Write What They Don’t Know: Manipulating Your Reader for Better Plots

When you think about it, writers are quite manipulative. We craft situations designed to cause different emotions in the reader. We want them to worry, to care, to laugh, to cry. The stronger we play with the emotions of our reader, the better our stories can be. But how often do we push things as far as we can? Do we manipulate our plot for the best impact or just show it unfolding?

Just because we know what happens in a scene, doesn’t mean we can’t fake out the reader and make them think something else might happen.

Say you have a scene where the heroine is cutting through a dark, scary park on her way home. Plot says she’ll make it home fine and there’s a big surprise waiting for her. Let’s say her long lost (and much hated) father is home from prison. But let’s also say there’s a girl missing at school. It hasn’t been made a big deal yet in the story, but it’s there, and readers have it in the backs of their minds. You might:

Have the girl get home with nothing happening, then be hit with her shocking surprise. Or…

Have her hear things in the park, fear for her life, think about that missing girl and wonder all sorts of horrible things, then get hit with a nasty shock about Dad.

If you never planned anything happening to her in the park, odds are she makes it through with nothing going on. She’ll probably be thinking about some related problem, there will likely be description and maybe even some characterization. You know nothing happens, so you don’t suggest anything might happen.

And you miss an opportunity.

Take a look at your scenes. Are there opportunities to make the reader feel an emotion? Can you heighten anything, suggest anything, play with anything, even though you don’t plan to follow through? Would tweaking the emotions make the scene better?

While you don’t want to throw stuff in there to mislead the reader and make them feel cheated, you can use any inherent aspects of a scene to raise the emotional level of that scene. You know it won’t happen, but the character doesn’t. The girl in the park is in for a nasty surprise, so making her fear something horrible is about to happen (even if what she worries about isn’t what happens) makes the moment when something horrible does happen all the stronger. And it’s a bigger surprise because the reader was looking somewhere else for trouble. You gave them what they expected, just not in the way they expected it.

Predictability can kill a story, no matter how well written it is. We know what’s coming, there are no surprises, and it all unfolds exactly as we expected it to. It’s not uncommon for a story to telegraph what’s coming. We hear so often to show “what matters” that we forget red herrings and mood setters are just as important as hints of the actual plot. We only show they stuff that affects the plot.

How many times have you seen something in a book, casually mentioned, but it seems like a little too much attention was paid to it? Maybe it didn’t fit as naturally as it could have, or it was an odd point to make. It stood out for whatever reason. You know for sure that that piece is going to matter in the future. It will be the key to something and save the day.

Are you surprised when it happens? Probably not.

But what if you added several other things as well? Multiple snippets of information, hints at a variety of outcomes. Suddenly the story could go in any number of ways. It’s more interesting because you don’t know for sure what’s coming. Anticipation is a big hook. Expectation not so much.

When we know what will happen in a scene, we tend to write it that way. That’s how the scene unfolds. There’s a difference between a scene that says, “The hero overpowers the bad guy and gets away” vs “the hero battles the bad guy, trying to escape.” It’s subtle, but mentally, it’s easy for us to write the scene knowing the hero is in no real danger when we know she gets away. If we think about the hero trying to escape instead, suddenly we have more we can do to suggest the outcome might be different.

Great stories are more than just watching things happen. It’s being drawn into a story and wondering what will happen next. It’s the difference between watching a movie for the first time and watching one you’ve seen a dozen times. No matter how much you like it, knowing what happens affects you differently than that thrill of the unknown.

Don’t forget the thrill of the unknown. Just because you know what happens doesn’t mean the reader or the character does. Use that to create uncertainty, unpredictability, and keep the reader guessing what will happen.

Do you write what you know happens or do you explore other possibilities on your scenes? Are there places where you can add uncertainty?

Other articles on plotting and unpredictability:

Surprise! Being Unpredictable, Even When You Don’t Know Where it’s Going

Will They or Won’t They? Plotting With Yes or No Questions

Knowing the Future: Avoiding Predictable Plots