Books With a Surprise
Quote by Robert Frost: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."
I laughed out loud when I came across this quote! I probably cry at my books more than any of my readers. I assume that it is because I know my characters better than my readers. I have a more intimate relationship with them; therefore, their pain affects me more intensely. The last couple weeks I have been working on a couple novellas to go in the Clause series. They'll fall between the second and third books. As I was working on the second novella, I got to a point where one of the characters is telling the others that his brother had died of cancer.
I was sitting at the island in the kitchen behind my computer, and as I typed tears are just rolling down my face. I was only fifteen pages into this thing, and I was killing off his brother. This was a brand new character; he wasn't a return character from one of the first two Clause books, but my heart bled for him, this completely fiction character of my own making. I started telling my mother about it, and she said, "Oh no, you mean I've got to read a sad book?" The whole book won't be sad, but that one part just killed me. I can't tell you how many times, especially when I'm proofing a book, that I have sat there and cried at my own work.
The surprise sometimes occurs by complete accident. I have to tell you the story about More Than Instinct! This was well before we published it but a long while after I had written it, and I had finally talked my dad into critiquing it. Now, first off, my dad isn't like me, my mom, or sister. He doesn't read an awful lot just for the pure fun of it. After reading the book, he told me that he really liked the surprise ending to which I replied, "What surprise ending?" So, he describes the surprise at the end to me, and I just stand there thinking one of us has completely lost it, because I don't remember that ending at all. Of course, my dad found this hilarious, but I had to find out what he was talking about. Naturally, I went back and reread the ending myself.
I did remember it after reading it, but what happened was that I had never originally intended it to be a part of the book. When I got to the end, I had two extra characters whose existence was just left hanging. There were too many unanswered questions surrounding them. I had to do something with them, so I did something with them. I never realized until my dad pointed it out that this provided for a nice surprise ending.
