# About surprise



## M. LeRenard (Mar 24, 2012)

This is a quick tip to beginning writers, or just to writers in general who don't think too much about this kind of thing.
Let me talk about comedy for just a bit.  There are a variety of different styles of comedy, right?  Everything from Carrot Top to George Carlin.  Some people are universally panned, others are universally praised, and a lot of it is subjective.  But what makes comedy comedy and not just someone giving a speech?  Well... the answer to that is 'surprise'.
I mean, someone actually did a study on this once, looking at the origin of laughter in humans.  To answer the question, "Why do people laugh, and when do they laugh?"  And it turned out the answer was a little less obvious than you would have thought.  Like, most people assume you laugh when you see something funny, right?  That's the obvious answer.  But then you have to ask, what defines funny?  It covers a lot of ground, so what do things like slapstick and political jokes have in common?
Apparently, it's that they all rely on shattered expectations.  You ever watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force?  Random humor.  It's the most obvious, straight-forward way to do it.  Just throw a bunch of events in some kind of order, most of which are only vaguely connected.  You will shatter a few expectations once in a while, and people will laugh.  And you know, hell, it works; that show got to be pretty popular.
On a more sophisticated level, take this monologue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCljFYn3zTY&feature=fvst
I probably don't need to go into detail on that one, so I'll spare your intelligence and let you think about it.

So what does this have to do with writing?  Well, shit... writing and poetry and music and all these things are based on just about the same premise as comedy.  When you read someone's writing and you find yourself loving the word choice, loving how a passage sounds, loving how the author put such and such a thing, what is that author doing to get these reactions from you?
I'd argue they're doing what good comedians do.  They're setting up expectations and then shattering them.  Your brain does a little nose-dive when you read it, and the vertigo feeling you get is what makes you go, "Ah!  I liked that."  This is comedy, this is poetry, this is good writing.  This is what separates 'competent' from 'good'.
So why am I talking about this... well, it seems to me that this is a step a lot of amateur authors take a really long time getting to, and yet it seems to be the step that gives your writing an identity, that makes your writing unique.  Yes, it's perfectly fine and perfectly possible to write a story that just tells the reader about a series of events.  This happened, this happened, someone said this in a room that looked like this.  If you tell a good story, people will get through it and they'll probably enjoy it.  But chances are they won't remember the author.  I mean, if you're like me you won't.  Usually when I'm reading a new piece and I hit some passage that makes me feel that little twinge, that almost-laugh you get just from seeing how the words or the logic are laid out, I'll stop for a second and go, "Who wrote this?  This is great."  If that never happens, I'll read the story, but I don't think I'll ever care who wrote it, because while the storytelling was competent and while it was a good story, it never really reached that level where it struck a chord in me.  It never made me feel great about reading it, or drew me in.  Not unless there was something else about it that really stood out, but those kinds of things are usually a lot of hard work.  Being clever and unexpected usually isn't, unless you're just absolutely terrible at it.
Allow me to copy a passage from a book as an example.



> Dix-huit cents ans avant cet homme infortunÃ©, l'Ãªtre mystÃ©rieux, en qui se rÃ©sumement toutes les saintetÃ©s et toutes les souffrances de l'humanitÃ©, avait aussi lui, pendant que les oliviers frÃ©missaient au vent farouche de l'infini, longtemps Ã©cartÃ© de la main l'effrayant calice qui lui apparaissait ruisselant d'ombre et dÃ©bordant de tÃ©nÃ¨bres dans des profondeurs pleines d'Ã©toiles.







...oh, whoops.  Sorry, that was the wrong book.  Here, this one:



> So many shadows and shafts of Southwest sun bouncing in through the windows and all over the floor, over the benches over the bunk uprights bouncing out of the freaking roar of the engine bouncing two sets of Gretch eyes two sets of Babbs eyes, four sets of Gretch eyes four sets of Babbs eyes eight sets of Gretch eyes eight sets of Babbs eyes all grinning vibrating bouncing in among one another carrying them both into an unaccountable adventure, you understand.



Yeah, so what does that make you think of?  If I give you the context that this is quoted from _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, maybe you can figure it out better.  Hippies in the back of a van on a bumpy road.  Right?  It's like when you talk into the blades of a spinning fan just to listen to how vibrate-y and distorted your voice sounds, except here it's watching people bounce around like crazy in the back of a vehicle.  I mean, he could have just written this like so:



> Sunlight streamed through the windows.  The van was rocking up and down so bad it looked like everyone had eight sets of eyes.



But that's just really dull and straight-forward and boring.  That doesn't make you realize that the way the passage is written reflects not just what's going on, but what it feels like it, how it looks, and all these other subtle little details of what's going on in the mind of the narrator at that point.  It doesn't make you smile and go, hey, that's pretty clever and neat.  It's completely expected, you see, and things that are completely expected don't make you laugh.

I'll bet one or two of you chuckled at my little joke up there, where I copied a passage from _Les MisÃ©rables_ in French, because you didn't expect me to do that.  Right?  This is the point I'm trying to get across, so keep that in mind the next time you go to write something.  You're not just trying to tell a story, you're trying to make people smile.


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## Wise Red Dragon (Mar 27, 2012)

Thank you for posting this!

I just recently had a similar discussion with a friend, and I'm trying to get this writing skill into my own work. Readers are more likely to enjoy and remember comedic or unusual imagery than remember complex vocabulary; this makes comedy and surprise the better tool.

And now I must buy and read _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_.


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## M. LeRenard (Mar 27, 2012)

Ah... complex vocabulary.  I have strong opinions about that, too, but maybe that's another thread.
Anyway, thanks for reading.  I was starting to wonder if this whole Writers' Bloc became an echo chamber with just me in it.


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## Aden (Mar 27, 2012)

(stored in my memory banks for next nanowrimo)


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## M. LeRenard (Mar 27, 2012)

NaNo is actually a really good time to practice stuff like this, because you're supposed to turn off your inhibitions while you're churning out words.  So you'll end up coming up with a huge variety of different attempts at this, and some of them will suck, but some of them will be totally brilliant and you'll wonder how you even thought of that.  Those usually seem to come out in a drunken stupor some midnight when you're sitting there smashing your face on the keyboard trying to fulfill your quota for the day but lacking ideas and drive.  At least, that was my experience, the one time I did NaNo.


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## BeaverReturn (Mar 27, 2012)

Forgive me as I'm merely a student of the arts and no where NEAR being able to dwell into the mysteries of Neuroscience, but if you'll excuse me for a second I'd like to indulge on this topic with another idea which is symbiotic to your own. 

I was in my Animation and New Media class some time ago and we were discussing the purpose animation has as a filmic media. It was in one of the articles we had to read for class that they actually spoke of a study in which they found that (and I quote--without reference, sue me for plagerism): 


> Emotion drives attention, and stylized or expressive imagery can isolate and accentuate rhetorically, guding and focusing attention by amblifying the signal, and through metonmyic and synesthetic connotation and resonance can act as a multimodal neural hyperstimulus, capable of encapsulating an entity's essense in a blended aestetic gestlat."


"Lol what? Shut up BeaverReturn, don't pretend you know what that means...." 
"Actually, I do, but I'll admit it's a bit heavy so I'll continue quoting..."


> Recent brain imaging research has also compared responses to naturalistic video imargery, and then its rotoscoped, expressively animated equivalent. Rotoscoped from video, Linklater's _Waking Life _(2001) embraced a deliberate visual stylization for expressive effect; using imagery as metaphor, reflecting characters' altered states of mind. Evidence from the research suggets that, whereas naturalistic liveaction evokes brain responses that characterize recognition and *mind-reading (yes, Mind-reading, folks...ooooOooo)*, expressive animated footage is more likely to activate areas associated with emotional reward."


I often refer to this article as a debate for the importance of expression in any artististic work. In linking it to your original post, naturalistic in this case would be, 

"The dog excitedly jumped over the log to get to his owner." 

Where as, the expressive is, 

"A blur of fluff, a flash of fur, the four legged beast bounced over a stretch of decaying tree. His persistence unhindered by any obstacle that prevented him from reaching his open armed master."

I agree the element of surprise is important, I'd say the surprise should be the hook to which you guide your audience into your imagery.  I agree surprise is important for expression. I mean, you can paint a beautiful picture in cliches, but it won't have that lasting of an effect if you don't feel surprised.  


To quote Gibson from Neuromancer, the best example I can think of is  





> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel



I like this idea of the surprise as a narrative function. I'll keep it in mind when I'm trying desperately to make my work _more better (lol)_. 
If you think about it, surprise (by your definition) is the means to which language evovles. Because the writers who are remembered are the ones who surprised their audience by changing the natural structuring of their own language. Like Shakespere, who invented many many words.


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## Aden (Mar 27, 2012)

M. Le Renard said:


> a drunken stupor



That describes my nanowrimo last year pretty well, I'd say


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## Wise Red Dragon (Mar 27, 2012)

M. Le Renard said:


> Ah... complex vocabulary.  I have strong opinions about that, too, but maybe that's another thread.
> Anyway, thanks for reading.  I was starting to wonder if this whole Writers' Bloc became an echo chamber with just me in it.



I'd be happy to see that thread, and I could reply to it to get rid of any echoes.


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