February shitposting, day 3

[edenfalling]

Today's randomly chosen theme is: my love of shocking the reader

Uh, mostly this is not an emotion I feel? As a writer, I am more interested in A) moral and ethical questions, B) world-building, C) interpersonal relationships and how networks of such relationships interact, and D) characters learning to balance their own needs and those of the people/society around them. Also power and action scenes, but action scenes are a pain and power is one of the live-wires deep in my id, so I'm kind of leery of handling it.

You will note that none of these areas really lends itself to plot twists and surprises.

Anyway, if stuff happens in my stories and it's a complete shock, I generally feel that's because I have failed to do proper setup. I mean, yeah, you shouldn't be able to see everything coming from a mile away, but the emotion evoked should be "that wasn't exactly what I was expecting but it fits perfectly" rather than "oh my god what just happened?!?!"

This may be related to my general "oh, whatever" attitude toward spoilers. If a story's effect relies so heavily on not knowing what's coming, then what is even the use of it? Yeah, okay, there's something to be said for a story where your experience of it is radically different on the first and second reads because now you can trace all the threads you overlooked the first time, but I generally feel that seeing how you get from point A to point Z is more important than knowing the story will eventually reach point Z and hit points H and Q along the way. Story is a process, not a treasure hunt.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I'm also generally opposed to ugly-shock for the sake of shock. Ugly-shock for the sake of making a specific point, sure. Sometimes that's necessary to break through preconceptions or a protective layer of apathy. But shock in and of itself is pretty shallow. It's a means, not an end.

And those are my thoughts on shocking the reader.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Yeah, shock wouldn't have occurred to me as a deliberate choice either. (Your list is perfect.) I do perversely like the idea of shocks born out of apparently unshocky things like worldbuilding. Some science fiction maybe does that? Nothing leaps to mind, obvs, to make this more than a vague gesture at an interesting observation.

[edenfalling]

Oh, yeah -- the unexpected but inevitable consequences of various facts that have been quietly lurking in the background. Hmm. Like... oh, to pull an example out of my hat, in the Chronicles of Narnia it's canon that the Tisroc has over twenty sons. Yet nothing is ever mentioned about him having brothers. It would not surprise me at all if this is because he had his brothers killed upon taking the throne of Calormen. It follows logically from the canonical world-building, and is also well-attested as a pattern in various real-world cultures. But to just drop that into a conversation in a story would be shocking because people won't necessarily put those two initial observations together.

Or I guess reframing one's perception of an alien people once some key fact is learned that puts previously noted oddities into a new perspective. I think that's something of a trope, actually -- and even for non-sf works, when any person is encountering an unfamiliar culture and has a moment of "Oh, so that's how it fits together!"

[alexseanchai]

Sometimes I wish I could read HP:PoA for the first time again. This is why.

[edenfalling]

Oh, yes, that book had a lot of very well-constructed things that read entirely differently on the second time around, as well as some nice moments of revelation. :)