Surprise!

My wife and I are both movie watchers, but we don’t always agree on what to watch. Raise your hand if you can relate. 😉

Rachael-Jayne and I are good, though, because we’ve worked out a system where we take turns choosing. It works most of the time. Interestingly enough, our bone of contention often centers on surprise.

It’s not that I don’t like surprises; I enjoy them as much as anyone else. However, I can watch a movie two or three times because I enjoy analyzing and studying how it’s written, why the characters are who they are, why the story itself is engaging, why we care about the characters, etc. I also look for things I would never have done and do an inner critique of what the author or screenwriter (in my opinion) did wrong. I have a background in screenwriting and am currently writing novels, so it’s interesting and fun for me. For the most part, I keep quiet, but on rare occasions, while watching a movie at home, I have been known to blurt out things like “personal stakes!” or “story question!” My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t have that specific interest and prefers to watch what she hasn’t seen before. Fortunately, she’s extremely tolerant of my mid-movie exclamations. For the most part.

Like nearly everyone else, she likes most surprises. One thing I love about her is that she’s easy to make happy, especially when I surprise her with an unexpected gift (unexpected being the keyword here) or when I do an act of service for her that she didn’t know was coming. The element of surprise amplifies the value of whatever I do or give. Similarly, when watching a story unfold on the screen, we both enjoy it when there’s a believable twist we didn’t expect.

While movies are good examples of this, it applies equally to books. Viewers and readers want to be surprised—to a point. As a writer, I want to come up with things that people didn’t see coming, but when they do happen, they make sense. This is very different from coming up with something that is simply not believable. I see this often in movies, books, and TV shows. I consider it a mistake if not downright poor writing.

These are some popular books or movies that left many readers or viewers disappointed because the story’s surprises did not seem believable.

Movies and television:
Game of Thrones, final season. This may be the most well-known disappointment for many viewers. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard complain that this series wrapped up poorly and that the surprises weren’t believable.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “Somehow, Palpatine returned” became a meme and a punchline because a dead villain came back with no setup or logical reason at all.

Popular (and well-written) books that many readers have complained about as having unrealistic surprises:

Verity by Colleen Hoover
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

We dread surprises that blindside us for no good reason, and an unearned twist feels like cheating. But any kind of surprise is intriguing—even when it’s not positive—in life, literature, and media, which is why authors and screenwriters use them.

My wife and I are celebrating our 20th anniversary this coming weekend. Do I plan to surprise her? Take a wild guess.

Rachael-Jayne and I in Japan, Mt. Fuji in the background.