When you have a good thing going in your fiction – especially in a series – don’t ruin it by suddenly changing or deleting that special element. Readers like it and have come to expect it. They feel disappointed and possibly even betrayed if you suddenly eliminate this expected element.
If you ever watched the TV series Home Improvement, you may remember that one component of each episode was that the audience was never allowed to see the full face of Tim’s next-door neighbor as it was inevitably partially hidden by a fence, a ski mask, or a Santa Claus beard. This was an element that dawned on the audience slowly and built up anticipation over time. Now one waited anxiously through each episode in hopes of getting a glimpse of the neighbor’s full face. And then, one night… there it was! With no fanfare whatsoever, we saw the full face of Tim’s neighbor over that same fence that usually hid it, and instead of feeling triumph and satisfaction, we felt only let down and deflated.
Why? Because that anticipation of expected near-success but ultimate denial of satisfaction had become part of the charm of the show for us. It worked. So why did the writers abandon that ploy? I have no idea. The next week they were right back to covering part of the neighbor’s face again, but it was too late for those of us who had seen the previous week’s episode. The magic was gone.
This is true for books, too, especially in the case of series novels where the same characters continue to play a part in the ongoing story. I really got a kick out of the character Ranger in the Stephanie Plum series written by Janet Evanovich, but after many books in which Ranger hardly ever said anything to Stephanie except, “Babe” (which could mean anything from how can you be such an idiot to you sure look sexy tonight to you got my car blown up again?), Ranger suddenly became more loquacious and, in my opinion, lost much of his charm. I also began to look forward to the inevitable destruction of Stephanie’s car in each succeeding book—how will it happen this time? fire? bomb? bullets?—and was again disappointed when Stephanie’s vehicle survived an entire novel without suffering some sort of bizarre demise. Couldn’t it at least have drowned?
Think of it this way: What if Columbo showed up to solve a murder wearing a new trench coat instead of his battered old raincoat and never once turned back on his way out of the room to say, “Just one more thing”? The murderer would no doubt feel great relief, but the viewers, I think, would not. They would most likely feel cheated instead.
Once you have established that your private detective never gets paid, never gets the girl, and never gets the credit he deserves, think twice about suddenly granting him great success. It might just lessen your own.
© 2023 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: Tall, Dark & Silent © 2011 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.