As a child, there were certain things that I believed would loom larger in my adult* life than they have in reality. Trap doors, for example. Quicksand, the need to suck snake venom from a wound, compasses. These things have yet to play a pivotal role in the Adventures of Olive. However, there is one childhood phenomenon that has become vital to me as a writer: zigzags. Strictly speaking, the ability to zig when your reader expects you to zag, as it were.
*The term ‘adult’ here refers to someone who, to their total shock, continues to move unsupervised through the world despite their clear inability to regulate their snack intake or bedtime.
Readers are increasingly literate in the field of storytelling. We have so many ways to consume stories: novels and audiobooks, podcasts, tv-series and movies, newsletters, games, graphic novels, TikTok, Twitter threads and so on. This means we are reasonably familiar with the broad conventions of storytelling. You can see this in the short-form analysis of tropes such as ‘enemies to lovers’ storylines on #BookTwitter and #BookTok.
This narrative literacy makes fiction writing more interesting yet more challenging as writers strive to give readers fun surprises, twists and satisfying resolutions to their stories. In other words, it's getting harder to zig without your reader anticipating it.
I’m still learning how to do this myself but I do have a few pointers that I have gleaned from my own story consumption:
1. Understand that your first instinct for a scene will likely be quite hacky - and that's ok.
If you are a book and film lover, you are very likely to subconsciously absorb the structure of common scenes and reproduce them in the first draft stage of your writing. For example, fans of Austen might find themselves writing a scene in which a quippy heroine is rejected by a moody but eligible bachelor at a dance. That's fine, we all do it.
To avoid having these scenes take up huge swaths of your draft, I recommend giving yourself some kind of planning stage for each scene. This allows you to get the hackier first instincts out of your system. I like to keep a notebook where I do my 'working out' and brainstorming. This helps me spot when I've come up with a too-familiar scene. The trick is to spot it and then try to write your own take. How? Proceed to pointer number 2.
2. Get to know your genre conventions.
“NO!” I hear some of you scream. “My work defies categorisation. I am an artist. I am not writing commercial fiction. My book is too literary to benefit from such base knowledge.”
To this I say 1) I promise you’re not Bret Easton Ellis and 2) you are also not Douglas Adams. I could substitute a number of literary rule breakers here but these two are the examples that turn up most often in creative writing classes.
Delusions of grandeur aside, the real reason I urge writers not to reject narrative theory and considerations of genre is because having a good understanding of the canon in which your book might fall allows you to consider what a reader may be expecting from you and subvert it. This brings us to pointer number 3:
3. Take a lesson from the Basterds.
We’ve all seen it. The scene where the innocent family cowers in their hiding place before BAM the front door is kicked in by the SS officers/stormtroopers/Agent Smiths. A hail of bullets and violence swiftly follows. So, I imagine, when Quentin Tarantino came to write the script for Inglourious Basterds (yes that is the correct spelling), he went hunting for a way to make his Officer-Comes-For-The-Innocent scene more interesting. He knew the audience expected a zag so he had to find a way to zig.
If you haven’t watched the movie take a look at the opening scene -
Tarantino knows all about genre and audience expectations. The vast majority of his films pay homage to or satire a range of genres. He knows viewers have seen countless nasty Nazis. So what does he give us? A very polite Nazi. A charming Nazi. A Nazi that speaks multiple languages and asks permission to enter the farmer's home. And this is what makes Christoph Waltz’s character so much more sinister, and the scene so compelling. We know Waltz’s character is the bad guy. We know his arrival will be catastrophic for the Jewish family sheltering under the floorboards. But we don’t know what he is going to do or when he is going to do it as he disarms the farmer, his family and the viewer with his good manners.
His behaviour also demonstrates just how much power he has as an SS Standartenführer. He does not need to break down doors or hold a gun to the farmer's head because everyone on that farm already knows he possesses a deadly level of power.
Whatever you think of genre, you will find hacky scenes easier to spot and 'zigzagging' much more natural if you have a good understanding of the conventions readers are familiar with.
Creative Writing Exercise
Pick out a scene from your writing, one that feels fine but not great. For example, have you written a scene with a stormy night and an unexpected knock at the door? Think about how you have seen similar scenes play out before.
Write a list of these scenes in fiction, film and TV. Write down what these scenes have in common and what makes them special or interesting (or bad!).
Now use your observations to consider how you could make your Knock-At-The-Door different from, for example, the same scene in The Mousetrap or An Inspector Calls.
Rewrite your scene and with any luck, you will have a more interesting scene than the one you started with.