In the competitive world of fiction, making your place as an exceptional author is nothing less than a challenge. Authors must be able to stay ahead of the reader’s expectations to create an unforgettable impact.
Creating an unconventionally surprising novel involves breaking away from predictable patterns and expectations to deliver fresh and engaging experiences for readers.
Here are some of the best ways to make your novel surprising.
- Add Revelations from Secondary Characters
Protagonists are expected to reveal major information in a fiction story. It is something every reader knows and is mentally prepared for. You can consider making a change by letting someone else take the role of revealing major information.
The element of surprise can be incorporated into a novel by letting a secondary character take the responsibility of revealing major information. This approach can help you make surprising statement shifts to your main plot while adding complexity and depth to your story.
If you have read “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” by J.K. Rowling, you may remember the impact created by secondary characters such as Horace Slughorn. The crucial information provided by Horace goes on to reveal hidden truths about Voldemort.
- Use Time Shifts
One of the major qualities the best fiction authors have is their ability to show instead of tell. Looking back at the best works of fiction, you can agree that authors who focus on showing have a higher chance of winning over the hearts of their audience.
Similarly, you should refrain from burdening your audience with lengthy descriptions. It might seem difficult to convey the backstory of your characters without being descriptive, but you can overcome this challenge by harnessing your creativity.
Instead of taking pages to share the backstory of your characters before starting, you can make use of time shifts and flashbacks. You can consider them as one of the best tools to unveil critical backstories, provide context, or change the reader’s understanding of the present narrative.
- Break the Norms
Every reader has certain expectations from a genre. While you cannot completely go against their expectations, you can certainly consider breaking the norms and surprising your audience. There are several ways to do this.
From blending genres to switching character roles and challenging clichés, taking a different approach can help you stand out. It ensures that your readers will not forget you for a long time after they have read your work.
As an author, you can understand how readers expect certain outcomes based on genre norms. You can break these expectations and create surprising and memorable moments for your readers without making them feel betrayed.
- Unreliable Narrators
An unreliable narrator is someone who contributes to making the truth of the story suspicious. As the name suggests, these narrators are not credible at all due to their naivety, deceptive nature, or opposing intentions from the protagonist.
While writing your fiction story, you can make your narrator withhold some information or present a different version of reality. It is one of the best ways to create suspense for your audience and surprise them in the best possible way.
Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange is a brilliant example of an unreliable narrator. It tells us about a character named Alex, who is a liar and a sociopath, telling the story while drunk.
Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is also a great example of an unreliable narrator. While Nick claims not to judge characters, the way he describes them indicates that he judges them.
- Foreshadow Upcoming Events
A part of keeping the reader engaged is to drop hints that point to a specific outcome. Readers love to be able to predict what will happen next. Instead of letting your reader’s predictions become true, you must add a surprising twist to subvert their expectations. If you see an opportunity to add a surprising twist to your story, do not miss out on it.
While the twist should not fail to surprise the readers, make sure that it still aligns with the hints you provided earlier. Finding a match can be a challenge. You can ask an expert for help with this aspect or read literature that exemplifies this phenomenon well.
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is a great example of foreshadowing upcoming events and adding an unexpected twist. In the story, the clues about the protagonist’s condition are there from the start, but the revelation about his true state comes as a major surprise.
- Introduce Red Herrings
A red herring is an intentional piece of misleading information in a story. They are an effective tool commonly used in mystery and detective fiction to thicken the plot and distract the readers from the bigger truth.
In Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, numerous false leads and misdirections create a complex puzzle that keeps readers guessing until the end. It is one of the best examples of fiction novels that employs red herrings as a literary device.
Adding red herrings to your work ensures that your readers make one guess after another and stay on the edge of their seats throughout. This way, authors can ensure that the reader does not lose their interest in your work, even for a second.
- Hidden Motives
Another great way of adding surprise to your work is by disclosing the hidden motives of your characters when the readers least expect it. The best way to implement this literary device is to keep the surprise hidden from your readers and characters until the very crucial moment.
Remember, the revelation of these motives should change the perception of earlier events. Your reader must be left in shock, questioning all the assumptions they made earlier while reading different sections of your book.
Pip from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” is a great example of a character with hidden motives. He starts as a naive young boy whose ambitions and desires evolve throughout the novel, with his true motives and character development being revealed throughout the story.
