Is It a Good Idea to Frustrate Your Readers’ Expectations?

I was interviewed recently for a podcast by book blogger Charlie Place, and her perceptive questions got me thinking about my writing. In particular, why do I deliberately frustrate readers’ expectations in my novels?

You can listen to the podcast on Charlie’s site if you so desire. Or you can listen below:

Now that I’ve had some extra time to think about it, I think the main reason why I like to write books that subvert readers’ expectations is because that’s the kind of book I like to read myself.

For example, I love the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, and almost all of his stories deliver the opposite of what readers have come to expect. In a review of one of his short stories that I wrote back in 2009, I mentioned how frustrating the ending was. Borges lays out a few dramatic and/or poetic possiblities, and then gives the true ending: the main character suddenly dies of pulmonary congestion, and everything the story has made you care about comes to nothing.

Here was my reaction:

“An infuriating ending, yes, but for me it’s one that says something about the futility and unpredictability of life, the frailty of human plans, the way in which successful and powerful people can very suddenly fall from power and even die…. Most of all the ending feels true, more true (if less poetic) than the other possibilities.”

Borges does similar things in his other stories. He abandons narrative technique entirely sometimes, switching to the dry language of a history textbook. Or he writes a detective story in which every convention of the genre is ignored. He deceives and frustrates, he deliberately misquotes from other books, he plays with what fact and fiction are.

I could go through my other favourite books and writers, and many of them would have the same characteristics: the book was in some way not what I thought it would be. I’m not talking about a surprising plot twist, which is common enough to be unsurprising in my view. I’m talking about subverting the reader’s whole idea of what’s going on.

My writing is not at all like that of Jorge Luis Borges or other writers I admire, but what I do try to do is to write stories that surprise people, perhaps shake them up, perhaps make them think a little differently about something. I want them not just to be entertained or diverted for a few hours, but to be changed in some small way, to see the world a little differently than they did before they picked up the book.

In the podcast, Charlie asked about the endings of both my novels and why, in both cases, the ending was quite different from the direction the story seemed to be going in. I can’t quite remember what I said, and I cringe too much at the sound of my own voice to listen and find out, but I remember acknowledging that it was a conscious risk, and that the endings wouldn’t work for everyone.

Reader expectations are there for a reason, after all. We have been developing our sense of what a story should be over the course of millennia, and when events seem to be building to a certain climax, it’s probably sensible to deliver that climax.

But what if life doesn’t work that way? What if fraudsters don’t always get exposed and humiliated? What if the conflict that seems inevitable gets averted? What if our online identities have now become so fluid and so unreal that an identity thief can live on, undetected?

That’s what I was going for with A Virtual Love. I deliberately built towards a climax, having all the signs point to an expected ending in which a pretender gets his comeuppance, and then I had things take a different turn. The comeuppance never came up.

Charlie also pointed out some other ways in which I frustrated readers’ expectations in both my books, and we talked about them in the podcast. Have a listen if you have the time. Charlie’s site also has links to the various podcast apps if you prefer to download and listen that way. And I can say from listening to a few other episodes that it’s worth subscribing if you’re a book lover, so please go ahead and do that too.

Do you like to be surprised, even frustrated, when you’re reading? Or do you want writers to deliver what they seem to have promised? Let me know in the comments.

The post Is It a Good Idea to Frustrate Your Readers’ Expectations? appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.