writing life

Rewards

I recently saw an interesting workshop on getting yourself to write, how sometimes you resist doing even something you want to do and enjoy doing. That’s a weird problem I sometimes have. Once I get started, it’s easy, but sometimes I have to drag myself to work. It’s not so much that I dread it. It’s making the transition from what I was doing to writing. I enjoy sitting on the deck or on the sofa with a cup of tea in the morning, and I don’t want to leave my comfy spot to get to work. Or I find it difficult to get back to work after lunch.

One of the things the speaker said that caught my attention was the use of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards. An extrinsic reward is something that comes from outside yourself and that isn’t really related to the task, like getting a treat for doing something. An intrinsic reward comes from within the task, like the satisfaction of a job well done or the enjoyment of doing the thing. Intrinsic rewards are far more motivating, so the best way to get yourself to do something is to find the intrinsic reward. The trick is that you have to start doing the thing before you can find and experience the intrinsic reward that will make you want to do the thing again. You can use extrinsic rewards to get to that point, but they work best if you use them as a reward for starting to do it, not for finishing. If you give yourself the reward for finishing, you may miss feeling the intrinsic reward.

That was a big lightbulb moment for me because it explains something I’ve experienced. When I was struggling to get back into a writing routine after all the disruption from moving cross-country, house hunting, moving to the house, and getting the house set up, I bought myself some chocolate to use as rewards. The plan was to give myself a small square of chocolate if I hit my minimum goal, and on days when I hit my “crushed it” goal, I got a truffle.

But I found that I almost never ate the chocolate. I forgot I had it. By the time I got there, the thrill of hitting the goal was enough, so I didn’t need the chocolate and I forgot to eat it most days. So now I need to rethink the reward system to get myself to my desk in the first place. I don’t want chocolate first thing in the morning, but I could use that as a way to get back to the desk after lunch. To get my lunch dessert, I have to sit down at my desk. In the morning, maybe that’s the way I get a second cup of tea. The speaker also suggested a pleasant ritual, like lighting a candle, having a cozy pair of socks you only wear while writing, or listening to certain music. The candle doesn’t work for me in the summer because of the ceiling fan, and I can’t even see the candlelight in the morning because one of my office windows faces east, but I like the idea of finding some pleasant “ah, I’m at my desk, this is nice” routine. I just need something that will get me at my desk and writing the first words. After that, I get in a groove and enjoy it.

When I’m drafting or brainstorming and I don’t want to come in from the deck, I work outside, though that works less well while editing or proofreading because the glare on the screen makes it hard to see details. I’ve also had some success with not letting myself get to the deck or sofa. I finish reading the newspaper at the dining table and go straight to my desk. I do miss the outdoor time, though.

This hasn’t been a huge problem for me lately because I was finishing a draft and eager to write, but it’s good to have in mind when I’m in the middle of a book, it’s starting to feel like a slog, and I want nothing more than to sit on the sofa all morning.

writing

A Rom-Com Setting

I may have a story idea brewing. I don’t yet have specifics like characters, but I have a setting and situation. It started with a house I walk past on my way to downtown.

On the main street through town, my end of town has Victorian mansions on one side. They’re uphill looking downhill, and when they were built they must have had a mostly unobstructed view of a valley and the hills beyond. In the early part of the 20th century, they built smaller houses across the street, more packed in and without much in the way of front yards, and the valley got filled with houses. Most of these mansions are now apartment buildings. There’s one in particular that calls to me. It’s a gorgeous brick Queen Anne house, complete with turret, and it seems like a good setting for a romantic comedy series. There could be a story for each of the tenants in the building, and then if the earlier main characters move out when they get married, new characters could move in to keep the story going. I find myself pondering this idea every time I walk past, so maybe eventually I’ll come up with some specific characters.

A red brick Victorian house with a turret on one side and a wrap-around porch.
This mansion-turned-apartment building looks like the kind of place where quirky rom-com heroines might live.

The town is also a good setting for this sort of thing. It’s very “Hallmark movie,” or, as a lot of people here call it, Stars Hollow, as in the TV series The Gilmore Girls. We’ve got our quaint little local shops and restaurants, our quirky characters, and our unique festivals (so each book could take place during a festival). But I might have to tone it down a bit because if I wrote the way the town actually is, I’m not sure anyone would believe it.

For instance, the quirky characters. I’ve mentioned our local Spider-Man, the guy who dresses up in a Spider-Man costume to do good deeds. He’s a big force behind charity work in this town and has a way of rallying people to solve problems and get stuff done, even while he’s wearing a costume and doing parkour around downtown. Spider-Man is currently the director of the downtown cooling shelter, a place people without access to air conditioning to go on hot days. It’s hosted at a church, and it offers drinks, snacks, games, books, and WiFi. Since he took it over, they also have things like resume-writing clinics and job fairs.

Then there’s the dapper gentleman who dances his way around town while carrying tambourines. He wears pleated trousers, a dress shirt, waistcoat, tie, and a flat newsboy cap, and he doesn’t just walk anywhere. He dances as he walks while playing the tambourines. And he walks everywhere as his main form of transportation.

The shops and restaurants tend to keep what I refer to as “whimsical” hours. There’s the really cute coffee shop that has a beer garden in back — that closes at 2 in the afternoon. Yes, a beer garden that closes in the early afternoon. There was a cupcake and cookie bakery near a school that closed before school let out. It’s a private school, so kids with money, and the bakery closed before dozens of kids with money would be passing by after school. That one went out of business and there’s a bagel shop there now that’s actually open for the hours when they’re most likely to sell bagels (it’s open for breakfast). There’s a waffle shop that’s closed on Saturdays, when there are people downtown looking for brunch. Business hours here tend to be “whenever I want to be open.” A lot of the downtown shops are side hustles, so the owners have regular jobs and open their shops or restaurants when they have free time.

There are a surprising number of actors in a relatively small town, since there are two professional and semi-professional theater companies, and there are a lot of musicians of all genres. There’s a big folk/bluegrass scene and apparently a really thriving punk and metal scene.

So, lots of opportunity for characters.

Then the festivals. This week has been the classical music festival, and I work as an usher for that. This festival is like a small town went “hey, gang, let’s put on a major classical music festival” and pulled it off. They bring in musicians from all over, and they sort of function as a repertory company, being mixed into various ensembles, depending on the music being performed, for several concerts a day. They get put up in homes of people around town (putting the extra space in the Victorian mansions that aren’t apartment buildings to good use). That’s necessary because all the hotel and vacation rental space in town gets taken up by festival goers, many of whom get season passes and spend a whole week and a half here, going to every concert. The old churches in town serve as concert halls, with my church being the main one, as the biggest with the really good acoustics you get in a building built before amplification. They don’t just do the standard classical repertoire of the biggest hits. At the concert where I ushered Sunday afternoon, there was a world premiere orchestration and two pieces with the composer present. Monday’s concert had a Chopin piano concerto (played on fortepiano) and an avant garde piece.

Then there’s the fantasy festival. It started as a Harry Potter festival and has grown beyond that (this year’s theme is on The Wizard of Oz/Wicked). There actually aren’t that many real activities (part of the way they keep the lawyers at bay). It’s just something like ten thousand people coming to town to wander the downtown area while wearing costumes. It’s basically an open-air comic con without panels, with the vendors being the regular downtown shops.

There are also festivals in the park, lots of arts events, concerts at the old-timey bandstand, etc.

So I think I could have fun with a series of humorous romances set in a town like this, with the heroines all living in this one apartment building (until I have to branch out if it’s successful enough). To be on-brand, I think I need some kind of magical element, and I have some ideas in mind. I just need to come up with specific characters and stories. Then I may run it by my agent, since this sort of thing is hot right now.

writing life

Draft Done

I finished a draft yesterday, the longest book I’ve written in a long time. It’s going to take a lot of rewriting because I felt like I narrowed in on what the story was really about as I went along, and now I need to go back and adjust the rest of the book to fit.

I ended up veering sharply from the original outline. A major character I spent a lot of time developing never showed up at all. He may make it into a later book as a complication, but I may cut discussion about him from this book. The event that was going to be the midpoint ended up being the climax. The midpoint ended up being something I hadn’t expected. The planned ending got moved to a later book because it got rid of a character I realized was the main villain and I decided we needed to keep him around to be a pain before we get rid of him.

I’m really looking forward to going back and doing revisions on this because I love playing in this world and I want to see what I can do in revision to make the book what it should be. But for now it needs to rest and I have a lot of other things I want to work on. I need to proofread the next Rydding Village book to get it ready for publication, and I’d like to draft another one. I also have a lot of marketing work to get done.

But I may ease up a bit on work because next week is the big local classical music festival and I’m ushering for a few concerts. I have some projects I want to finish around the house and, weather permitting, the yard. I’m going to try to relax for a couple of days. I’m meeting a friend for lunch Saturday and I’ve got a concert Sunday afternoon. That should be a good break for the brain, though my mind already has a couple of new story ideas brewing.

Books

Cozy Adventure

I’m on a reading roll this summer, as I’ve found a number of good books. The latest wasn’t a big surprise, as I’ve read the rest of the series, but I think this one is my favorite so far. I read the latest book in Sarah Beth Durst’s Spellshop universe, Sea of Charms, and it was absolutely delightful.

This one overlaps a lot with the previous book, The Enchanted Greenhouse, showing some of the same events, but from a different perspective, which gives them a different context. The heroine of this book is the sailboat captain who brought supplies, people, and messages to and from the island in that book. In this one, we see what went into getting those things to the island and what else was happening along the way. But I don’t think you need to have read the other book first. I think you could read either one in any order, and each will give you context to the other. It’s an interesting way of handling a series (that I now kind of want to play with).

Marin’s happy being mostly alone with her boat on the sea, along with her friend the sea monster, but in the chaotic aftermath of a revolution, she finds herself taking on a composer/musician she’s met in the capital city. She didn’t really want a crew, but he wants to see more of the world and the city isn’t safe for him. She agrees to take him if he’ll come with her to her family’s local festival as insulation against her ex, who’s now out to ruin her family. Meanwhile, her family owes a huge debt from getting her boat built, and she doesn’t have a lot of time to pay it off, so she has to take as many jobs as possible, which means taking some risks.

This book proves that a fantasy can have adventure in it and still have that cozy vibe. It seems like a lot of cozy fantasies, including mine, are focused on communities in one place—a neighborhood, a shop, a village—but this gets into a broader sense of community in the people one person might know in various places she visits. You still get that warmth and comfort even as we’re sailing the high seas and dealing with things like magical storms and dragons. The other thing that’s interesting about this book is that it shows that you can have a “found family” and still have a family of birth. Marin finds herself part of a new “family” in the crew that grows around her as she gradually lets others in, but she still has her parents at a home she returns to regularly. A lot of found family tends to involve people who’ve lost or been cast out of their birth families, so it’s nice to see this spin on that, adding to the family instead of replacing them.

Even though the book actually takes place during the fall and winter, it feels like a summer book to me, probably because of the sea and swimming, so it’s a good cozy fantasy for sitting on the porch or deck with a glass of iced tea or lemonade. I guess it would also work with hot tea on a cool, rainy day, but I was reading it in August.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that you can mix cozy and adventure because the book I’ve been working on is sort of an adventure story but the cozy vibes keep sneaking in and I wasn’t sure they mixed well.

Life

Birthday Adventures

Today’s my birthday, and I’m giving myself the day off (mostly) to have fun. I don’t have firm plans, but most of the bigger things I have in mind for celebrating will come later in the month when it’s cooler. Today is going to be hot and with a chance of storms, so I don’t want to go too far. I think I may head up to the book fair — it’s really just a big bookstore, but they call it a book fair. It’s about three barns full of books and book-related stuff like calendars, puzzles and notebooks. They also sell closeout merchandise they get from large retailers like Target. I got my coziest pair of winter boots there last year. You never know what you’ll find, so it’s like a hunting expedition.

From there, I can get to a couple of farm markets and there’s the Amish mall (I think there’s just one shop there that sells Amish-made wood goods, but they also have a housewares shop and a sewing shop that cater to Mennonites). There are some things I’m looking for to do some projects around the house. And then there’s the international grocery store not far from there so I can restock on tea. I may have lunch while I’m out, then there’s an ice cream shop on the way home, and I hope to be back before the afternoon storms kick in. I may treat myself to dinner out in the evening, if it’s not too hot to walk downtown or isn’t storming at that time.

I have to sing for a funeral Saturday morning, so I may get lunch and gelato at the shop downtown afterward. Otherwise, I’m planning to let myself relax both Friday and Saturday. I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, and I’ve done a lot of house work and yard work. I have some craft projects I’ve been working on, and I have books.

Later in the month, I have a day trip planned and a short overnight trip/mini vacation planned. There are a lot of downsides to having an August birthday, and one is that the weather usually isn’t great. The other is that I was never in school for my birthday or able to get invitations to my school friends, so I seldom had birthday parties as a kid. As an adult, this seems to be when everyone is out of town, getting in one last trip before school starts.

Books

A Return to Regency Romances

One genre I really miss is the Regency romance. Not the Regency-set historical romance, like the Bridgerton books, but the old “category” Regencies that were modeled on Georgette Heyer’s books, which were modeled on Jane Austen. They were short books in a similar kind of tone and content to Austen and Heyer, so very chaste, witty dialogue, clever heroines, and maybe something to say about society and the plight of women in it. They were category-like lines, so a certain number of books fitting certain guidelines were published every month, and you could even subscribe to a line to get all the books every month. The subscription model died off with the growth of Amazon — why subscribe to get all the books delivered to you, some of which you might not like, when you can pick and choose exactly the books you want to get delivered to you? And this kind of book became less popular as the steamier historicals moved into the Regency period. I think they also sort of killed themselves because they started changing the books to be steamier, but still not truly steamy, as the Regency-set steamy historicals became popular, which meant that the people who liked them for what they were no longer liked them but they weren’t steamy enough to appeal to the people who’d never been interested in them because they were too mild.

I started reading these in junior high, and I particularly loved that a lot of them had unconventional heroines, the kind who were still unmarried at a later age (like actually in their 20s) because they were intellectual “bluestockings” or wild tomboys who didn’t fit into society. I guess maybe there was a hint of “not like other girls” there, but I suspect it was more a way of having less icky age gaps than you really might have had in that period and finding reasons for that. Of course she’s not yet married at 21, she’s terribly bookish and tends to bore anyone who dances with her with her opinions. Or she’s a better rider than the men, which intimidates them.

I recently found a book at the library that gave me all the old Regency romance vibes, but with some modern twists, Fast and Fastidious by R.M. Caldwell. Our heroine is very much coded as neurospicy, though not labeled as such in the book because they wouldn’t have known about autism. She doesn’t understand the unwritten social rules, so she writes them down and codifies them for herself, then rigidly follows them so she won’t risk getting it wrong. The one area where she breaks from society’s norms is in her interest in carriages. She knows all the specs and how they’re put together, and when she learns of the midnight races, in which competitors meet at midnight during the full moon to race carriages, she can’t resist. But when a new person moves into a neighboring estate and shows up as a competitor at the race just when there’s a string of carriage robberies, she can’t help but be suspicious and decides to get to the bottom of it.

We have drawing room and ballroom intrigue and lots of witty Regency banter, and all the things that make this kind of book so much fun, along with secret identities and espionage. Throwing a heroine who struggles to understand rules that don’t make sense into the rules-driven Regency period is an interesting twist to the genre. These are such fun characters and a fun story, with a romance that works for me (I can see why they’d like each other and can imagine their relationship working) and it reminded me of some of my favorite books when I was reading a lot of Regencies. I hope this author writes more books (nothing else is listed on Amazon) because this was just what I was in the mood for.

writing life

Productivity!

This has been a crazily productive week, and I proved to myself that I do have time for the things I tend to put off.

For one thing, I’ve written about 4,000 words a day every day this week. That’s around the peak pace when I’m really on a roll, but I haven’t managed to sustain that pace for a long time.

But while I was doing that, I also got my house in order and took care of a lot of projects. I love having a neat house, but I hate housework and I always feel like I don’t have the time for it. I get busy and things get out of control, so it feels overwhelming, so I can’t get started and it gets more out of control. Since I’m near the end of a book, I kept saying I’d deal with it when I finished the book, but then it was distracting so I didn’t get as much work done as I’d like.

This week, I decided to do alternating sprints. I’d write a thousand words, then take a break to work around the house. I started with something easy, getting my bedroom tidied. That just involved putting away the clothes that had piled up on the Chair of Doom, then dusting and running a Swiffer over the floor. I got all that done during one break. Energized by that progress, I wrote another thousand words and then tidied the office. I also got a good start on cleaning the kitchen while I made tea during an afternoon break between writing sessions. By the end of the day, the kitchen was mostly clean and my bedroom and office were in order, and I had 4,000 words.

The next day, I started on the living room on my breaks. I sorted out the work stuff that had ended up in what I call my writing nest on the sofa, where I’d been doing brainstorming. I also got the coffee table cleared off, and then I finished cleaning the kitchen. I still got 4,000 words done.

Wednesday, I vacuumed the sofa and flipped the cushions for better wear and got the coffee table totally cleaned. I ran some errands and got a big basket/tote for the living room to put all the throws in when I’m not using them so they don’t take over the living room. And 4,000 words.

Thursday, I vacuumed the rugs, cut the grass in the front lawn, and did a lot of weeding. And I still got 4,000 words written. It was good to have a nice, clean living room to collapse in that evening.

Today’s a busy day, as I had a grocery run, then it’s chamber music day and I have a Zoom meeting, so I don’t know how many words I’ll write. I’ve hit the end of my targeted first draft word count for this book, but I haven’t yet finished the story. I normally come in lower on the word count in the first draft and then flesh it out in the second draft, but I may be trimming a lot in the second draft. I’ll probably have to cut a lot of talking and eating scenes. I wrote a lot of conversations that I think were more about the characters telling me things about themselves than about the actual story. I can use this knowledge to shape the characters, but the scenes don’t have to be in the book.

Maybe I’ll finish it next week. I don’t know if I can sustain my current productivity pace, but I still need to organize the spare room and the basement.

Books

Time Travel

Last week, I read another book that I got from that box of free books on the sidewalk, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I think maybe someone here recommended it a while ago. At least, the title jumped out at me when I was digging through the box, so it was one of my selections.

I love time travel stories, but not the usual “person from our time goes back in time and has adventures/falls in love” type stories. I like some twists to it, like multiple or parallel timelines, non-linear storytelling, worries about changing the timeline, etc. The book is an interesting twist in that it’s about people from the past who’ve traveled to the “present” (which is the near future). It’s sort of an inverse of the Connie Willis time travel books, in which historians travel in time to study the past. Here, they bring people from the past who were known to have died forward in time just before they died (so they won’t affect the timeline) and study how time travel affects them.

Our heroine/narrator (who remains nameless throughout the book) works as a “bridge” for the Ministry of Time, the organization doing this work. Her job is to help the time travelers transition to their new lives while keeping an eye on them and reporting on how they’re doing. She’s assigned to a polar explorer who went missing in 1847 on an expedition. She’s to live with him for a year to help him adjust. There are other bridges who have different people in their care, including a young woman from the 1600s and a man from World War I.

The author does a wonderful job of capturing the voices and worldviews of these people and what they would think of a modern world. The woman from the 1600s embraces modern life for the freedoms she didn’t have in her time, comes to love movies and becomes a Swiftie. The man from WWI has some trouble adjusting, as he finds it hard to deal with the fact that there were more wars after that devastation. The Victorian polar explorer pretty much refuses to adapt, aside from being keen on motorcycles, and maintains his stiff upper lip and his manners.

This is a slow burn of a book. The first half is mostly a comedy of manners as we deal with all these historical fish out of water, but then it takes a turn into spy thriller, as things start happening to the time travelers and a threat becomes increasingly apparent. Our heroine starts to worry that the threat is coming from within, but she doesn’t know who she can trust — and then the time travelers aren’t sure they can trust her. Meanwhile, she and her assigned time traveler have grown far closer than they were supposed to, though they have very different ideas of what constitutes “courting.” That relationship is also a slow burn, though when it does happen, it gets pretty graphic, so fair warning. I was a little uncomfortable with those bits, since this person is a real historical figure and it’s kind of weird to get that explicit about a real person that way.

Aside from the time travel hijinks and spy thriller escapades, there’s some musing on what it is to be a displaced person who can never fit in. The narrator is biracial, the daughter of a refugee, and she’s well aware that her Victorian comes from a British empire where she wouldn’t have been considered fully human. At the same time, that helps her empathize with his situation of not quite fitting in.

Aside from my discomfort with graphic scenes involving a real person, I really enjoyed the book. It’s quite funny in places and then gets really emotional and tense. I’d recommend it for fans of the Connie Willis time travel books or other time travelers exploring history stories, like the TV series Timeless.

Life

So Much to Do

One thing I find amusing about life in the small city I’ve moved to is that there seems to be a lot more going on here than there was in the Dallas area. I’m sure there were actually more events in the entire DFW Metroplex, but they were scattered all over the place, so going to anything usually involved at least half an hour of driving on freeways. There wasn’t much happening in my immediate area. Here, there’s always so much going on that I sometimes get paralyzed by the choices, and most of it is within walking distance or, if it’s at night, it’s a 5-minute drive.

Today was a chamber music day. There’s a summer string institute hosted at the local university, with kids and young adults from all over the world coming to spend a couple of months studying with top-ranked teachers. There are a bunch of concerts associated with the event, but my favorites are the chamber music matinees. They have free midday concerts at the Shakespeare theater, with the kids divided into string quartets and devoting the summer to working on a major piece that they then perform at these concerts. They have to introduce the piece and describe what it means to them, and they have to go through the proper protocol for bows and response to applause.

This venue is amazing for chamber music. It’s a replica of the Blackfriars Theatre, where Shakespeare’s troupe performed once they were famous and were organized as the King’s Men, and all that wood makes the music sing. It’s like being inside a cello, and you can even feel the music. I like sitting in the box seats that are beside the stage because the vibrations are stronger there and I can see the violinists’ faces. I like watching the interplay between the musicians as they check in with each other and cue each other. It gives me hope for the future to see kids from China, Taiwan, and the US making music together.

Today’s concert also included a few solo pieces, with a cello and two violin solos, featuring some of the more advanced, older students.

Then next month is the classical music festival put on in this town. I usher for that, so I get into a lot of the concerts for free. There are people who make it their summer vacation to spend two weeks in town going to every concert.

Meanwhile, there are concerts just about every night in the park, with the community band on Mondays, bluegrass on Wednesdays, and jazz on Thursdays. There’s a concert on the street downtown this Saturday evening. There are also Irish jam sessions in various places around town.

I could fill my schedule with music alone. Then there’s all the theater, gallery shows, lectures, festivals, etc. I seem to have found the small town that isn’t at all boring.

writing, movies

Surprise vs. Satisfaction

A few weeks ago, I was in the mood for something fun and dumb and ended up watching Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This is the movie in which a group of kids in detention stumbles upon an old video game while having to clean out a school storeroom and soon find themselves in the world of the game as the characters they picked to play. I think most of the appeal of this movie is seeing the adult movie stars playing the teenage characters because the actors seem to be having a blast. We’ve got Dwayne Johnson playing the videogame nerd who’s never been big on physical stuff but who does know all about games and who has to get used to his character’s capabilities and Karen Gillan as the nerdy girl stuck as a Lara Croft kind of character.

The biggest contrast between actor and role is Jack Black playing a shallow, social media-obsessed teenage girl (the character had a name she thought sounded like a girl, so she’s not happy to find herself in the body of a middle-aged male scientist). I’ve never really thought of Jack Black as a serious actor. He pretty much has one persona he plays, and the difference between characters is mostly just dialing up and down how intense he gets with that persona. But here he takes on an entirely different character and pulls it off. He may ham it up a bit, but he gives a good performance that shows depth and vulnerability for the character and gives a real growth arc. If an actual young actress had played the role exactly the way he did, we’d say it was a good serious performance. It just becomes hilarious when it’s someone who looks like Jack Black doing it.

But the main thing that got me started thinking from this movie was the idea of predicability/inevitability in writing. It may just be that I’m a story structure nerd, but I felt that the various arcs and outcomes were really obvious. You knew which characters were going to be tested in which ways, which relationships would form or be revived. And yet this didn’t bother me because all of these things felt inevitable. I’d have been disappointed if these things hadn’t happened. These were the things I wanted to happen. I wanted the nerd and the jock who were best friends in elementary school but who had fallen apart once the jock became popular to find their friendship again. I wanted the shallow girl to learn to think of others, to the point of being willing to give up something important to help another person. Even though I saw all the arcs, transformations, and outcomes coming, I still found it to be an emotionally satisfying movie, one that ended with the sense that all was right with the world.

About the only way to escape the trap of being satisfying without being predictable is to find a way to do the thing the audience wants but in a way they didn’t see coming. If you surprise the audience by not doing the thing that feels inevitable, they may be disappointed. Surprise is only good in stories if what happens in the story is even better than what the audience expected or wanted to happen. And that’s really, really tricky. It’s awesome if you can pull it off, but sometimes the expected outcome is so satisfying that you don’t care that you predicted it.

I do have to remind myself that what’s obvious to me may not be obvious to everyone, just because I’ve spent so much time studying this stuff and tend to read and watch with an analytical eye.