Surprise in the Writer

"No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” - Robert Frost

by A.B. Donahue

The other day, a member of my Writers Group asked if we were plotters or pantsers. Another member replied something along the lines of, “I do some planning, but my characters surprise even me!” 

She went on to explain that as she was writing, she would sometimes realize that her character really wouldn’t do or say what she had planned for them. As she thinks like her character, she writes the scene differently, and the plot takes a surprising twist. 

Image by Jere Cang from Pixabay

That started me thinking about how writing is similar to acting. When acting, you may have a script to work off of, but that’s only a starting point. You have to become the person you’re portraying in order to be convincing. That’s why it’s called being “in character.” You’re essentially in the character’s mind—and even their body—as you reason like them, experience the world like them, and produce physical mannerisms like them. 

In the same way, a writer has to get “in character” when writing. If I wrote every character as myself, there wouldn’t be any variety, depth, or surprise. To write well, it’s necessary to imagine ourselves into the thoughts of another human being. Our fictional characters are representations of the very real humanity God has created in all of its virtues and vices. 

And the more an actor or author finds themselves completely immersed in the thoughts and feelings of another person, the more they can immerse you.

That’s all good and well, insofar as the artist’s extreme degree of identification with a character makes for a more interesting and worthwhile experience of content consumption.  But is there a deeper value to this artistic empathy?

I think so. 

In the article “Bookish Believers” at Story Warren, Katelyn Ho shares thoughts on how reading fiction can enhance the journey of sanctification and hits on this in one of her first points:

First, reading fiction helps us love people. C.S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism makes a helpful distinction between using and receiving art. To use art is to treat it as solely practical, rather than delightful. Instead of meeting the author on her terms, we read selfishly to improve our vocabulary or be known as a “reader.” According to Lewis, receiving art is an act of surrender. It’s about getting yourself out of the way and seeing through the eyes of another. As you do so, you realize that people are not just caricatures but image-bearers who hurt and want to be loved. 

When we see through the eyes of another person, we see through the eyes of another image-bearer. 

Katelyn goes on to say:

Literature has exposed me to people I would usually push away—the addict, the adulterer, the self-righteous scold. My world expands as I understand the riches and nuances of their ways of seeing. Reading even “pagan” books can be valuable. We can embrace people without adopting what they believe—a dispositional shift from judgment to empathy. Yes, we want to read critically, but with love and humility. 

My grandmother used to tell me a story about when she was a teenager reading dime novels. Her mother questioned the usefulness (and sometimes appropriateness) of the content. My grandmother’s reply was, “Well, these books teach me what NOT to do.” 

Many books are cautionary tales. They help us recognize the types of thoughts or actions that may lead us down the wrong path. But like Katelyn said, they also gently introduce us to people we might not want to cozy up with in real life. We are able to start our introduction to these new acquaintances from a place of safety. And since we can let our guard down, that environment helps us make the shift from judgment to empathy. 

The Bible is full of stories that would have been written differently if a heavy-handed happily-ever-after plotter had been given the reins. But the people in the Bible are real people doing real people things. They surprise us in good and bad ways. They don’t always think or act the way we would have predicted them to. But once we immerse ourselves in the story and live it through the perspective of various characters, we start to understand how brokenness bends our paths and our perceptions. We start to see people the way God sees them and to see ourselves in the same way—part of his redemptive story.

So, too, our fictional characters should occasionally surprise us with their humanity. When they take the pen from our hand, they disarm us and help us surrender. And as we look through their eyes, both we—and our readers—are enabled to “get ourselves out of the way,” see another human being, and learn to love.

September 10: Red Rex release (preorders are open!)
September 20–21: Bandersnatch Books at the Embodied Faith Symposium at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Charlotte.
November: Above, Not Up release (preorders open in September)

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“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

Robert Frost