Always play fair with your audience. When you don’t play fair with your audience, your story introduces something out of the blue that surprises the audience, but not in a good way. You always want to keep surprising the audience, but you always want them to feel like the surprise makes sense.
Think of a woman being chased by a man wielding a knife. That action alone can grab our attention as we wonder if the woman will get away from the man, but what if the woman could suddenly fly and simply flew away from the man? That would be a poor type of surprise if we didn’t know she could fly earlier. Even worse, if she could fly, why would she bother running away in the first place when she could just fly away instead?
When stories introduce surprises that don’t make sense, these surprises just weaken the overall story. Even worse, stories introduce surprises about characters we know little or nothing about so when the surprise occurs, we don’t really care.
In “Die Hard”, there’s a surprise when John McClane runs into the villain, Hans Gruber. Hans immediately switches to an American accent and acts like a scared man who has been hiding from the terrorists. Although we didn’t know that Hans could speak in an American accent earlier, we have seen Hans as a smart man so this surprise comes out of nowhere but feels possible.
John McClane gives Hans Gruber a gun and that’s when Hans turns the gun on John. Now comes the second surprise when he tries to shoot John but there are no bullets in the gun. That’s when John McClane reveals that he’s not going to give a loaded gun to just anyone he meets. This is believable because John has already shown he’s a street smart cop.
What happens when you spring a surprise out of nowhere? In “Attack of the Clones”, the opening scene shows a main character (Padme) arriving on a planet.
Suddenly there’s an explosion. Yet there’s no hint of a bomb and no hint of who might have planted this bomb. The explosion comes out of nowhere before we even know what the story is about or who the characters might be. That means we largely don’t care about any of the characters or even the beginning of the story.
That’s what happens when you introduce something out of the blue without setting it up earlier.
Now watch this far superior scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. In this scene, the hero stops his truck in the middle of the road to look at a map because he’s lost. Lights from another car stop behind him and he waves them past.
As the car drives by, a passenger yells at the hero for stopping in the middle of the road, which creates conflict and all types of conflict is almost always good to spice up a scene.
Then later, another group of lights stop behind the hero’s truck and the hero waves them past. Instead of driving past, the lights rise, revealing that it’s actually a UFO.
Because the earlier lights from the other car set up the idea of lights behind the hero’s truck, suddenly seeing the lights rise behind the hero’s truck is a surprise, but this surprise was set up earlier by showing an ordinary car behind the hero’s truck.
Setting up surprises is crucial to playing fair with your audience. The more you play fair and surprise them, the stronger your story will be.
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