Disappointment.
We’ve all experienced it when reading a book or watching a movie or series.
Most of the time, it comes when our expectations for the story aren’t met.
The twist wasn’t as brilliant as it should have been.
The romance turned into a tragedy.
The characters started acting out of character.
Whatever the reason, we walk away feeling cheated. Maybe we can’t pinpoint exactly why this story failed to satisfy, why this movie just didn’t work, or why we’re only giving this book a two-star review.
Put simply, your expectations weren’t met. The storyteller failed to deliver on a promise. And you were disappointed.
As authors, this is something you want to avoid at all costs. When you make a promise to your readers, you need to deliver. What makes this hard with storytelling is that most of the time, you are unaware of the promises you are making.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways we make promises to our readers and how you can work to deliver on them.
Book Cover
Even if you don’t design your cover personally, you need to be aware that it makes a promise to your readers. Your book’s cover indicates the genre of the story and often includes important elements such as the main characters or an important object. The cover indicates when your story is set and possibly gives clues as to where. It prepares readers to laugh through a comedy or be chilled by horror. It prepares them for regency era London or for futuristic space stations.
There is a lot that goes into a good cover, including considerations about the fonts and colors. Your book’s cover is the first promise you make to your readers. It’s the starting point of expectations and is often the difference between someone taking a peek at the first sentence or moving on to the next book.
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is a good example. The cover itself is simple, highlighting Katniss’s mockingjay pin. The black background prepares us for a darker story, while the placement of a few gray lines suggest military themes. The font is also characteristic of science fiction and dystopian novels. All of these elements combined prepare us for the grim story within the pages.
As the author, you need to do research on book covers, even if you don’t intend to design your own. Make sure you are aware of common elements of covers in your genre. You need to know that your cover is laying the framework for the right expectations. If you don’t feel that your cover is giving the correct impression, share your concerns with your cover designer (if you hired one) or go back to the drawing board (if you are doing it yourself).
Genre
Genre goes deeper than the labels on bookshop shelves. Those are broad categories grouping numerous genres into more-or-less similar categories. A fantasy can be horror, romance, thriller, comedy, and so many more. The same with Christian, contemporary, science fiction, historical, and so on. The point of this blog post is not to dissect genre but to look at how this aspect of writing builds your readers’ expectations.
If I tell you that I am writing a horror, you immediately anticipate the story having at least one monster. You also expect to feel fear. If I tell you that I’m writing action, you are going to expect fight scenes. A survival story must have a character fighting against his environment for his life.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of the best examples of this. From the start of the play, we are told that this love story is a tragedy. When Romeo and Juliet both die at the end, we don’t feel cheated because Shakespeare never promised us a happily-ever-after.
As the author, it is your job to know what promises the genre you’re writing in makes to your reader. Read books in your genre and pay attention to commonalities. What appears consistently through them all? More importantly, does your story have those elements in it? This step is also a great time to compile a list of comparative titles for marketing purposes.
(For a more in-depth look at genre, I highly recommend www.thestorygrid.com and the book, Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne. It is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to understand and master the nuances of genre.)
Blurb
Soon after readers look at the cover and possibly after they determine the genre, they check the blurb (or “back-cover copy”) out. This is, quite simply, where the reader decides whether they want to read this book based on the expectations they develop from your blurb. This means that, like your cover, your blurb carries a lot of weight. It needs to indicate the genre, introduce the main character and main story problem, suggest the overall tone of the book, and hint at the character’s motivation.
What a well-written blurb will do is encourage your ideal readers to read the book and turn away anyone who is not a part of your target audience. While turning people away might sound counterintuitive, you actually want this. If someone who dislikes romance were to read your book because the blurb focused on another aspect that they loved, they will be disappointed and frustrated because they expected something else but got romance. Their frustration will be even more pronounced because in not mentioning the romance, you promised that there wouldn’t be any.
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game does a brilliant job of building reader expectations from the blurb. In four sentences, we’re introduced to the main character, genre, internal and external story conflicts, and are given an idea of how they might affect Ender Wiggin.
As the author (yes, writing a blurb is part of your job description) you need to research how to write good blurbs as well as practice writing them. Read blurbs in your genre. Pay attention to patterns and similarities between the books—words, phrases, length, etc. Practice writing blurbs for stories you loved and then compare your creations with the actual blurb. What did you leave out? How could you improve? Write blurbs for your stories and then find share them with other authors or with your ideal readers. Ask them what expectations the blurb creates and if the blurb entices them to read your story.
And if you really don’t want to write your blurb or are having trouble getting it right—reach out to me! Blurb writing and editing is one of the services I offer. Check out my services if you’d like to learn more.
Tone
Right from the first sentence on the first page, readers will pick up on the tone they can expect in the story. Is your story meant to be funny? Thoughtful? Should we expect to take it seriously or are we supposed to know that the point of this tale is purely to be amused?
One of the best examples of this is Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. From the start, we realize that anything could happen and that we are meant to laugh through it all. The strange events of the opening chapter lead us to expect that odd and unexplainable things will happen. Thus, when they do happen, we aren’t surprised and we laugh, even at the painful misfortunes of the main characters.
As the author, you need to make sure that the tone you carry through the book is indicated in the first scene and preferably in the first paragraph or even sentence. If you’re writing a thriller but are taking a humorous look at it, let us know early so we won’t be shocked or repulsed by your sense of humor. If you’re writing a love story that will end tragically, give us clues early on so we won’t build the expectation of the couple having a happily-ever-after.
Characters
Believe it or not, your characters make promises to your readers. How they respond to the world around them, their knee-jerk reactions to uncomfortable situations, all prepare us for how they will react in future. When the character fails to act in a way that is expected, readers will feel cheated.
Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the most iconic characters from the screen. From the start, we know that he is pursuing his own ends. Even when he helps others, we know that he will benefit from it in some way. When he gets into sticky situations, he prefers to talk his way out of them rather than fight. It would be out of character for him to start planning or leading large battles or to help someone purely for the sake of helping them. The screenwriters knew this and made sure that he always acted in character.
As the author, it is your responsibility to ensure that your characters are remaining true to themselves throughout the book. This is not saying that they can’t change, but rather that they must respond in ways the readers have come to expect. If your character is going to respond differently, then a plausible reason must be established, one that allows their abnormal action or response to make sense.
Subplots
Whether you realize it or not, readers know that everything in a story is important in some way. What this means is that even the subplots and side quests your characters go on are supposed to advance or tie in to the main plot at some point.
An excellent example of this is Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. At the start of the story, Pip helps an escaped criminal by giving him tools to cut his bonds. At the time, it seems that his brush with criminals serves only to make him frightened. However, as we discover at the end of the story, that moment in his childhood is what set the wheels of the main plot going and later introduced another level of conflict that Pip needed to overcome.
As the author, you need to take a critical look at every subplot and element you introduce, assessing how it impacts or advances the main story later on. “Side quests” for the sake of a diversion will frustrate your readers. Even if the subplot only influences the main story in a small way, it needs to do so.
(Side note: the classical authors were masters of weaving seemingly innocuous events into the main plot. If this is something you personally struggle with, it will be well worth your time to study a few of the classics and see how they managed it.)
Objects
Here’s a secret: the amount of time an author focuses on a particular object is directly proportional to the importance of that object. You’ll notice this more in mysteries, but the principle holds true for any story. It also isn’t restricted to an object. The amount of time spent describing a person is an indication of the importance of that person.
Quite simply, when you as an author take the time to describe something in more detail than normal, you are promising your readers that the object (or person) will be important later on. So when you describe something in detail only to not use it again or to have it of little importance later, you have broken a promise to your readers and they will be disappointed.
C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a good example. When Lucy first enters Narnia, we are told simply that she was in a snowy wood. Lewis doesn’t describe the snow or the trees in great detail. Later, however, when Lucy comes upon a lamppost, Lewis pauses to describe it in more detail, not only because it is unusual but also because it will feature again when the four Pevensies leave Narnia. His pausing to remark on it signals to us that it is important.
As the author, you need to go through your story and watch out for places where you may have described an object that is not as important as the amount of detail suggests. Give us enough description to flesh out the scene and make it real, but not so much that we expect those objects or people to be more important than they really are.
Character Deaths
This is probably one of the most contested aspects of writing fiction, with some writers seeming to delight in killing main characters and readers complaining bitterly against the practice.
There are numerous articles regarding character deaths and how to write them well. I’m not going to go into that here. Rather, I’m going to focus on the promise you as the author unconsciously make to your readers.
Unless you indicate otherwise, readers will expect all their favorite characters to still be alive at the end of the book. If you do intend to kill a character at the end of the book (or even during the story), then you need to alert the reader early that they must expect this.
I’ve already mentioned Romeo and Juliet and how Shakespeare let us know that it would end badly. Tolkien does a similar thing with The Lord of the Rings by having Gandalf fall in Moria and Boromir die at Parth Galen. Another excellent example is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.
Zusak never promises that everyone will survive. In fact, he lets us know that we should expect characters to die by using multiple methods. The narrator of the story is Death. Leisel’s little brother dies at the start of the story. Later, a side character commits suicide. Hans Hubermann witnesses death up close when working to clean up the town after bombing strikes. So when Himmel Straat is bombed, we don’t feel cheated because Zusak never promised that everyone would live.
As the author, you need to think twice before orchestrating a character’s death. Have you set it up properly? Is there anything that signals to the reader that everyone will be alive at the end? If who have unconsciously made that promise to your readers but still intend to have some characters die, then you need to go back and find ways to hint that someone might die.
Climax
Your climax is why your readers started reading your book in the first place. It’s the point, the moment you’ve been building to from page one. If your climax does not fulfill your readers’ expectations, they will be disappointed and will most likely label you as a bad storyteller.
In many ways, your readers’ expectations of the climax result from your foreshadowing. Have you set up that the main characters will be facing down the villain or just one of his henchmen? Have you established that your character might die while attempting to achieve his goal?
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example. Throughout the story, Tolkien allowed us to see the ring’s power and how it consumed the mind of its bearer. Thus, when we scramble into Mount Doom with Samwise and watch Frodo claim the ring as his, we aren’t surprised. And when Gollum takes the ring from Frodo and falls into the fire with it, we don’t feel cheated by the deus ex machina because it was expected.
As the author, you need to comb through your story and make sure that what happens in your climax is established. You don’t need to make the ending overt; in fact, you don’t want to. But the major elements of your climax must be the natural outcome of what has come before, and if there is no logical thread between an event in your climax and the rest of the story, then you need to do some more work.
Conclusion
Naturally, these few things are not the only places we authors make promises to our readers, but they do give you a starting place for thinking about it. Being aware of what promises you are making to your readers means that you have the opportunity of filling their expectations and satisfying them. But more than that, being aware of how we as authors make promises to readers means that we have the chance to intentionally mold their expectations in the direction we want to go.