We have seven days in a week and twenty-four hours in a day, but it all happens one second at a time. You anticipate what comes next, but you can’t be sure what that will actually be until the moment gets here.
Authors can be like God.
With your great knowledge of the story, you may be able to tell all that has happened, is happening, and will happen. Your main character can’t do that. She sees what’s happening only at the present moment. She may worry about or anticipate the future. She will remember only snippets from the past—the parts that either bother her or give her hope. She can’t know all that you know. If she did, the story wouldn’t be captivating.
The best way to ruin your story is to let your omniscient knowledge creep into the narrative.
The future must always remain in doubt.
If your point-of-view character can’t see it, you can’t write it. You want to avoid statements like these:
- Little did he know how much worse things would get.
- This would not be the first time she would deal with that problem.
- They had never been able to break through, but they would soon find a way.
If you want readers to anticipate a future that your character can’t foresee, emphasize her confidence that something will or won’t happen. The stronger the emphasis, the more that readers will anticipate the opposite happening. They’ll keep reading to find out if it really does.
- Things couldn’t get worse. Absolutely not. They had to get better. He was sure of it.
- Finally she had the problem solved. With all she had been through, she was Superwoman, able to leap tall buildings. Nothing could get in her way now. No way.
- They’d tried everything. Breaking through was impossible. David might have slain Goliath, but this was like putting a sword in a toddler’s hand and expecting him to defeat an army. It wasn’t going to happen.
In the first set of examples, we need only a few words to tell readers what the future holds. That’s easier, but it’s not better, because readers aren’t challenged to anticipate what might happen, just as they must do in real life.
The unexpected happens all the time.
Sometimes we say events are “unbelievable,” because they defy the laws of probability. In conversation, saying with conviction and an honest face might convince your audience that it’s true, that it actually happened. But in both fiction and nonfiction, as soon as readers think, No way. That’s unbelievable, they become disengaged. The reality of the story is ruined.
Suppose that these things actually happen:
- Jack stubbed his toe on a rock and uncovered the largest diamond ever found.
- Bill was playing poker and filled an inside straight—three times in one night.
- On the day Janet was fired, she met a stranger who offered her a job that made her a millionaire.
In effective storytelling, the cavalry cannot ride in to save the day. Your character can’t suddenly have skills we never knew he had. No one can be unbelievably lucky.
How could we make our examples more believable? We need foreshadowing where the arrival of the cavalry wasn’t expected but makes perfect sense when it happens. Circumstances leading up to winning hands become believable when readers see it as more than just “pure luck.”
- Jack was always looking, never finding. Excited rock hounds had combed the area countless times and rarely found a diamond large enough to be worth anything. Too tired to lift his feet, he tripped over himself. He looked back, picked up the rock that had stubbed his toe, and stuffed it into his pocket—a souvenir of another uneventful day.
- Bill knew the odds. He’d made millions playing the game to win. But this was a different kind of game, one that he would enjoy losing so his wife would have nothing to gloat about in the divorce.
- Escorted from the building, Janet walked toward her car, carrying the belonging she had cleared from her desk. Without a job, she held nothing of value except the picture of her daughter. “Here,” she said to a well-dressed man entering the homeless camp. Maybe you can use this stuff. I have no need for it anymore.”
The more dynamic and life-changing an outcome is to be, the more words and more time that will be needed to make it believable.
