The Unexpected (In Writing)

The biggest thrills… when do you get the biggest thrills as a writer? As a reader? As a movie watcher? What really makes you dive in that extra  little bit? Pay attention just a little bit more?

For me, it is the unexpected. I was watching The Hangover the other night (Loved it! Don’t watch the trailer if you haven’t seen as it gives away some of the unexpected. Doh!) and found myself getting right into it. What was it that sucked me in? The unexpected. Yes, it drove me a bit crazy in the beginning that these guys had had a huge room wrecker of a bachelor party and couldn’t remember a thing from the night before. But what truly made this story great was the unexpected. It was one big unexpected event after another. It was unexpected for the characters and unexpected for the viewer. Yet, it was all still believable. Tiger in the hotel bathroom–unexpected. Believable? Actually, yes!

The joy of discovering something unexpected is the same when I read. I think one of the reasons I loved The Flying Troutmans and The Glass Castle was the unexpectedness of events and character reactions. Yet, it all fit and that made it believable.

When I am writing, it is the same thing. I’m trucking along, putting it down and then ‘whoa!’ a character just got arrested. ‘Whoa!’ a character just revealed an 18 month long affair. It is invigorating and exciting. It surprises me and makes me pay attention. (This is actually how we humans are programmed–a change in patterns is surprising, which in turn, gets our interest. Survival instincts kick in and we assess that change for danger or reward.) Most times, the surprises that my muse presents are like little treats for the brain.

However, when seeking to add an unexpected twist in our writing, we need to ensure that this unexpected element will stay within character and fit the story. If we sensationalize for the sake of throwing our readers off balance, we may get their attention, but we’ll also leave them with empty, meaningless surprise and no message. And that’s no fun.

Has something unexpected caught you off guard and grabbed your attention lately?

Book Review: The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle

By Jeannette Walls

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That line pretty much sums up this memoir. I have to admit that the first page had me hooked in this story. It started with a woman driving to a fancy party and spots her mother dumpster diving. She feels ashamed and worries that someone might figure out that it is her mother living on the streets, so she turns around and goes back to her Upper East Side apartment. You know this is going to be quite the tale.

You might be thinking that this is going to be a whiny story or a story about huge family fall-outs and hard times and tough decisions. And in part, it is. But on the other side of the spectrum, Walls describes it all with such simplicity and such clarity and removal that it just moves you along, half believing, half disbelieving. Someone described her voice having a ‘childlike innocence’ and there is a touch of that. But there is also a voice that is very reasoned. Very seeing. Very telling.

When I wasn’t reading this story, I was thinking about it. At one point, a little over half way through, the book became an addiction. I wanted to read it and when I wasn’t, I was thinking about reading it. I would wonder where the story would take me over the next few unread pages. To make the addiction worse, every scene is short. Only a few pages, which allows you fall into the, ‘just until the next scene break’. Only you know you’re going to read more. You can’t help yourself. You reach the end of the scene and you getting wondering about the next one, so you have to read on.

Walls grew up doing the skedaddle (leaving in the middle of the night, breaking out of hospitals before the bill came due, etc), moving around (usually when money really, really ran out), finding her own food, adventuring and doing more living and growing up than the average North American child. A family of six, the Wall’s were never rich and often lived on very little. Jeannette’s father, a brilliant entrepreneur who like many like him, had trouble hanging onto a long term job, and eventually became an alcoholic and gambler, leaving the family for nights and days at a time while he tried to earn enough money so he could make his inventions some to fruition or to root out union corruption. Her mother, an artist with a free spirit and a firm belief that everyone should make their own path and look out for themselves, was occasionally pushed back into her teaching career by her hungry and frustrated children.

The adventures the Wall’s family had are incredible. When I began reading the story, I was shaking my head and thinking, this is unbelievable. Then I began thinking about my own childhood and came to realize that really, it wasn’t that her life was so incredible, it was simply the amount of incredible things that happened to her. In other words, she had more than her fair share. It’s like taking chunks of Maya Angelou’s childhood, a touch of Dave Peltzer’s, a smidgen of Antwone Fisher’s, a thread of Malika Oufkir’s and a sprinkling of one’s own and rolling it all into one. To say the book was interesting is an understatement.

When you look at the individual pieces of Wall’s life, it isn’t that different. We all struggle in our own ways. The local librarian, who also read the book (book club), said Wall’s childhood was similar to her own in many ways. We compared the bits that were like our own and in which we could identify. For her, the parents were reversed. For me, there were several parallels, such as living in an unusual building, having a father who made bunk-beds for me and my brother, I might have burned down part of a shred (purely by accident) and other such events.

Really, we aren’t all that different. And as for Jeannette Walls, I think I’d like to meet her.