Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by like a unicorn in pajamas.
Why does surprise please us? Think of it as a survival mechanism: Unexpected stimuli exercise the neurons, keeping brains alert to danger, prey, and available taxis. In fact, a recent study suggests that brains prefer surprise to the expected (see the “Synapses of Surprise” sidebar, below).
But enough anthroposemiotic musing! Everyone knows that good writing stimulates readers with inspired, sneaky surprises. It does so at all levels, from surprises based on twists of plot and character to the smaller but keen surprises of language—the ones that concern us here.
Is there a syntax of surprise, a formula for working it into our locutions? Yes and no. Surprise is like one of its vehicles: humor. Try to parse it, and it’s hasta la vista, bubela. Yet even humor yields an occasional secret to those who won’t let it alone. Remember when Woody Allen discovered that “if it bends, it’s comedy; if it breaks, it’s not”? That’s not a bad measure of the unexpected in your prose. Consider these two efforts in a NewYork Times article about the Windows XP operating system. The first one breaks apart: “When it comes to obsessive, clean-freak tendencies, Windows XP makes Jack Nicholson in As Good as It
Gets look like a slob.” The image here is labored and arcane—intelligible only to those who have watched the movie, and even then, too ponderous to allow for surprise. But the second attempt, even with its technical jargon, bends and delivers: “You may have to update its BIOS . . . before installing XP, a procedure about as user-friendly as a wet cat.” Bingo! Dry tech-talk, and suddenly I’m smelling damp fur and feeling the scratches.
START WITH THE EXPECTED
Even as you set out to be surprising, gangs of predictable idioms and images will bully their way into first drafts. Let them appear, as they tend to do when the brain is spewing words. But in the editing process, show no mercy. Occide, verbera, ure! Kill, beat, and burn—sniff out and destroy everything that smells predictable, clichéd, formulaic, labored, or lazy. Force yourself to fill the gaps with language that hoists a big exclamation point (but not aquestion mark) above the reader’s head.
Use familiar words in a new way; raid the coffers of poetry; recruit fresh words and images from specialized fields; tweak clichés and paired words—not the usual phrase all agog, for example, but something surprisingly else agog (radioactively agog?). Dare to use unfamiliar words with attention-getting qualities, such as mofongo or barmy. Concoct your own words now and then, as novelist Jonathan Kellerman did with firp (jerk) and yog (thug).
You won’t score surprise every time with these efforts, but you’ll create pleasures an editor never expected from the slush mound.
Consider this sentence: He crosses the consulting room’s red carpeting, his grotesquely ugly face like a big toad’s. No surprises here; just a tired word pair (grotesquely ugly) and a sorry metaphor. But if you were novelist Will Self, author of How the Dead Live, you’d have written: “He crosses the consulting room’s endometrial carpeting, his marvellously ugly face like a clenched fist in a glove puppet.” Three surprises hit me here: “endometrial,” because it is shockingly uncarpet-like, yet in keeping with the chapter’s context of medical horrors; “marvellously ugly,” an effective paradox; and the dead-on “glove puppet” metaphor for a scrunched face.
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SYNAPSES OF SURPRISE
Scientists have identified a patch of the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens as a center of pleasure in humans. Imaging shows heightened activity in this area of the brain when people receive a reward—whether sugar treats, money, or drugs.
Though researchers have long known monkeys to favor unexpected rewards over expected ones, the same phenomenon has now been identified in humans: Unpredictable stimuli excite the nucleus accumbens, while expected stimuli elicit no response. In the experiment that led to this conclusion, researchers Gregory Burns (Emory University) and E. Read Montague (Baylor College of Medicine) administered squirts of Kool-Aid and plain water to human test subjects in either predictable (alternating) or random patterns. Pleasure-wise, random squirts won it all.
A fresh locution may not be quite the same as Kool-Aid, but writers can extrapolate from the experiment’s conclusion: Brains love that little squirt of surprise.
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THE BLESSING OF THE PREDICTABLE
Writers may rant about the banality of everyday expression, but they also rely on it. Like every aesthetic element, surprise needs a foil; our habitual speech patterns provide it. A character in a Robert Stone novel remarks, “When you’ve heard what a Yank has to say in the first five minutes, you’ve heard everything he’ll say the rest of his life.” And it’s not just Yanks: most everyone communicates in stock patterns using a relatively small working vocabulary. Whatever the topic, people call in the usual skeleton crew of modifiers and images to tackle it, so that everything sounds alike and monotony sweeps the land. When surprise comes along, it’s like caffe freddo gushing from the Mojave.
Some writers simply lasso unexpected zingers from their imaginations as the need arises. Others find—or stumble upon—a structure for surprise using one of many rhetorical devices. Here are just a few:
Indirection, beloved by humorists, fakes one way and then reverses for a hook shot: “If love is the answer,” says Lily Tomlin, “could you rephrase the question?”
Oxymoron pairs incongruous or contradictory terms to create surprise: engagingly demented; deep inconsequence.
Personification, or prosopopoeia, gives life to inanimate or abstract objects: Excuse me, Sir—your liver is on the phone.
Catacosmesis delivers statements in descending order of importance, often ending with a surprising triviality: I ask for peace, prosperity, and a bagel with cream cheese.
Enallage uses one part of speech for another, such as a noun or adjective for a verb: Grammar? I’ll grammar you! (See Chapter 16.)
Understatement says surprisingly less about more. For example, a Leslie Stella heroine (Fat Bald Jeff) allows that her hated suitor is “tall and virtually odorless.”
Neologisms are invented word formations. Often they build on established word parts, as in schmooseoisie (referring to talk show hosts; “schmooze,” with a play on “bourgeoisie”) or para-pooch (a dog dropped by parachute). They are good for one surprise each. (See Chapter 14.)
Change of diction from one level of English to another creates surprise if the shift is abrupt and justified. Within just a few lines of a short story (“The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”) Junot Díaz shifts from academic diction to street dialect—from a description of European sunbathers as “budget Foucaults” with “massive melanin deficit” to one of Dominican girlfriends who “can’t be no more than sixteen” and another of a woman “rocking a dope Ochun-colored bikini.” Television scriptwriters, too, speed-shift from one diction to another, as in lines like: “I believe I speak for everyone present here when I say: ‘Huh?’ ” (See Chapter 8.)
Synecdoche and metonymy surprise by referring to a part or attribute of something, rather than the thing itself. Noting that he has heard a bearlike sound in the woods, Bill Bryson writes that his pocketknife is “patently inadequate for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur.” (emphasis mine)
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SURPRISE YOURSELF
In the excerpts that follow, I’ve removed the key words that the authors used to create surprise—or that caught me pleasantly off-guard, at least, when I read them. See if you can equal or better them: try replacing the hint words (in brackets) with something unexpectedly perfect, avoiding the dumbfounding and bizarre. (The actual words used appear in the “Answers” section below.)
1. “At Ozzfest, a pile of bands [played] through their inner children.”
2. “His smile beamed everywhere in the large room, as if his teeth were [unbelievably shiny].”
3. “. . . Martina Hingis, a shrinking star who has become as vulnerable as [a sitting duck].”
4. “He was older than [the hills] now and [likely] to make his century.”
5. “Svetlana Ivanova, a 57-year-old pensioner with a mind made up like [something tight-as-a-drum].”
6. “They were foragers and gatherers, can redeemers, the people who [swayed] through subway cars with paper cups.”
7. “How much cooler it is to save the world from the Nazis than [fret] over the NASDAQ.”
8. “Sister Grace believed the proof of God’s creativity [came] from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-ins.”
9. “If there are a number of visually interesting ways to shoot two heads floating in an endless expanse of H2O, Kentis has succeeded in finding [not too many] of them.”
ANSWERS
1. trolled (Ben Ratliff, The New York Times); 2. strangely iridescent (Jane Smiley, Moo); 3. dunk-tank victim (Selena Roberts, The New York Times); 4. kerosene, strong (Annie E. Proulx, “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World”); 5. marine’s bed (Michael Wines, The New York Times); 6. yawed (Don DeLillo, Underworld); 7. swivet (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times); 8. eddied (Don DeLillo, Underworld); 9. exactly none (Mike D’Angelo, Esquire).
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SURPRISINGLY APT
Ultimately, the devices of surprise may set up the pins, but they don’t guarantee the strike. The essence of surprise is in its timing and execution: fast, graceful, and apt. Aptness is paramount. The best surprise of all may be how precisely an unexpected word or image pops a message. Unexpected is easy; unexpectedly perfect helps separate writers from hacks.
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From Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style by Arthur Plotnik. (ISBN 978-0-375-72227-1) Reprinted with permission from Random House, Inc. © 2007 by Arthur Plotnik.
