Surprise—Part Four

This is the final blog in this month-long series examining the concept of surprise in film.

Whatever your creative bent, your job as an artist is to surprise us. And for the writer of film, that surprise can mean just coming up with a different idea than anyone’s explored recently, as I discussed last week, or it can be as simple as surprising us in a scene you’re writing.

When I’m reading a script, I like to be surprised on every page. But, wait. Really? In a 100 page script there are going to be 100 surprises? One per page?

Really. In fact, I hope there’s more than one surprise per page. And by surprise I’m not talking about having a guy jump to his death off the Chrysler building or a car crash we didn’t expect or the revelation that a priest is really an escaped convict—in other words, it doesn’t have to be any big plot twist.

Surprise can be… subtle.

Let’s say a father is walking down the street with his 8-year-old son and the son is pleading his case that he’s mature enough to have his own room and not have to share with his older brother. His father looks at him and we can see the wistfulness in his eyes—because he knows his son is right, knows his son is growing up. They get to an intersection and the father looks down at his son’s hand, debates taking it, and we see it in his expression—that he laments his son growing up, and not needing dad’s hand when they cross the street anymore. And then, guess what? The son reaches up and automatically takes his dad’s hand as they step off the curb together—and the father smiles.

The surprise there was just in that moment when the son reaches out his hand for his dad’s—he surprised his dad and he surprised us and it made us smile just as the father did.

Surprises don’t have to be gigantic. They can be as varied as:

• A line of dialogue that’s unexpected.
• A facial expression that’s different for a character.
• A turn in the story that we didn’t see coming.
• A change of attitude that makes a character do something we didn’t expect.

The different, the unexpected—surprises are important for both character development and plot. You don’t want characters who are predictable and you don’t want a plot where the audience says, “Boy, I saw that coming a mile away.”

So as you write, think about that. Think about how you can surprise that reader on every page with something a character does or says, with some plot twist they didn’t see coming, with a small moment that they never could have predicted might happen… Think of something that will astonish, stun, scare, dumbfound, amaze, dazzle, astound or startle your reader—think surprise.

Copyright © Diane Lake

26Nov17

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