way just because you have good looks an money."
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16069. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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