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Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion
 
 
Key points: Anticipation and subversion. Set something up for the reader, then send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. You don't have to go the exact opposite. Lateral! Lean into it! Support your subversion with something else in the text. First show you know what you're doing, then start subverting. Mini-subversions and Chekhov's whiskey bottle. Humor and horror. Mix it up, sometimes follow the trope, sometimes subvert it. Widening the lens can be a subversion. Use in text subversion. Use the POV character's attitude. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite forms of tension is the thing where you set something up for the reader, and then you send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. It's something that P. Djèlí Clark does again and again in Ring Shout. An example from a different property... It's one that DongWon mentioned earlier in this series when they were talking about the... in The Candyman... 
[DongWon] The Candyman.
[Mary Robinette] The Candyman remake with the opening the door, the long set of stairs, looking down it, and going, "Nope!"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, we are anticipating that, and that just subverts it. It's like, nope. We're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to go in a completely different way than you expected. So, when we're playing with anticipation and subversion, is it necessary to always go in the exact opposite direction when you're subverting or are there other options?
[DongWon] Yeah. I think there's so many ways to subvert. Right? There's the complete inversion. Right? But then you can also just sort of sometimes make a lateral move. Right? Like, the nope example is the complete subversion, but to stay on the Jordan Peel tip for a second, the movie Nope make sort of a right turn instead of a complete inversion. What originally feels like an alien invasion story is still about aliens, but it has morphed into a monster movie instead. So he is very carefully subverting our expectations over and over and over again throughout that movie. In general, he's a complete master at this. But the turn into the more adventure and monster tone that that movie goes into, I think is such a great example of how to be very playful with your audience while still honoring the core experience that people showed up to your movie for.
[Howard] Another really great example of that is the hotel desk scenes in the original Beverly Hills Cop and in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F where Eddie Murphy pretends to be someone he's not in order to get a free hotel room. In the second movie, he starts into it, and then stops, and says, "Oh, I'm too tired. Do you have any open rooms?" The woman says, "I do." "I would like a room, please." Yeah, complete subversion. Then she quotes the price, and he gives us the same deadpan I'm going to accept this price that he gave us in the first movie. So it's a… It's almost like it's a double subversion.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I think is fun is that you can subvert something by moving away from it, but you can also subvert something by leaning into it more. I'm going to go back to that butcher shop scene. Because we get… We get this… She has this really horrific nightmare, where she sees this butcher and he's this redheaded man and he's got mouths all over him, and then she wakes up and it's horrifying. You're like, "Well, that's a really bad dream." Then she goes to the butcher shop and what I'm expecting to happen is for that dream to have been a metaphor for something else. It turns out, no. In fact, he is a redheaded butcher who is covered in mouths, and then we lean into it even further because each of those mouths is a separate individual creature. That is all composing this one horrific person. So it is… It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It is setting it up and then it's going I'm just going to take it further than you thought it could go. That's another way that I think you can subvert something.
[DongWon] Well, the subversion can lean into the thematic core…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Of the things as well. Right? Because thematically, it's not one evil person. It's not one dude doing this. It is the host, it is the collection of all the different perspectives, all the different people that that represents, all the different intelligences that make up the butcher. Just the sheer horror of realizing you're not dealing with one guy, you're dealing with a system of people, a way of being.
 
[Erin] I think when subversion works really well, it's when it is supported by something else in the text.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] So it doesn't feel like you've just gone out completely on a limb. But it's a limb to a tree that is being supported by your story. In this case, it is that her sword is also a multitude of voices.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So you've got the multitude of voices that are good, or not good, but that are in support and the multitude of voices that are apart. That becomes more and more apparent over the course of the story until it eventually, like, in the climax, that becomes, like, the song versus anti-song, becomes like a huge part of the climax. So, leaning into it and subverting it also is the story that's being told here on purpose.
 
[DongWon] Also, it's very important to think about patterns here, too, because when you want to subvert, you kind of have to show that you know what you're doing first. If the first move you make is a subversion, then it sometimes will just feel like you don't know what you're doing. Right? But if you look at Ring Shout, that opening fight is a sequence of promises that are delivered on. Maybe not delivered exactly how you expected. Like, he knows how to draw the beat out, draw the tension out. Right? It's not the bomb that kills them. Because the way that scene unfolds, where the explosion is the start of the fight, which then resolves inside the warehouse. Right? So, what he's doing, over the course of that scene, is setting up all these beats, all these reveals, by making us promises, and delivering on them. Right? Setting up the anticipation, and then saying, here's the thing. So that when later he wants to start messing with us and providing that subversion, which is adding extra layers to it, which is pushing the book in different thematic directions, where it's like, "Oh, this isn't just a we're going to have sword fights with monsters book, there's more going on here," we're open to it because we have the competence, he's proven to us that he knows what he's doing.
 
[Erin] I also think there's some interesting mini-subversions in that scene. Like, for example, there is a whole, like, we're in a cotton warehouse, like, in a story about the South…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it's not important. Like, it's just that's just what's there. And they find the whiskey, and I was like, "Ah, this will be key to everything, this whiskey." It's not. It is just…
[DongWon] No, they're just mad because they're competitors.
[Laughter]
[Erin] They're just like, "No." It does actually matter in the course of the story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it isn't like, oh, this is going to be the key to figuring it all out. What I like about that is it says, "Oh, like I need to pay attention. I can't just check out and be like, oh, this is going to check these boxes…"
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] It's going to follow the steps. I don't need to worry about it, and I can kind of half pay attention. It's like, no, the things that you think may be key are not. The things you're maybe not paying attention… As much attention to are in fact important. I love that because it makes you lean into the text.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like it's going to be Chekhov's whiskey bottle, but… Like that is a thing that you expect. It's like you set it up in Act I, it's going to go off in Act III. And Chekhov's whiskey bottle does not, in fact, have to be consumed.
[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.
[Chuckles] [laughter]
 
[Howard] Okay. So we're laughing… We're laughing at this. I want to point out that the whole principle of anticipation and subversion is one that horror and humor rely on incredibly. I'm going to put a stake in the ground here and say if you want to write good humor, become a student of horror. If you want to write good horror, become a student of humor. Because learning how people use these tools for things other than what you plan to use them for is how you'll get better at using them.
[DongWon] Horror writers are some of the funniest people I know. Like, their ability to dig into on the one hand, very dark material, but also that gives them so much of the toolset to deliver a great punchline, tell a great story, and things like that. So…
[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of this really important point. But we're going to take a break right now.
[Laughter]
[Erin] No…
 
[DongWon] No one writes a story like Kelly Link. There's such an odd pacing to them, and I find in that to be endlessly enchanting. Her worldbuilding, character work, and deep interest in what makes people people keeps her at the top of my list of writers of short fiction. She has a new collection called White Cat, Black Dog. This shows that she remains at the peak of her abilities. Rife with creepy encounters, fairytale retellings, and even just strange creatures, this is a unique and rewarding read that I cannot recommend highly enough.
 
[Mary Robinette] Now, the pattern from Writing Excuses over the years is that coming back from the break, I'm going to tell you what that important point is. But I have another question for you. When we are looking at Ring Shout… I'm certain that someone out there is like, "No, she's making this up." No. When we're looking at Ring Shout, and one of the other things that we had talked about with that, that anticipation and subversion is the thing with the girl. That we keep anticipating that this is going to be important, and where it finally is revealed, it is in a different way than we expect, and also exactly the same way. Do you think that there are ways that he could have subverted that more than he did, or do you think it's important that he follows the pattern there?
[Erin] We're stumped.
[Howard] That's a difficult question, because I was so enamored of the beauty of the resolution of that scene that I'm reluctant to suggest any possible change.
[Mary Robinette] So, this is one of the things that I wanted us to be thinking about for our listeners is that when we're talking about this anticipation and subversion, that a lot of times someone can see a tool and be like I want to use that all the time, and that actually the reason it works is because there are patterns that are set up and followed through.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So you don't know which ones are going to be subverted and which ones are going to be like oh, that's kind of the payoff I was expecting. Which means that everything then becomes tenuous and tense.
[DongWon] Exactly. It's how you keep it from feeling quote unquote trope-y. Right? Like, I get a little frustrated when people say that a book is trope-y as a criticism. In part, because, again, returning to my whole patterns thing, books are made up of tropes we've seen before. They're all just combined and recombined in different ways. But those little subversions, having the little subversion of, like, the girl isn't the age that she was when that event happened reveals itself to mean something else in that moment. But those little moments helped disrupt the sense of oh, I've seen this pattern before, even though we absolutely have. Right? I think including small moments like that, not fulfilling every single pattern you set up, having some make a right turn, having some of them invert, I think adds the kind of texture and nuance that people are looking for from a book that make it feel like it's not just paint by numbers.
 
[Erin] I think in that particular example, like, the subversion is in the widening of the lens. So, sometimes the way that you subvert things is that you create a pattern, and then you're like it's a much broader, a wider pattern then you even realize. One of the things that I love is that I had the same thought twice during that sequence of the girl. There's the one where she is a little girl, like, I think, like hiding under the floorboards. And she feels guilty, and I think, "Of course she couldn't do anything." Then you realize she's 18 and I thought, "Of course she couldn't do anything."
[Mary Robinette] Ooo...
[Erin] Like, that difference in context, nothing has changed in my understanding, really, but the broader context just made it like hit me so much more.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think having that…
[Mary Robinette] Yah...
[Erin] Earlier moment of sympathy made that sympathy carry through, and made it so much more tragic when I understood.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example of that kind of widening of the lens, of different ways of subverting. What are some other ways that we can… That we saw this being subverted?
 
[Erin] I have one other one which is I love that there is an in text subversion. So I like when subversion is happening, it's happening in our minds, it's happening in context, but the belief that what she would be offered was to have her family live again…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is a belief that I also considered as one that the story would do. But I love that she considers it on page and is told her beliefs and her anticipation is subverted in the text. Because it is an interesting way, like, it's subverted for me as well, but then I also get to see the emotions play out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] How do I feel about that? How does she feel about that, is an even better question may be to be asking. By subverting it on the page, I get a chance to experience it, both from my reader perspective, and also from, like, the parts of me that is identifying with her as a POV character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the fact that as we go into that scene, we are not told what her decision would be. For that… That she thinks she's already made the decision. I'm like, "Oh. Are you going to turn that down?" Then, when she gets the actual decision, and is… Like, the actual offer, and the temptation that she has… I'm also, like, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the temptation that you're having right now.
[Erin] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think the core inversion of the question of what does it mean to be a hero in that circumstance. Right? The question of is the sword good or is it a curse? Right?
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Is really core to it. And her relationship to the haints and things like that… Like, we are so conditioned as the reader to be like, "Oh. You're the chosen one. You're getting all these cool magical powers. You have the magic sword. You're the hero of this." But we can see how corrupting that is on her. Then, when the offer itself is subverted, that leads to us recontextualizing and questioning all of her choices about the story and what future she represents for this community, for herself, for all of these… All of the people that she holds and represents in a very literal way.
[Howard] There's also a subversion of the overall meta-, which is… This looks like a story about good versus evil, and when we get to our resolution, it's… Well, there's good and there's evil, and there's something else. All of these things are on the table and in play. That was the point where I got chills…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.
[Erin] Yeah. I think it's also, just like the subversion of good versus evil. One thing that I… Not my favorite thing is that you will have like forces that like all evil forces line up together and they all agree on…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I guess the evil of it all. But what I like here is that each set of folks, like each group here, has their own perspective on each other.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Like, the haints are like, "I don't know about this, like, lady."
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] And the woman is like, "I don't know about going to the night doctors." They're all sort of, and in some ways, she needs them all. I think in a story that's ultimately about communities…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Communities for good, communities for ill. The fact that there is a community of people working together, none of whom are quite good or evil, but each have their own perspectives and needs that can align for this moment is something that's really power subversion of the overarching trope.
[DongWon] Like her going to the night doctors is such a hero's journey in a certain way. Where we're expecting her to, like, go on this quest, rebuild the sword, like, she's literally like reforging whatever Aragorn's sword's name was, I forgot it all of a sudden. But, like, whatever. She's off to the quest of re-forge the magic sword, all of these things we're expecting in this regard. That just takes such a hard right turn into something completely different. The night doctors scene was probably my favorite in the book, just because it is… It just feels almost like it's from a different story. But still is so in conversation with the thematic's, with the characters, with the world, that it felt like it's from a different story, but in a good way. Not, I mean, parentheses complementary. Right? Being able to subvert expectations that way, of just like making the hard 90 degree turn into something else for a second, I think made the world feel so much more expansive and rich and nuanced than if we just stayed with the haints and the butcher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As you were saying that, it made me realize that there are two places, two different worlds that she portals into.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The contrast between those two is really interesting and fun to play with. Something else that I was also thinking about in terms of subversion is that one of the ways you can subvert something is with the hero's attitude towards what they get. So that sometimes your hero achieves the goal that they were going for and they're unhappy about it. That's a way to subvert a victory. Sometimes they lose something, and they're like, "Oh, thank heavens I lost that thing," and they're happy about it. That's… The attitude of your POV character is one of the ways that you can subvert things.
[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.
[Mary Robinette] Ah, it's pretty close to homework. So, this is a time in Writing Excuses when we normally offer you homework. This has been Writing Excuses…
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] The homework that I have for you is I want you to take a trope and I want you to write for different outcomes for it. One of it doesn't deliver the trope outcome. Just like the nope. Just doesn't deliver it. One of it inverts the trope. It goes in the opposite direction of what you're expecting. One of them has an unexpected kindness. And one of them has an unexpected cruelty. And now…
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go subvert something.
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. Private instructions here includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait
 
 
Key Points: Forms of anticipation? Surprise, introducing an unexpected element. Suspense, delaying the action or answer. Humor, the joke is coming. Unfulfilled promises, waiting for the promised action. For anticipation, you need to know or think you know what is coming. Be careful about trying to build tension with unearned interruptions, withholding information. Inevitability, and genre tropes, can build anticipation. Subverted tropes, using the reader's expectations against them. Mix up the kinds and places of anticipation, and play them against each other. Horror and humor use the same anticipatory expectation, but horror fulfills it, while humor subverts it. Use your beta readers to check your anticipation. The twist in mystery depends on the reader anticipating something, and then you take them someplace else.
 
[Season 18, Episode 10]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So now that you've been anticipating something, let's talk about actually how this works. There's a number of different forms of anticipation that we can think about playing with. I'm going to mention four of them, but there are more. This can be anything from surprise, where you're introducing an unexpected element, suspense, where you're delaying an action or an answer, humor is often a form of anticipation where you know that a joke is coming, and then unfulfilled promises, where you… The reader is waiting for the thing that you've promised is going to happen. Like, in a previous episode, we mentioned going down the dark stairs, and you know that someone is going to jump out. You've just made that promise.
[Howard] Yeah. The title of this episode comes from the 1976 Heinz ketchup commercial where they're singing anticipation while the very slow ketchup comes out of the bottle. The whole idea being I really want to just eat the sandwich, but I have to wait for the ketchup first. Anticipation is inherently… There is an inherent tension there, and you can be anticipating something wonderful. Even the ordinary kind of wonderful like ketchup.
[Mary Robinette] That actually…
[Dan] I just want to say, an important part of anticipation is that you have to know or think you know what's coming. A very, very short version of a story I know I've told before. I was trying to teach this to a group of teen writers several years ago. I showed them the beach scene, the first beach scene in Jaws, where there's a bunch of kids out playing in the water. It is full of jump scares and all these things. It is just delicious mounting tension of which one of these kids is going to get eaten by a shark. But I, in my foolishness, forgot to tell this group of 12-year-olds that there was a shark. They didn't… They had no context for this movie whatsoever. So instead of a very tense scene, it was a really boring scene in which nobody got eaten by a shark. Without knowing that something bad was going to happen, there's no anticipation at all.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about that example is the… Is that you have to have that conversation with the reader. One of the things that I will see people do badly with anticipation is that they will hold onto a key piece of information trying to build tension by creating a mystery around it that is unnecessary. Where the reasons for interruptions are unearned. This is a… Like, this is, again, a thing that I played with a lot with Spare Man was that I would attempt to have… To create tension by having someone say, "Oh, well, the answer to your question…" Then I would use Gimlet, who is an adorable small dog, to interrupt the process. So, "The answer to your question… Is this dog allowed to have fries?" The reason that that worked was… Usually… Was that it was an earned interruption. It was an interruption that wasn't under anyone's direct control. There was also a different payoff, like that interruption was serving another function. Often, the interruption is just like someone comes by to drop a check, and they decide not to answer the question after all. That dropping the check? That is not serving any other purpose in the scene. It's not… It's an unearned, in my mind, interruption.
[DongWon] In a different way, you also used anticipation in one of the most clever ways that I've seen. Which is with the intimacy between your two leads. Right? There's this recurring sort of very funny thing where they're just trying to get a moment alone to sort of have an intimate moment, because it's their honeymoon. You're using those scenes to give us an enormous amount of exposition and information. You're having them talk through the mystery, and you're using them is what could, in other circumstances, be a very dry and boring dump, but by including this anticipatory element of like are they finally going to get to do the thing, it creates this very funny loop where you using the anticipation in this very like subtle background way that draws us into the scene and gives us a reason to care about what they're saying, while we're just like, "Can they please just make out now?" It's great.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you for noticing that.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Or not. Maybe I don't want you to notice it. But, yes. But it is that thing which I think gets back to something that Dan said earlier, that anticipation, that there is an element of hope… That there is a thing that you're hoping is going to happen. I think that was Dan. It may have been Erin.
[Howard] It was Dan, and it was two episodes ago.
[Mary Robinette] Two episodes ago. Previously.
[Howard] Or, no. One episode ago. But, yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Before. Someone said. I thought it was clever. But that element of hope, whether it's that there is an outcome that you're wishing for with anticipation…
 
[Dan] Now, one form of anticipation that I don't see on your list, though it arguably can be a part of suspense, is the idea of inevitability. If we have seen a character do a certain thing in a certain situation every previous time that that situation has arrived, then, all of a sudden, you can present us with that situation again, and we know what's going to happen. We know they're going to make the wrong choice or we know that they're going to kill the person. You can see this a lot in No Country for Old Men, for example. Where we suddenly find ourselves in this situation and we know what's going to happen because we've seen it happen before. That inevitability just adds so much tension into it.
[Howard] Genre also programs a measure of that inevitability into us. If you're watching a… Watching or reading a thing, and you realize, "Oh, this is sort of following Hero's Journey, and this character is the mentor… Oh, crap. I like this character and they're the mentor. Something is going to happen to them to prevent them from being useful. Oh, no." That's real. That's a thing that your readers bring to your book, even if you're not writing Hero's Journey. If you've dropped enough things that might telegraphed to the reader that it's Hero's Journey, the character they think is the mentor is the character they're expecting you to kill off. It's something that we need to be aware of any time we're writing in a genre.
[DongWon] Sometimes you can be really explicit about it. Star Wars has spent 20 years now milking anticipation as a narrative engine in all these prequel series. Right? I'm a huge fan of the cartoon Clone Wars, also known as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. Right? We know what happens to Anakin. We spent five seasons with all these characters that we know aren't surviving this series. They are not in the movies. We know what is going to happen when Anakin becomes Darth Vader. So the tension of that series is so much in wait, there are all these characters we care about. Are they going to make it out of this? How do they make it out of this? And those questions. Andor recently was such a fascinating series because we know where Cassian Andor ends up. We know… And the entire question of the series that we're watching is, how does he become the character that we meet in Rogue One? So they're sort of using this as a loop, over and over again, to answer interesting questions that the audience has, using our anticipation, using our sense of inevitability, to give us like these little Greek tragedy structured stories. Because we have certainty about where this ends up.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of inevitability and anticipation, why don't we take a pause for our thing of the week?
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Max Gladstone's Dead Country. This book is out March 7th, which should be a couple days from when you're hearing this, if you're listening to it when the episode drops. Max is returning to his most well-known and original series, the Craft sequence, with a new series of books that is telling the story of a war that is coming to the world of the Crafts. The first book starts with Dead Country. We meet Tara Abernethy, who's the hero of the first book, Three Parts Dead, returning to her home for the first time since she was chased out because she's heard the news that her father has died. So, we get to see this character that we've seen before returning home. It's this really wonderful examination of what we give up when we go out into the world, what ambition costs us, and how do we pass on the learning that we've had over the course of our lives. Dead Country kicks off a new arc in the Craft that is a much closer, tighter knit arc then we've seen Max do before. I cannot tell you how excited I am for everyone to see where he takes this universe over the next four books.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, as we're continuing this conversation about anticipation, there's… One of the other things that I particularly enjoy are subverted tropes. Where you are using the reader's expectations against them. Sometimes this is a… I will spoil a little bit… This is a thing that I used in Spare Man, when… You'll see this used a lot… Where you're like, "Aha. I think that it is this person." Then they become the act two corpse or something else happens that causes you to decide, "Oh, I guess I was wrong." Then, either they have fake their own death or they have… There's something where you subvert the reader's expectations. You use their anticipation of the ways they think it's going to go to toy with them.
[Howard] One of the best examples I can think of, just off the top of my head, is Samuel L. Jackson's St. Crispin's Day speech in 1999's Deep Blue Sea, where he is riling everybody up and saying, "Yeah, these sharks might be smart, but we're human beings, and we're…" He is ramping up to awesome, full-blown Samuel L. Jackson. Then a shark comes out of the water from behind him and eats him. Now that… I mean, it's 20 years later, we kind of expect that kind of thing. Now that it's been done a few times. But at the time, it was both hilarious and horrifying and was brilliant. So, I look for ways in which I can do something that looks like it's delivering what people are anticipating, and then twists and delivers something else that makes them laugh and makes them scream at the same time.
 
[Erin] One of the things that I love about that is that it plays with the different types of anticipation. Not in the way that Mary Robinette has set this up, but just the different strands. You can have physical… Like, the anticipation of physical pain, the anticipation of emotional change. Like, I'm going to have a breakthrough, or a relational change, we're finally going to make out. What I think is cool about that example is it's an emotional… The anticipation is of this emotional release, and then a physical thing comes in and interrupts it. So one thing that's really fun is to play around with the different types of anticipation or the different kinds of places in which anticipation can happen, then layer those in among each other.
[DongWon] Mary Robinette kind of mentioned this earlier, but I think horror and humor really rely on the same overlapping anticipatory impulse. Right? This kind of goes to what Erin was saying as well, in… There's one type of anticipation that sort of drives that flip. There's a moment in the recent reboot of Candyman. It's a tiny little moment, where one of the characters opens a cellar door and looks down a dark stairwell. We have this horror anticipation of she's going to go down there, something bad's down there, it's not going to go great. She just says, "Nope." and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It becomes this comedy beat. It's a delightful beat. I was in a theater. We all just lost our minds at this. But it is the thing of humor can be that subverting the expectation, and horror can be about fulfilling of the expectation. The horror version is she goes down there and something bad happens to her. The humor version is she's like, "I ain't doing this. I'm out." and closes the door and walks away. So, I think how you resolve the anticipation can sort of determine what genre space you're in. But the same impulse is there in terms of the feeling we have going into that.
[Mary Robinette] The… One of the examples of how you can really use anticipation along these lines is in the Expanse, in the first episode, we meet… I think it's the first episode… But we meet a ship's captain and he has this wall of collectible cat figurines.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The main character is like, "So what's with the cat figures?" He's like, "What?" He clearly refuses to answer, there's something there. What you're anticipating is that later he's going to be… There's going to be a telling moment, a compelling moment where they… He shares why he collects the cat figures, or you're anticipating that one of them is going to be broken, and he's going to feel… The main characters going to feel really bad about having broken it. Instead… Full on spoiler… What happens is we just blow the entire ship up, and we will never get the answer to what is going on with all of those cats. But it creates this little bit of tension there that it's like here's… We're anticipating something… That these are going to be important for some reason. We're anticipating that they're Chekhov's gun, and then they are not.
[Noise]
[Mary Robinette] The other… Go on.
[Dan] If I can interrupt really quick, that's also an example of that combination of anticipation and hope. Just giving those little cat figurines humanizes that character in such a tiny but vital way that suddenly we care about this person. We care about getting the answer to that question. We find them to be more interesting than just standard captain on a doomed ship. So, when the ship blows up, we care in a way we wouldn't have without that little element.
 
[Howard] I want to call out one of my favorite go to tools for anticipation. That is the beta reader. I will ask my beta readers at the end of each chapter to tell me what is it that you are anticipating? What is it that you are dreading? What is… Tell me what you think is going on. Not so I can second-guess you and write the story so that you're wrong. I want to know if the anticipation is working. Because it's very difficult to know if it's working when the only person who's reading it is you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's very true. Which actually brings me to how you can use anticipation with a mystery. We mentioned that one of the main beats in a mystery is the twist. The twist does not work unless you have the reader anticipate something else. That's one of the things that you have to do when you're setting up the mystery is you have to build in anticipation. Then, at the twist point, you take them somewhere else. Speaking of taking us someplace else, think let's take us to our homework assignment.
 
[Howard] I can do that. Have a look at your current work in progress, and ask yourself, are there genre tropes that you can subvert? Can you payoff reader anticipation by delivering something other than what the genre you're writing in has led the reader to expect?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.35: Brainstorming an Urban Fantasy

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/05/01/writing-excuses-5-35-brainstorming-urban-fantasy/

Key points: Brainstorming isn't all serious. Sometimes it's jokes, roleplaying, and silliness. Focus on the key parts: setting, characters, plot, premises. Don't be afraid to go trope fishing, and pick ones you like -- but put your own spin on them. Main characters need a life and goals that go beyond the plot of the book. Don't forget that everyone is the hero of their own story -- so what do the other people want? Where will it end, what's the big problem? And don't forget to wear a banana slug in your hair.
Are you going to write urban fantasy? )
[Brandon] Yes. It Happens at Sundance. That would be awesome. I do think... why don't we just say this? Your writing prompt this week is to take what we've done here...
[Dan [Come up with an ending.
[Brandon] You need to come up with a big problem. Come up with an ending. What's the big problem? What's the story really about? We know who it's happening to, you have your first two chapters, and you have where it's occurring. Now give us a real story.
[Howard] Alternative writing prompt. Go through the list of films shown at Sundance. Pick six. Determine why these six are all related to a fay plot.
[Brandon] Wow. That could work, too.
[Dan] Alternative alternative writing prompt. Were banana slug! Because the classics will never get old.
[Brandon] Wear them? Like across your body? Like clothing? Out of [garbled]
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] We're done.
[Brandon] We're done. This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks, folks. Goodnight.

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