The Trick: If you want a scene to culminate in a particular emotional reaction, start the scene with the opposite emotion.
Anticipation
When Disney started his animation studio, he and his artists had to invent the tools of the animation trade. No one had ever done it before. One problem they ran into was that viewers had trouble telling what the figures on the screen were doing. Disney solved this with an animation principle his artists called anticipation. In anticipation, as the concept was developed by the Disney studio, a character leans left to run right. He bends down to jump up. He pulls his arm back to throw a ball forward. This allowed for an exaggerated motion that helped the viewer track the action the character was performing.
The same is true with The Trick—only, in writing, the actions are all emotional.
In some ways, The Trick is the secret to all writing, the thing that makes a story work. It could be summed up as: establishing an expectation followed by something other than the expected outcome.
Of all writing techniques, The Trick is the easiest to do. You just decide where you want the story to go, and then you indicate—through dialogue, character thought, or narration—that the opposite is coming.
If you want to have a happy incident, you first make your character glum.
If you want something bad to happen, you first make him unexpectedly confident.
It is that simple, and it is tremendously effective. You have to remember to use it.
That is all.
How best to use it, of course, gets more difficult. If you are too blatant about your reversals, the audience will not be taken in. Some books and shows are so obvious that every time someone is happy, the audience winces, certain that something bad is around the corner. Being that obvious undercuts the effect. The reader is put on alert rather than lulled into a false sense of security.
So, the more subtly you can apply The Trick, the more effective your scene. But you would be amazed at how blatant you can be and still have it work. Some of the bestselling authors today are quite obvious in their use of the Trick, and yet people read their books with great eagerness.
Rebecca’s Ups and Downs
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